Gambian Ambassador Continues “Shameful Silence” after Sen. Durbin Demands the Release of a Journalist Secretly Jailed
August 5th, 2008
Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) could not have been more clear. “My direct request to the Gambian Embassy here in Washington has been met with shameful silence,” he said on the Senate floor last week. Sen. Durbin was referring to the Gambian journalist “Chief” Ebrima Manneh, who has been held incommunicado by government authorities in the small West African nation for more than two years.
Sen. Durbin went on, “Is the Gambian government so afraid of one of its own reporters that it cannot even acknowledge his detention?” Apparently it is.
“I don’t think we’ll be making any comment on this,” The Gambia’s ambassador to the United States, Abdul R. Cole, told me yesterday by telephone, after confirming that he had already read Sen. Durbin’s statement about the missing journalist Ebrima Manneh.
Nobody knows if Manneh is dead or alive, as the Gambian government refuses to confirm his whereabouts, health, or legal status. He was arrested in July 2006 by plainclothes police of the National Intelligence Agency at the Daily Observer newspaper where he worked, his colleagues who witnessed the arrest told the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The reason for his arrest? Manneh tried to republish in the state-controlled Daily Observer an online BBC report on the eve of an African Union summit in the Gambian capital of Banjul. Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who first came to power through a 1996 coup, was hosting the summit even though, the BBC report noted, the African Union is “supposed to suspend governments which take power by arms.”
Manneh has been missing ever since. In 2007, The Gambia’s then-Communications Secretary Neneh Macdouall-Gaye told CPJ that the journalist was not in government custody. But local journalists reported that Manneh was seen under armed guard one year after his arrest, in July 2007, at the Royal Victoria Teaching Hospital in Banjul, and again that September in the far eastern Fatoto Prison.
Sen. Durbin is hardly the only one demanding both information and Manneh’s release. The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States declared two months ago, in June, that Manneh’s July 2006 arrest was illegal and demanded his release. The Nigerian-based West African community court also ordered the Gambian government to pay $100,000 in damages to Manneh’s family, according to Funmi Falana, one of the prosecution lawyers.
Yet, still no word at all from any Gambian official. Sen. Durbin directed his final remarks on the matter last week on the Senate floor to President Jammeh. “I say to President Jammeh: Release this reporter. Let him return to his family.”
Unfortunately, Manneh is not the only journalist to come under fire in The Gambia. In December 2004, another critic of President Jammeh, the journalist Deyda Hydara, was shot and killed in a murder that has yet to be investigated or solved.
Note: CPJ is a worldwide watchdog that accepts no government funds as it defends the rights of journalists everywhere to report the news without fear of reprisal.
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