New York, July 6, 2011--Gambian President Yahya Jammeh must clarify his March 16 comments suggesting that detained journalist "Chief" Ebrima Manneh has died, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. CPJ's call comes ahead of the fifth anniversary of the July 7, 2006, arrest of Manneh, left, who disappeared after being taken into government custody.
Last week, Gambian President Yahya Jammeh participated in a rare meeting with select members of the West African nation's press corps. Jammeh spoke in favor of access to public information. He announced that he would allow The Standard newspaper to resume publication, five months after the National Intelligence Agency forced its editor, Sheriff Bojang, to halt production. But the president largely lashed out at the Gambian private press and critics of his repressive media policies in the meeting, a tense session that was broadcast on state television. Jammeh, a former army captain who seized power in a 1994 coup, spoke in a harsh and contemptuous tone as he addressed media owners invited to the State House in the capital, Banjul.
"President Jammeh bags 4 awards," trumpeted a September 17 headline of the Daily Observer, a pro-government newspaper in the Gambia, a West African nation whose idyllic façade as "the smiling coast of Africa" is maintained in part by President Yahyah Jammeh's brutal repression of the independent press.
Who would not like to enjoy luxurious beach resorts and quaint fishing
villages on the “Smiling Coast of Africa”? This is the pitch that the Gambian
government made to participants of an international tourism conference last week. In
fact, behind the idyllic facade of a tropical paradise wedged on Africa's
western Atlantic coast is the grimace of Gambia's independent press.
For more than two years, U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin and a group of Senate colleagues have been pressing for the release
of Gambian journalist “Chief” Ebrima Manneh, left. In July 2006, security agents arrested
Manneh at his workplace at the Daily
Observer and have since held him incommunicado and without charge. On
Thursday, Durbin and four other senators sent a letter to Kamalesh Sharma, secretary-general
of the
By Tom Rhodes
As of December 1, 2009 | » Read the accompanying report: "FREELANCERS UNDER FIRE"
