Yahya Jammeh The Worst Dictatorship You’ve Never Heard Of

Gambia is facing its biggest protest movement in years. It will either be a breakthrough or a bloodbath. Since taking power in a bloodless coup in 1994, Yahya Jammeh has presided over the worst dictatorship you’ve never heard of. The eccentric Gambian president, who performs ritual exorcisms and claims to heal everything from AIDS to infertility with herbal remedies, rules his tiny West African nation through a mix of superstition and fear. State-sanctioned torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary executions — these are just a few of the favored tactics employed by his notorious security and intelligence services.

Elsewhere in Africa, rights advocates have increasingly lamented a plague of “third-termism” as more and more leaders move to scrap constitutional limits in order to remain in power. But in Gambia, Jammeh will probably cruise to a fifth five-year term in elections scheduled for December. That is, of course, unless the unprecedented wave of protests that began last week boil over into a full-fledged popular revolt.

Tensions have been slowly building in Gambia for years, not least because of the repressive security environment, widespread corruption, chronic food shortages, and terribly mismanaged economy. (Gambia ranks dead last in West Africa in terms of GDP per capita, the only country to experience a decline since 1994.) But Jammeh has mostly succeeded in keeping discontent in check, in part because of Gambia’s Indemnity Law — signed by the president in 2001 — occasioned by an incident the previous year in which security forces opened fire on a group of student protesters. In total, 14 people were murdered in broad daylight. The new law gave the president sweeping powers to prevent security forces from being prosecuted for quelling “unlawful assembly.”

On April 14, however, long-simmering frustrations inevitably boiled over. Scores of Gambians bravely took to the streets that day to demand electoral reforms before the December elections. Unsurprisingly, Jammeh’s riot police cut the demonstration short, roughing up protesters and firing tear gas to disperse the crowds that had gathered in a seaside suburb of the capital, Banjul.

The regime’s initial response to the protests was actually quite subdued when compared with similar events in Gambia’s past. But citizens mobilized again two days later, on April 16, staging the largest and most sustained act of public defiance against Jammeh since he seized power more than two decades ago. This time, the agitated police responded more forcefully, spraying demonstrators with live ammunition and assaulting people in the streets. In total, 55 people were reportedly arrested; many of them were brutalized in detention.