By Ajong Mbapndah L

After 22 years, a portrait other than that of former President Yaya Jammeh now adorns the walls of the Gambia Embassy in Washington,DC.

At a solemn ceremony at the Embassy on February 2, Ambassador Omar Faye was joined by staff, a few Gambians and friends of Gambia in unveiling a portrait of new President Adama Barrow.

Gambia is back on the rails and it is time for all hands to be put on deck in writing the next chapter of the country’s history, said Ambassador Omar Faye. Gambians are a proud, noble and a dignified people and that the recent political crisis were resolved without a shot or bloodshed speaks volumes to the political maturity of the people Faye said.

Faye said, President Barrow was speedily building up cabinet and called for unity and a common vision as Gambia starts another very important chapter in its history. Ambassador Faye lauded the support from the international community and from all friends who stood by Gambia in the last few months.

In a sign of growing confidence, visa demands to Gambia from the USA have experienced a surge.

“I have hoped and prayed hard for this moment,” said a lady who told this reporter she had not gone to Gambia for the last twenty years.

“We will continue to serve all Gambians and people interested in Gambia without fear or favor,” Ambassador Faye said as he declared the doors of the Embassy very open. From Gambians who need services, to people interested in investment opportunities in the Gambia, the doors of the Embassy are open, Omar Faye said.

Many Gambians and Africans too a sigh of relief with a peaceful transition that was not very obvious. In power for some 22 years, President Yahya Jammeh was surprisingly beaten by little known opposition challenger Adama in elections last year. Yahya who initially conceded and even called to congratulate Barrow for his election, reversed his own decision and created a political crisis in the country with his refusal to handover. It took a combination of international diplomacy and military action led by the Economic Community of West African States(ECOWAS), for Jammeh to leave the country. Initially installed in Senegal, President Barrow made a triumphant return the capital Banjul after Jammeh’s departure.

An NYU lab technician forgot his wallet in his apartment — and paid for it with his life when an ex-con neighbor yanked him from an elevator and beat him to death, cops said.

Bakary Darboe, 46, was riding the lift in his Bronx building — after returning home to grab his billfold — when he fell victim to the “completely unprovoked” attack, police said.

“To do this to Bakary, to just kill him like that, we cannot forget,” said the victim’s brother Mbemba Darboe, 61. “We can forgive, but we cannot forget.”

Relatives said the father of six was on his way to Mercy College, where he was taking classes, when he realized he forgot his wallet and returned home to grab it just before 5 p.m. Thursday.
Darboe jumped back into the elevator after leaving his ninth-floor apartment. Now carrying his wallet, Darboe made it to the seventh floor of the building on E. 156th St. in Melrose when the elevator doors opened.

A deranged 40-year-old parolee — identified as Junal Jordan — had been shadowboxing in the hallway, sources said. As soon as the elevator doors opened, Jordan launched into a ferocious attack, sources said.

“The guy is shadowboxing in the hallway,” a police source said. “The elevators open up and he pulls the guy out of the elevator and beats him.”

A security camera captured Jordan dragging Darboe out into the hallway and then pummeling the older man, sources said.
“Please get off me … I can’t breathe!” Darboe screamed at one point, sources said.

The video shows Darboe managing to get back to his feet. He started to stagger away — but the suspect then delivered several blows to the bloodied victim’s head until he collapsed.

Darboe was found dead at the scene in a pool of blood, sources said.

One of his knocked-out teeth was found nearby, along with a bloody backpack, two cell phones and a set of keys. Spots of blood stained the hallway walls.
Cops found Jordan a few blocks away and took him into custody.

The suspect, who had blood on his hands and clothing, admitted to getting into a fight “in his girlfriend’s building.” But he wouldn’t say anything else, police sources said.

Jordan, a career criminal with a long rap sheet, was later charged with murder and manslaughter, police said.
The accused killer has been arrested 20 times since 1993 for many crimes including assault, robbery, reckless endangerment and drug possession, cops said.
He was sentenced to nine years in prison following a 1999 conviction for attempted criminal sale of a control substance.

Jordan was released in 2005 and put on parole until 2008, but he couldn’t stay out of trouble.

He was arrested in 2006 after being charged in a series of robberies in Manhattan. Jordan was sentenced to eight years in prison — and walked free in 2014. He was placed on parole until 2019, cops said.

On Friday afternoon, some 30 Darboe relatives were gathered at the family home mourning the Gambian immigrant who arrived in the United States 12 years ago.

In addition to his job and studies, Darboe was an active member of his mosque and the secretary general of the Gambian Islamic Society, relatives said.

“Every time he came home late he would help me with my homework,” said his 8-year-old daughter Jakong.
“He was very busy but he always had time.”

Mustafa Darboe, 14, sat quietly in the corner on a computer, holding back tears as his sister talked.

“He was just a good guy,” he said of his father.

Brother-in-law Demba Sanyang described Darboe as a “highly educated person” who was heavily involved in the Muslim community.

“We are deeply sad,” Sanyang, 58, said

The doomed man’s neighbors were stunned.

“(I) knew him from dropping our kids at the school bus stop,” neighbor Bademba Diallo, 48, said. “He was a very nice man, always great.”

“It’s very heartbreaking,” he said. “I’m shocked about what happened.”

WITH ROSS KEITH

By Max Bearak

The Washington Post

The 22-year reign of one of Africa’s most eccentric and self-serving dictatorships came to an end last month when the president of Gambia — whose full title was His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh Babili Mansa — finally ceded power to his democratically elected rival and fled to a similarly tiny fiefdom farther south along the continent’s western coast.

Teodoro Obiang Nguema, now his host, has led Equatorial Guinea for 37 years, making him the world’s longest-serving head of state. Both men came to power decades ago in coups, and brutally quashed dissent while enriching themselves and their families. Investigations by activist groups and Western governments have found evidence that both siphoned off vast quantities of money from state coffers. With that money, they lived lavish lives, amassing dozens of expensive cars and houses around the world while the majority of the people in their countries continue to live in poverty.
If their proclivities weren’t already similar enough, it so happens that both men own palatial multimillion-dollar houses right next door to each other, at 9908 and 9909 Bentcross Dr., in a luxurious subdivision of Potomac, Maryland, about 20 miles from downtown Washington.

Bentcross Drive is a ribbon of mansions. Their looping driveways, manicured lawns, tennis courts and swimming pools are guarded almost universally by iron gates with passcodes and security cameras. Prominent signs warn against trespassing.

The subdivision, Falconhurst, is home to doctors, lawyers, business executives and even professional basketball players. Calbert Cheaney, whom the Washington Bullets (now Wizards) picked sixth overall in the 1993 NBA draft, sold 9908 Bentcross to Jammeh’s family trust for $3.5 million in September 2010, according to public property records. A 2013 CNNMoney.com article titled “Where the money makers live,” listed Potomac as the most affluent town of more than 25,000 people in the United States — and Falconhurst is a warren of its richest.

The World Bank’s latest figures indicate the average Gambian earns $460 a year. Equatorial Guinea has the highest per-capita income of any sub-Saharan country, but is so unequal that two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant mortality rates are some of the worst in the world.
Neither Jammeh’s nor Obiang’s house had cars in the driveway last week, and D.C.-based activists from Gambia and Equatorial Guinea said that both residences usually remain unoccupied. Sohna Sallah, vice chairwoman of the Democratic Union of Gambian Activists, said that as far as she knows, Jammeh has been to the Potomac house twice since it was purchased, while his wife uses it on a monthly basis for shopping excursions and to see their daughter, who attends boarding school in McLean, Virginia.

The listing for Jammeh’s house on Maryland’s property records portal says it has 11 bathrooms. The house is 8,818 square feet and sits on 2.3 acres of land. Obiang’s house on Bentcross is bigger, at 9,261 square feet, and was bought for $2.6 million in 2000. The Obiangs also own a second house in Potomac that is, relatively speaking, more modest.

In fact, none of the houses is exorbitantly expensive by U.S. standards. But they are only three out of a constellation of villas owned by the two men’s families in locales stretching from Morocco to Malibu, California.

Repeated requests for comment to the ambassadors of both Gambia and Equatorial Guinea on their states’ roles in purchasing or using these houses went unanswered.
Tutu Alicante, a U.S.-based Equatorial Guinean human rights activist, explained why leaders like Obiang and Jammeh would want to buy houses in Potomac in the first place.

“There are big public relations firms in Washington that specialize in catering to dictators, if you can believe it,” he said. “Someone like Obiang comes to the U.S. maybe twice a year, say, for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic and an appearance at the U.N. General Assembly meeting. After the General Assembly meetings in New York, the firms bring them down to D.C. and connect them with corporate leaders and help them whitewash their image with shiny events.”

“The most disgusting days in this country are the days of the U.N. General Assembly,” echoed Kambale Musavuli, a human rights advocate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Banks, P.R. firms, marketing firms falling over themselves to court them.”

One U.S. bank played a key role in helping Obiang launder money from his country’s oil boom into immense privately held wealth. In a 2004 inquiry, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that accounts in Riggs Bank, which closed in 2005, were the destination for Equatorial Guinea’s oil revenue. Senior government officials held more than 60 accounts at the Washington branch of the bank, valued at up to $700 million.

The bank would then transfer massive sums of cash to offshore shell companies it created for Obiang, who could then spend the money on a house in Potomac, for instance. The Senate committee also found that some of Obiang’s money came from oil funds explicitly established to be redistributed among Equatorial Guineans.

Obiang has escaped prosecution in part because going after heads of state presents an array of complications. A Justice Department official who was not authorized to speak with the press and requested anonymity said, “In addition to possible immunity issues, heads of state sometimes have significant control over the degree to which their law enforcement officials can cooperate with U.S. investigators. Moreover, it can be very difficult to convince witnesses and others with evidence of foreign corruption to come forward — they often are worried about their economic well-being, and sometimes even their safety or the safety of their family members.”

On the other hand, Obiang’s son and presumed heir has been the subject of sweeping investigations in the United States, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands regarding his multitudinous assets. In 2014, Teodorín, as he’s known, settled a case brought by U.S. federal prosecutors and agreed to sell a $30 million mansion in Malibu and a Ferrari, but was allowed to keep a Gulfstream jet and $2 million worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia including a diamond-studded glove, a jacket the star wore in “Thriller” and six life-size statues. He also avoided criminal prosecution. In a statement, prosecutors said Teodorín “received an official government salary of less than $100,000 but used his position and influence as a government minister to amass more than $300 million worth of assets through corruption and money laundering.”
The United States doesn’t have an “ill-gotten wealth statute” that would allow investigators to act on the simple suspicion that a government employee couldn’t possibly be earning enough to afford certain assets. So even though Yahya Jammeh isn’t a head of state anymore, it might still be very difficult for U.S. authorities to mount a case for seizing his property.

“To bring a civil forfeiture case, we need evidence of the crime and the link to the asset we seek to forfeit,” said the Justice Department official. Evidence can be hard to come by, but nongovernmental organizations that work in Equatorial Guinea, for instance, have helped U.S. investigators by convincing witnesses of corruption to come forward.

Sallah, the Gambian activist, said she was returning to her country for the first time in eight years to try to collect some of that evidence. She’s hoping that officials from the central bank will be confident enough of Gambia’s weeks-old democracy to help her pinpoint instances of illegal withdrawals Jammeh made from the state treasury.

That would be the first step to challenging Jammeh’s ownership of houses like the one on Bentcross Drive. Jammeh’s house is listed as belonging to “Trustees of the MYJ Family Trust,” which activists like Sallah have long known is tied to Jammeh’s family, but now they can endeavor to make the link tangible. When asked how many other foreign power brokers own property in Falconhurst, Eric Stewart, a real estate broker who has sold houses in Potomac for 25 years, said the common practice of listing caretaker trusts as owners makes it hard to tell.

Stewart is trying to sell the house on the other side of Obiang’s on Bentcross, which currently belongs to Serdal Adali, a Turkish businessman whose company provides “full contingency support to US Military and Coalition forces” in places like Iraq. Adali once served jail time and was barred from Turkish soccer stadiums for match-fixing when he was on the board of the wildly popular Istanbul club Besiktas. Adali bought the house from Ayman Hariri, the billionaire son of Lebanon’s slain former prime minister Rafiq Hariri and heir to his father’s huge construction company.

Falconhurst is flush with money, both ill-gotten and not.

Nixon Clermont, a part-time cabdriver who grew up around Potomac, said he feels a twinge of disgust when he drives around the neighborhood and sees what he takes to be evidence of misused state wealth.

“I’m from Haiti, man. In Haiti, my people can’t find the food to eat,” said Clermont.

“Our ambassador used to live here. Paid for with money that could have saved people. It makes me so angry, man. So sad.”

Julie Tate contributed reporting to this article.

The cache of weapons discovered at former president, Yahya Jammeh’s villa in Kanilai has finally be collected and transported to Faraja Barracks this morning.

The cache which includes lethal weapons were transported in military trucks by the combined ECOMIG and Gambia Armed Forces officials who stored them at a secure place at the barracks.

At the start of the intervention of the ECOMIG forces in The Gambia, there has been concerns about the fate of former dictator Jammeh’s weapons. Credible reports were that, the dictator and his ‘Enablers’ in the army, set up mobile armories embedded in civilian populated areas as part of the broader plan to commit genocide in the country.

The discovery of the Kanilai cache and its transportation to the Fajara Barracks for secure keeping is part of the first initiative to account for any missing weapons from The Gambia Armed Forces armories.