Source : VOA – http://bit.ly/1lFXptF

The Gambian government has denied reports of an alleged attempted coup against President Yahya Jammeh.

Gunfire erupted early Tuesday in the capital, Banjul, and residents awoke to find government buildings and the main bridge into the city sealed off by soldiers.

A government statement described the reports of a coup as rumors and said peace and calm continue to prevail in the West African country.

Pa Samba Jow, the spokesman for the Democratic Union of Gambian Activists in the Diaspora, said his organization wishes the attempted coup would have been successful. Jow said Gambians want to get rid of Jammeh, who his group accuses of abrogating the rights and freedoms of Gambians for 20 years with impunity.

“I think, for this time, it was a genuine attempt to definitely get rid of this regime that has abrogated the rights of Gambians for over 20 years. I think the regime has denied Gambians all avenues, legally and constitutionally, to change the manner of their government. People are left with no other choice but to try to end it by any means necessary,” he said.

Jow described the alleged coup plotters as freedom fighters who, he said, are determined to restore democracy to The Gambia.

Jammeh came to power in a coup in 1994. His government has been heavily criticized abroad for what Amnesty International called its iron fisted repression and widespread human rights violations.

In its 2013 Human Rights Report, the U.S. State Department said The Gambia’s most serious human rights problems included government interference with the electoral process, harassment and abuse of its critics, and torture, arrest, detention, and sometimes enforced disappearance of citizens.

The rights group Civil Society Associations Gambia criticized President Obama for hosting Jammeh at the White House during the U.S.-Africa summit in August, which drew dozens of African heads of state to the U.S. capital.

Jow said everything has gone wrong under Jammeh.

“When Jammeh came to power, the reason he claimed was corruption and overstay in power by the previous regime. Jammeh made the claim that he will never introduce dictatorship in the country, that nobody will ever rule the country for more than 10 years. As we speak, he’s been in power for 20 years. As we speak, Yahyah Jammeh, who came to power a poor man, is now one of the richest people in the country, if not the whole of Africa,” Jow said.

The African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have both frowned on coups.

Jow said that had the alleged coup succeeded, the AU and ECOWAS would have no choice but to support the restoration of democracy in The Gambia.

“Gambians have not been accorded any opportunity to change the manner of their government in a peaceful, democratic way. What is important is for sure that the international community support the Gambian people and to install the restoration of democracy and to make sure that nobody in the history of that country takes the government of the people from the back of the people,” Jow said.

Jow said the Gambian media is under constant attack under Jammeh and that the government does not allow for the free exercise of democratic rights.

The French News Agency quoted an unnamed military officer as saying three suspects were killed in the violence, including the alleged ringleader, whom the officer described as an army deserter.

A US State Department spokesman said the United States strongly condemns any attempt to seize power through extra constitutional means.

Butty interview with Pa Samba Jow

Source : http://wapo.st/1JtbWVf
How do you stop a historic flow of migrants to Europe?
With pop music, according to the U.S. Embassy in Gambia.

As thousands of migrants left Gambia, one of Africa’s smallest, poorest and least democratic nations, the embassy put on a concert aimed at deterring young men from making the journey to Europe. The concert, held in November, was called “No to Backway,” referring to the Gambian term for illegal migration across the Mediterranean.

As European policymakers deport migrants or debate how to disrupt smuggling networks, other efforts are being made to discourage young men and women from leaving in the first place. Banners have been hung in small villages across West Africa. Television and advertising spots have been purchased. The United Nations has been actively engaged in those campaigns around the developing world.

But the American attempt in Gambia is certainly one of the more creative. In addition to the concert, the United States paid twelve Gambian artists to write and record songs about illegal migration that would be performed live and disseminated across the country by radio and cellphone.

The singers were each paid around $270. The gross national income per capita in Gambia is $500, according to the World Bank.

“They called me and explained the motives involved. They said ‘It’s about enlightening people about the dangers involved,’ ” recalled one singer, Fattoumatta Sandeng, 21. “It sounded noble.”

The songs and the concert don’t appear to be dissuading anyone. Massive numbers of Gambians have continued leaving for Europe this year, many of them dying on the way.

“These are the kinds of things you do even though they have minimal impact,” said Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank devoted to the study of migration. “They give governments a sense that they’re doing something.”

Attendance was poor at the concert. Even the performers couldn’t persuade many of their friends to come. As part of the campaign, U.S. diplomats spoke to Gambian media outlets about the opportunities for young people in the country. But even by the standards of sub-Saharan Africa, those opportunities are limited.

“A lot of people are planning to go the Backway, and they didn’t see the reason to go to a concert like that,” Sandeng said.

The songs are in four languages: Wollof, Mandinka, Sarrahule and English. They range from soulful ballads to anthemic hip-hop songs. Some touched on the reasons many are leaving.

“It’s hard to survive off of $50 a month,” sang one artist, Killa Ace.

DAMPHA KUNDA, Gambia — The village was losing its young men. Hundreds had left their thatched-roof huts and tiny squares of farmland for the promise of Europe. About 40 had died on the way.

Susso knew nearly all of them. He had prayed at the funerals after their boats capsized or their smugglers stranded them in the desert, ceremonies with mourners but no bodies. The grim toll complicated his plan, turned it into a secret he hid from almost everyone.

He, too, was preparing to join the exodus from Dampha Kunda.
Africa has never seen such a flood of young men heading for Europe. The number of migrants crossing by sea to Italy, a top entry point, nearly quadrupled from 2013 to 2014, reaching about 170,100. Sub-Saharan Africans made up a growing percentage of the total, with around 64,600 arriving last year. This year, the figure is expected to be even higher. Gambia, one of Africa’s smallest nations, is a big contributor to that flow.

To deter the arrivals, European policymakers have proposed reinforcing their naval forces in the Mediterranean, conducting mass deportations and destroying smugglers’ boats. When Susso turns on the radio in the bedroom he shares with his wife and six children, he hears all the ways Europe is trying to dissuade him from leaving.

But it has never been so alluring — or so easy — to begin the trip. Over the past two years, sub-Saharan Africa’s smuggling networks have expanded, as Libya has descended into chaos, leaving its coasts unguarded as migrants set out for Italy, a few hundred miles away.

Stories of Gambians arriving on Italian or Spanish shores now reach even remote Dampha Kunda via Facebook and text message, like rumors of a gold rush. Most men keep their plans a secret until they leave, fearing an outcry from worried relatives or arrest by the country’s authoritarian government. Susso asked that only his last name, common in eastern Gambia, be used in this article.

In the weeks before his trip, he veiled himself in routine, waking every day at 5 and working on the rice farm of the village’s richest family. He played on the floor with his children, most of them half-clothed in torn shirts and underwear, telling them nothing of his plan.

Then, one day in May, Susso opened a drawer hidden under a yellow blanket and removed a small metal box with a silver padlock. He counted the money: 17,000 dalasi, about $500. It had taken him three years. It was enough to begin the journey north.

Twice a week, a bus called the “TA Express,” full of young men wearing sandals and carrying small bags, clatters past Dampha Kunda on its way to Agadez, a desert city in Niger that smugglers use as a way station on the route to Libya and Europe.

Soon, Susso told himself, he would be on it.

“The Western Route,” experts call the web of migrant trails from Gambia, Senegal and Mali that now lead to North Africa. But Gambians have a different name for the dangerous path to Europe: The Backway.

“Say No to the Backway,” reads a government banner near Susso’s village, with a picture of a boat capsized in the ocean.

“Backway bad way,” says a song funded by the U.S. Embassy in Gambia and played on the radio here.

Across Africa, there are different paths to Europe and different reasons for leaving. In Somalia, refugees flee the brutal al-Shabab rebels, following an “Eastern route” winding through Sudan. In Eritrea, they escape a harsh military regime.

And Susso’s reasons? He walked by them one day in the scorching heat shortly before he would depart, homes in sandy lots with numbers painted on the walls.
House number 1027, a mud-baked hut, was getting a cinderblock addition, thanks to money from a relative in Spain. House 301 boasted a flat-screen television, thanks to remittances from Germany. And House 311 had a big red tractor.

“So much money,” he sighed.
Poverty had once imposed a kind of uniformity here — every house with a thatched roof and dirt floor, every meal a small portion of rice and okra, every job tending to patches of rice on a small subsistence farm.

Then the wealth gap that had always separated Europe and Africa began to insinuate itself here. If you had a relative in Europe, you were rich. If not, you remained stuck on the edge of survival.

It filled Susso with an envy that bordered on anger. He was 39, broad-shouldered and sleepy-eyed, older and wearier than most of the men making the journey north.

Susso could afford only two meals a day for his family. He knew he would have to pull his four sons out of school in their early teens, so they could work his small rice field or make money elsewhere. He shared his two-room home with 12 people, including his brother, nieces and nephews, a bedsheet hanging where the front door should be.

Like so many Gambians, no matter how much he was willing to work, his ambition yielded almost nothing.

A growing number of Gambians are literate, but with “little chance at employment that matches their skills, just like China by the 1960s and India by the 1970s,” said Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. “So they do the rational thing and they leave.”

The Gambian government hasn’t helped. Its longtime dictator, President Yahya Jammeh, has preached a life of subsistence. He has created a bizarre mythology around himself as a man who could cure AIDS and threatened to personally slit the throats of gay men. He has brushed off the thousands of young men fleeing his country as failures and bad Muslims.

But even the farmers of Dampha Kunda knew migrants were the true success stories. Twenty percent of Gambia’s gross domestic product now comes from remittances, according to the World Bank, one of the highest percentages in Africa. It’s a nation with almost no industry or valuable natural resources, where the government dominates what little private sector exists.

“The only people who can make any money in The Gambia are those very close to the president. If not, you’re making $100 a month, if that,” said C. Omar Kebbeh, an economist and expert in Gambian migration, now at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Not far from Susso’s house, there was a massive billboard with a picture of Jammeh, smiling in a white cap.

“Grow what you eat and eat what you grow,” it said.

For Susso, that policy had one palpable impact.

“We’re hungry,” he said. “We’re always hungry.”

Susso had memorized the way Dampha Kunda looked from eight feet off the ground, as he bumped through the rice fields atop a big red tractor. The new two-story houses rose above the old, mud-colored huts. Across much of the village’s cropland, plants were ailing. With the rising prices, few people could afford fertilizer.

The tractor was an extraordinary luxury in a place where almost no one owned a car. But it didn’t belong to Susso. Its owner lived in Europe.

The first major wave of Gambians left villages like Dampha Kunda in the 1990s, mostly for Spain. By 2010, there were 65,000 Gambians abroad, around 4 percent of the population. One of the men sending money home was Alagi Ceesay, the owner of the tractor.

Full story here : http://wapo.st/1IE7Rc4

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