Gambia: War of Words between Jammeh and Opposition

Via Ibn Kafka, I read this article on Gambian President Yahya Jammeh’s threats against human rights activists (French) – and, by extension, against the journalists to whose treatment the activists object.

My (shoddy) translation from the French:

“Those who want to collaborate with these alleged defenders of human rights and imagine they will be defended by them are mistaken. If you want to destabilize the country, sow trouble, and make my people suffer, I will make sure that you’ll be dead,” the president declared [in a television interview].”

[…] Many organizations for defending human rights and the press in the world regularly denounce the repression exercised in Banjul against independent media. Private media work in a “very menacing climate,” according to Reporters without Borders, since the assassination of a journalist in 2004 and the disappearance of another in 2004.

For its part, the Gambian opposition condemned the president’s threats, though at least one Gambian journalist suggested the opposition had more work to do in presenting a clear alternative to the regime and its language.

More on Gambian journalists at CPJ.