The upcoming truth commission hearings in Banjul should shed further light on the massacres of over 50 migrants in Gambia, a human rights body said on Wednesday.
Referring to Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) hearings, Human Rights Watch said it the rights body also wants the cover up of the killing of the West African migrants probed and the culprits brought to book.
It said in a statement on Wednesday, the hearings should get to the bottom of the atrocities committed in 2005 during former President Yaya Jammeh’s administration.
The hearing began on February 22,2021.
HRW described the killings as the largest loss of life during the rule of Jammeh.
About forty-four Ghanaians, nine Nigerians, two Togolese and nationals of Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia and Senegal are believed to have been killed over several days in July 2005.
Among those scheduled to testify is Martin Kyere of Ghana, the sole known survivor, the rights body said.
Kyere will be in Banjul for the hearings together with William Nyarko, executive director of the Africa Center for International Law and Accountability (ACILA).
ACILA, coordinates the Jammeh2Justice Ghana campaign.
”Previous official attempts to investigate the massacre have been stymied or flawed,” said HRW.
Ghana attempted to investigate the killings in 2005 and 2006, but was blocked by the Jammeh government, HRW claimed.
In 2008, the United Nations and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) formed a joint investigative team.
The team produced a report in April 2009 that was said to have concluded that the Gambian government was not directly or indirectly complicit in the deaths and enforced disappearances.
It blamed “rogue” elements in Gambia’s security services “acting on their own” for the massacre.
HRW says the UN/ECOWAS report has never been made public, however, despite repeated requests by the victims and by five human rights experts.
A 2018 report by TRIAL International and Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with 30 former Jammeh-era officials, found, however, that Jammeh’s closest associates in the army, the navy, and the police detained the migrants.
“Junglers,” a unit of Gambian soldiers operating under Jammeh’s orders, summarily executed the detainees.
TRIAL and Human Rights Watch also found that the Gambian government destroyed key evidence before the UN/ECOWAS team arrived.
In July 2019, three former Junglers testified publicly before the truth commission that they and 12 other Junglers had carried out the killings on Jammeh’s orders.