Serekunda, The Gambia – A baptismal certificates. A baseball cap. Wallets, belts, neckties and bank membership playing cards. Originally, the customary-seeming items enact not seem fit for disguise in a museum.
Then, with staunch a pair of words from some of the slips of paper accompanying them, the objects’ quotidian nature takes a chilling flip.
“Certificate awarded to Kanyiba Kanyl for the completion of Pc Operation route,” one blow their non-public horns reads. “He was forcibly disappeared on 18th September 2006. His fate is aloof unknown.”
That is Memory Home, a museum positioned on a dusty avenue in Serekunda, staunch outside The Gambia’s capital, Banjul, dedicated to the victims of previous chief Yahya Jammeh.
Objects on disguise here vary from photos of victims to written testimony to art work made by those that suffered below Jammeh’s 22-year reign on this diminutive West African nation of 2.4 million.
Nonetheless staunch five years after Jammeh was deposed, the museum, which opened in October, pursues a mandate necessary grander than its diminutive stature of staunch four exhibition rooms suggests: rewriting the suppressed history of Jammeh’s rule – including, in some cases, uncovering unique stories for the most fundamental time.
“Our target is the folks who comprise been listening to things [about the Jammeh era] but without a doubt are not particular whether or to not enlighten it or not,” acknowledged Sirra Ndow, Gambia nation consultant for the African Community In opposition to Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances (ANEKED), which runs Memory Home.
Jammeh came to energy in a 1994 protection force coup. Over the subsequent twenty years, a full bunch of Gambians – journalists, migrants, political activists, apart from student protesters and random Gambians caught within the tainted just at the tainted time – would be killed or disappeared.
Others had been focused in “witch hunts” and accused of sorcery. HIV patients had been compelled to undergo bogus, unpleasant treatments.
Rigged and suppressed elections saved Jammeh in energy except 2016, when the political opposition was ready to unite around Adama Barrow for a surprise victory.
After within the originate resisting Barrow’s appointment as president, Jammeh within the waste fled the nation to Equatorial Guinea, the build he lives this day in exile.
While a put up-Jammeh fact payment was wanted to publicising heaps of Jammeh’s atrocities for the most fundamental time, Memory Home hopes to prolong that dialog.
“Correct folks shiny what took just is an act of accountability,” Ndow instructed Al Jazeera. “Folks forgetting leaves [behind] impunity … For heaps of of us, they staunch hear the stories, and they don’t bag to without a doubt feel it. Memory Home brings that ingredient of feeling it.”
Tallying some 250 victims of the convey or its agents, The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) published its remaining story in December, which called for all the pieces from constitutional reform to the prosecution of Jammeh.
The govt.’s response – outlining which of the myriad of the story’s ideas this is able to likely perhaps moreover honest pursue, and how – is due on Wednesday.
Nonetheless – while necessary has been acknowledged of the makes an are attempting at reconciliation, reparations funds and eventual trials – to for the time being, some Gambians push apart accusations in opposition to Jammeh as counterfeit smears, and a few victims of the rotten witch hunts aloof face social stigma in their communities.
Memorialisation “helps to educate the public by maintaining a permanent file of the history, standpoint and context of a interval of dumb human rights violations. That is serious because it permits victims specifically to manipulate the fable,” acknowledged Salieu Taal, president of the Gambian Bar Association, which has produced coverage papers on alternatives for accomplishing the TRRC’s ideas, in an e mail.
Memory Home “will play a without a doubt crucial role in instructing generations of Gambia of a unlit chapter of our history which we must collectively create particular that never occurs all yet again. It’s serious that the classes of the [post-Jammeh transitional justice] task are mainstreamed in our training machine to instil a culture in opposition to impunity.”
Despite 871 days of testimony, the TRRC may perhaps likely perhaps well not likely duvet every victim of the Jammeh regime, which is why Memory Home expert three Gambian ladies to doc more crimes.
Their work is displayed in an exhibition that opened earlier this month, titled We. Are. No longer. Performed.
Portraits and testimony from victims and their household dot the museum’s courtyard.
“My mum was eight months pregnant when she was accused of being a witch,” reads the textual yell material accompanying portraits of 1 lady, going by the name Fatou, hiding her face to offer protection to her identification.
“[My mother] misplaced the baby … My grandmother is aloof affected. She will get offended for no reason; she throws stones at us and closes the gate pronouncing ‘nobody will ride away the dwelling’.”
“I dropped out of college at grade 5 as a result of I was being bullied that my mother is a witch, which is why I agreed to bag married at an early age. [People still] mock us about being witches … I have not any chums,” the testimony reads.
“That is my first time sharing this story.”
The therapeutic task
While the provision of the TRRC story was hailed by rights teams as a milestone, its release was moreover hampered by delays and concerns that a govt with lingering Jammeh apparatchiks would not rep it seriously.
Barrow gained his re-election remaining year with strengthen from some participants of Jammeh’s faded occasion, which aloof holds seats within the Nationwide Assembly. The structure, judicial sector and national security sector aloof need fundamental reforms after being warped by Jammeh’s rule, activists and the TRRC story comprise declared.
Memory Home maintains financial independence from the convey – counting on grants and start air partners to support its exhibitions free.
“[Memory House] is a capacity to support not staunch the govt.’s minds but the public’s minds on the long-interval of time nature of the transitional justice task,” acknowledged Sara Bradshaw, programme director at the World Coalition of Web sites of Judgment of correct and unsuitable, which counts Memory Home, positioned at ANEKED’s headquarters, as a member build.
“Since the 2016 election, [civil society groups] comprise without a doubt pivoted their work to create the transitional justice task as inclusive as that you may perhaps perhaps likely perhaps well moreover have faith, and as victim-centred as that you may perhaps perhaps likely perhaps well moreover have faith.”
Reed Brody, an American attorney who works with Jammeh’s victims, moreover acknowledged there may perhaps be a “persevering with battle over the fable” of Jammeh’s rule.
“You will have the recent technology and future generations to be unsleeping, moreover, that Gambians insisted on accountability for these items,” he acknowledged.
In some cases, Gambians are aloof studying harsh truths of the Jammeh technology for the most fundamental time. A Gambian journalist covering the museum recently found herself a disguise a pair of household member, whom she never realised had been a victim, Ndow recalled.
A fifth grader passing by found out her father’s death was linked to Jammeh. “We comprise participants walking by, walking in, not shiny what’s here, simplest to preserve shut, ‘Oh, that is my household member,’” Ndow acknowledged.
Ndow’s household is represented within the displays as successfully. A social security card and passport belonging to her uncle, Saul Ndow, sit on disguise, a remaining testomony to the govt. critic allegedly killed and disappeared by Jammeh’s regime in 2013.
“It goes a protracted formulation in opposition to the therapeutic task” on a non-public diploma, Ndow acknowledged of having her uncle’s outcomes on disguise – but she will not be by myself.
“Many of the victims had been powerless,” within the midst of the Jammeh technology, acknowledged Ndow. Now, even when, being ready to share their stories “brings support their energy”.