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Post-Coup Politics in the Gambia

Four years ago in these pages, following the disputed 1996 presidential election in the Gambia, the late John Wiseman characterized the “democratization process” in that small West African country as a “moldy loaf.” Soldier-turned-civilian president Colonel Yahya Jammeh, who had taken power in a bloodless 1994 coup, engineered the 1996 election to ensure himself victory. Jammeh’s decision to stand again for the presidency in 2001, the kind of campaign that he ran, and the type of elections that he conducted form a backdrop against which we can assess the prospects for a return to free government in what was once one of Africa’s oldest continuously surviving multiparty democracies. The 18 October 2001 presidential balloting was riddled with irregularities and problems, ranging from a truncated campaign period designed to favor the incumbent to instances of intimidation and violence against opposition political leaders and supporters. It seems clear that President Jammeh’s reelection was aided by padded voter rolls, illicit votes from non-Gambian members of Jammeh’s Jola ethnic group who crossed over from Senegal, and an Electoral Commission chairman who manipulated the rules. Together, these irregularities rendered the election fundamentally flawed. The Gambia is a former British colony (and current Commonwealth member) of 1.5 million people, four-fifths of whom are Muslim. It has the smallest land area of any African country and is almost completely surrounded by its much larger neighbor, the former French colony of Senegal. After gaining its independence in 1965, the officially EnglishAbdoulaye Saine teaches African studies and international political economy at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has published widely on the military, human rights, and democratization in the Gambia and Africa. He gratefully acknowledges funding for this research from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Hampton Fund, and the Office for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching (OAST) of Miami University.