Coup D'etat by the Gambia National Army: July 22, 1994

By Lt. Col. Samsudeen Sarr

Coup de tat by the Gambia National Army, July 22nd 1994 is the authors autobiography chronicling the events of the title and its impact in his life. It is a story filled with lessons about Gambian history with a special focus on the genesis of the Gambian Military. For complexity, Lt. Col. Sarr alternated his story in the early chapters between scenes in the Gambia and his struggles to obtain political asylum in the United States of America. The book also revealed recollections from his childhood to educate his readers about certain social and spiritual beliefs and traditions in the Gambia.

After the first few chapters, which set up the coup and established his thoughts about it, he further provided a detailed history of his personal life up to the time of his enlistment in the Gambia National Army. There he discussed his first days in the USA in the early 80s sequentially focusing on life in the Gambia before, during and after the coup.

The book is intended to be instructive and educational to readers interested in, among other things, the background of the Gambia National Army and current APRC government headed by President Yaya A. J. J. Jammeh since July 22nd 1994.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781469100142

Lt. Col. Samsudeen Sarr

Born in the Gambia in the 50’s, I first started a career as a school teacher. But in the 1986 after living and studying in the United States, I returned to the Gambia and enlisted in the Gambia National Army. For fourteen years I served as a commissioned officer in the army rising up to the rank of a lieutenant colonel before losing my job in 1999 as commander of the Gambia National Army. After my unceremonious retirement from the army, I left Gambia on voluntary exile to the United States where I am currently living together with my wife and children. LT. COLONEL SAMSUDEEN M. SARR (RTD)

Book preview

Coup d’etat by the

Gambia National Army

July 22, 1994

Lt. Col. Samsudeen Sarr

Copyright © 2007 by Lt. Col. Samsudeen Sarr.

Library of Congress Control Number:         2007902183

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

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in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

Chapter One

The agony of a sudden departure

Chapter Two

Applying for asylum in the USA

Chapter Three

When the coup de tat started

Chapter Four

The initial confusion

Chapter Five

Details of the coup during my interview

Chapter Six

The rise and fall of the PPP

Chapter Seven

More about Gambia and the coup

Chapter Eight

Confusion over the leadership

Chapter Nine

Living in the USA

Chapter Ten

Inside the GNA

Chapter Eleven

Actions that brought stability in the country

Chapter Twelve

We were arrested after the formation of the military government.

Chapter Thirteen

Ten months in death row

Chapter Fourteen

Desire to write all about it

Chapter Fifteen

From Liberia to Ghana

Chapter Sixteen

Consolidation of the AFPRC—The APRC

Chapter Seventeen

Commanding the GNA in the military government

Chapter Eighteen

Difficulties in the Jammeh government

Chapter Nineteen

Recollections of the past in the USA

Chapter Twenty

President Jammeh and the need for a safe exit strategy

SPECIAL DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the following GNA soldiers who were summarily executed by the AFPRC government on allegation of a countercoup attempt on November 11, 1994: Lieutenants Basiru Barrow, Ablie Faal (Dot), Gibril Saye, Bakary Manneh (Nyancho), Jammeh; Darbo; Officer Cadet Sillah; Sergeant Ablie Bah (Choping), Ebrima M. Ceesay, and Basiru Camara.

It is also in memory of Honorable Ousman Koro Ceesay, the 34 year Gambian minister of finance murdered and incinerated in his car by government assassins on June 12, 1995.

My condolence goes to their families with prayers for their souls to rest in eternal peace.

Chapter One

The agony of a sudden departure

I left my country, Gambia, on voluntary exile to the United States of America in late July 1999. It was not an easy decision or action to take, considering the uncertainty I had felt in permanently leaving my country for a foreign one with no clue of what I was going to do with my life upon arrival. Leaving my wife and children—with simply the hope that after settling down at where I was headed to, only God knew when I was going to get them over to join me—was a major nagging trauma that almost caused me a clinical depression.

My consolation was, however, the faith I had always had in God and my unshakable belief in the wisdom of making the decision to leave. I felt fortunate that I was not leaving because of any bad records associated with my past as the country’s former military commander. Neither was it for those accustomed reasons, such as searching for greener pasture abroad as most third world immigrants to the Western world were generally categorized. I had to leave because, first, I believed I was never going to be the person I truly wanted to be in my country and, secondly and most importantly, for safety reasons.

By all evidence, the people I had worked for and had trusted all along seemed bent on breaking my character and moral values in a system of government where losing those human qualities meant reducing the personality of any honorable person into a disrespectable character or a despised figure.

I had had no doubt that the sudden and drastic action taken against me by the president of the country, Mr. Yaya A. J. J. Jammeh, on the advice of my immediate superior in the Gambia Armed Forces, Chief of Staff Colonel Babucarr Jatta, was meant just for that. I was not only innocent of any wrongdoing but totally flabbergasted by the drastic measures taken against me. Worse of all, I was not allowed with any chance to defend myself of the concocted allegations against me.

Since the military coup d’etat of the civilian People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government in the country five years ago, I had seen enough to know when the new regime was bent on breaking someone’s moral strength by forcing that person into compromising his or her principles or, even worse, abuse the person’s intellect in order to reduce him or her into a shameless sycophant or helpless victim.

Ironically, most prominent Gambians, by design of the country’s labor system, were somewhat shackled down by their total dependency on government employment, which the president was aware of and had used and frequently abused for his political advantage. In the process, however, he had used those flaws of the system to manipulate the minds and characters of Gambian technocrats, intellectuals, academicians, and politicians in a way that had effectively subdued almost all talents into becoming his personal servants. Of course, he had tried the same treacherous tactics to control the minds of the military commanders in a way that I believed was too dangerous for the maintenance of discipline in the armed forces. Most of us were aware of the problem, but there was little we could do to change the status quo.

As commander of the Gambia National Army (GNA) in the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) government that came into power through coup d’etat, waking up every day with the understanding that the very dynamics that orchestrated the treason yesterday still prevailed and that another coup d’etat could happen again tomorrow helped tremendously in guiding my thought process, especially when it came to command decisions and critical actions.

In the army, therefore, despite my elevated position, I had always reminded myself of how the junior officers of the GNA pulled off a successful breakthrough coup in a way that may best be described as a major revolution.

A well-known author and scholar Samuel P. Huntington has categorized coups into three distinctions: breakthrough coups in which noncommissioned officers (NCOs) or junior officers in the military seize power from a legitimate government and form their own elite bureaucrats to run the country. Such coups have, of course, been found to cause serious problems in the organizational structure of the armed forces and in the Gambia where we had one like that, the GNA was no exception.

The second form of coup, guardian coups, according to Mr. Huntington, have been found to be more progressive in that they are often organized by senior officers in the military with minimal or no fundamental alteration in the structure of the government institutions or personnel. Such coups are genuinely meant to improve public order, efficiency, or to stop corruption. I believe that was what the Malians experienced in 1991 when President Moussa Traore, a brutal dictator, was overthrown. In less than a year, there was a transitional government and a new constitution that ushered in free and fair elections winning Alpha Omar Konare the presidency in 1992.

Veto coups, the third category however, have common similarity with the guardian type in that the senior officers are in charge; but their major difference is that the military in such cases is most repressive and bloody because of its inclination to veto mass participation and social mobilization. Late General Sani Abacha came into power in Nigeria in a classic veto coup.

One could go further and add a related component inseparable to the three coup categories and, i.e., countercoups. In almost all cases where there is a coup, a countercoup attempt had usually followed and could continue to happen over and over again as long as the military is in charge of the government.

From my point of view, however, I don’t think the world, in general, or Africa, in particular, would ever be rid of coups d’etat. Coups had been happening in human society since the Roman days of Julius Caesar and had ever since been part of the human political equation.

What we had in the Gambia was without question a breakthrough coup that had come with all its negative ramifications, particularly in the GNA command structure. There was rampant treachery causing deep mistrust everywhere, compounded by a state of job insecurity, and fueled by the president’s paranoiac policy of frequently firing and hiring civil servants. Individuals and families had, therefore, lived with constant fears, humiliations, and embarrassments; and in some circumstances, innocent people arrested, detained, and tortured or, in extreme situations, even killed. But all tolerated because of the desperate need to hold on to jobs controlled and monitored from the strong man’s office.

The civil service was definitely affected in those uncertain times, but I think the army suffered the worst part of the destructive repercussions of the coup d’etat. From the beginning, the coup leaders, all junior officers, purged the senior-officer corps of the GNA with brutal vengeance, literally wiping all of them out of the force. If they had not learned the bitter lesson along the way that the army really needed some senior officers for its continued survival, they may have succeeded in getting rid of all of us.

I was throughout the turbulence there; but with the strong determination not to allow anybody or anything in the system to corrupt my professional demeanor regardless of the monumental temptation to do so and be seen as perfectly normal. I had always believed that if I could escape history’s guilty verdict for any of my actions unbecoming of a good officer or fair person, then the almighty God would eventually try and convict me of my misdeeds.

In other words, I think our actions—good or bad, in private or public, and confidential or not—shall never escape the zoomed lens of nature, history, God, or whatever we may choose to call it. Somehow, sooner or later, every person would be accountable to one’s actions in this world, good or bad.

I have had children whose future I wanted to protect by maintaining my decency as prescribed by divine laws or human conscience or true military ethics. I did not want my children, who were still too young, to grow up tomorrow just to learn that their father was among those monsters whose greed for power and position drove him into ungodly means of attaining and sustaining that power.

What happened to me in 1999, therefore, finally convinced me that regardless of my positive hopes in the uncertain future of the Jammeh government and the belief that I could make a difference by being sincere or godly, nothing progressive was achievable or sustainable in the long run. I was totally fed up with the government. As a result, I took the decision never to work for President Jammeh’s government again.

After all, I didn’t think there was any choice left for me after being booted out by the president. Demographically, it was clear that the government by structure and policy was the country and the country, the government. That was how things had been since the Gambia’s independence from colonial rule in 1965. However, the civilian rulers then ran the country in a relatively tolerable way but basically in the same unfair fashion. So after the military takeover in 1994, the new rulers simply ratcheted up the poor style of governance into a less-tolerable fashion.

As a member of the military, who had held a position as high as mine, my only logical option was to leave the country or face the possibility of sooner or later being forced into succumbing to the intimidating tactics of President Jammeh. I had witnessed the way matters had turned against those who had once been considered the president’s most trusted associates or loyalists. He had humiliated them by sacking them from their jobs for no explained reason and later rehired them back to special positions just to retire them prematurely or fired them again for no given reason, denying them all their retirement benefits. He would arrest his best followers on dubious allegations, releasing them after a while and later employing them just to dismiss them again. I could not imagine myself stooping down that low in my business that I knew was more beneficial to the state than it was to me.

There was little or nothing I could do to avoid the problem without leaving the country. I was never going to crawl down before President Yaya Jammeh like I saw many people did, especially civil servants and politicians desperately struggling to secure their jobs.

I was the army commander, far different from the ordinary employee and definitely not the average technocrat or politician in his government. If my will or character was broken, I would not be able to establish my authority over my subordinates again or say no to my superiors if unlawful orders were ever given to me to execute; carrying out illegal orders would be acting like the despised monster I was always afraid of becoming. Hence, I had to leave the country and perhaps never to return until there was a change of the APRC government or the Jammeh leadership.

Staying in the country would inevitably render me a victim without options. I would be at his mercy waiting for his call to do whatever he had wanted. Refusing to accept his job offer would equally mean greater trouble yet accepting it usually meant something that was not going to last in a pretty good manner. And nobody in his right mind, in the public or private sector, would even consider offering me employment without Jammeh’s approval. So many Gambians have fallen victim of such circumstances but continued to suffer it in preference to leaving the country.

The world was too wide with limitless opportunities waiting for any honest, hard working individual to go out there and freely exploit or enjoy them. The Gambia, despite its small size, was considered one of the loveliest countries; nonetheless, I believe that the qualities or values that made it so had seriously been undermined by the current political leadership. Until there was a genuine change, therefore, I decided I was going to leave for the United States of America.

Before leaving the country few elders, respectable imams, and religious leaders came to my residence and offered to go and see President Yaya Jammeh on my behalf and have me reappointed again as commander. They thought they could do something about my unceremonious removal from the position. The discreet manner in which I was retired had convinced them that the problem was of lesser magnitude and that their intervention would have changed the situation. They were merely conscientious people acting on good intentions but lacked the proper understanding of the system and the difficulties in it, especially those in the job of an army commander in a post-coup d’etat government run by President Yaya Jammeh.

If it was a serious action taken by the president, one of the elders had rationalized, the retirement of the country’s army commander would have been made public through the media.

It was over three days since I got my letter from the president’s office retiring me with immediate effect. But the action from above was still not officially publicized as normally required under the Gambia Civil Service Act. The letter was brought to my house by the GNA Military Police (MP) Commander Lt. Pierre Mendy on June 22, 1999, at about 5:00 p.m.

My hands had trembled out of control when I opened up the letter while the MPs stood in attention waiting. I thought they were given orders to arrest and detain me again. Six days after the coup in July 1994, I was among the dozens of officers arrested and detained at death row in the maximum prison facility of the Gambia’s Mile Two Central Prisons. I was at first appointed secretary of state for trade and industry on July 26 and then, twenty-four hours later, arrested and detained together with Captain Mamat Cham, secretary of state for information and broadcasting. I could say that it was the first of the numerous treacheries that characterized the policy of the military government for years to come.

The coup leaders had justified it for security reasons, stating that our cases had to be thoroughly examined by legal experts to determine who was to be prosecuted or freed. I was there for ten horrible months after, which I was cleared by a panel of judges and reinstated to the army.

In jail, Singhateh and Haidara had issued us with dismissal letters: Singhateh for army personnel and Haidara for the police detainees. It was an experience I really never wanted to encounter again. The events of those early days of the coup had demonstrated to me that a government by coup was the most unpredictable and dangerous establishment to happen to a nation. While in jail, all my thoughts about my future were focused on first getting my freedom and then leaving the country with my family as soon as possible. But when I got released and reinstated, I decided to abort my travel plans and stay on the job and sincerely work for my country. As I would reiterate, I thought I could make a difference within the establishment. There were several things that were seriously wrong with the army before the coup, fundamental faults that I believed seriously contributed to the armed rebellion and needed serious correction for the stability of the nation.

The concept of an army in the Gambia, by my observation, seriously deviated from the true guidelines of a national one since its first conception during the colonial era. From 1901 up to 1994, Gambian soldiers in this tiny West African nation had always been commanded and controlled by foreign commanders. The Nigerians were the last in that telling tale in our history, leading to the final breakage of that frustrating cycle. It was the British, at first, then the Senegalese, and the British again before the Nigerians showed up. I could not understand the GNA’s seizure of the political system, especially by the junior officers in charge, but I could perfectly understand the Gambian military being exclusively taken over by the Gambian soldiers at last. It was a shame that it had to happen through a coup d’etat.

Certainly, I was in the beginning humiliated and embarrassed by the military government, yet I took the job they offered me later with positive hopes for the future. In those days, not too many of the Gambians could reason out the implications of the events. Most of them were even upset with me for accepting the job. However, what I was going to do with my life, as an unemployed military officer in a country in the hands of the military, was an issue that perhaps never crossed the minds of my critics. Who was going to employ me for the education I had had that was basically combat oriented and pay me the salary I used to earn as an army captain was another thing. While in jail, none other than my immediate family members had cared about my plight or questioned the legal basis for my detention. And a good number of the Gambians had even thought that the allegations made against all the detained officers, including me, had some truth in it or carried only the truth. Besides, I had also wondered how they had put into perspective the reality that the two officers, Second Lieutenant Sana Sabally and Second Lieutenant Sadibu Haidara, who physically arrested most of us at gunpoint, ended up being arrested and detained at the same place six months later.

It was not a simple black-and-white problem with answers readily available. Instead, it was actually a state of coup d’etat engulfed in a complexity that was suffocating the very elements actively responsible for its perpetration. The concept of logical decision seemed to be getting more and more elusive with every passing hour. Anyway rather than leaving according to my initial plans in jail, I stayed with the belief that things would somehow work out for me until 1999 when I realized that it was all unrealistic.

After reading my retirement letter, I asked for how long I was given to vacate the commander’s house with my family.

The chief of staff said tomorrow, sir, replied the lieutenant in attention position.

I walked into the bedroom where my wife was breastfeeding our one-month-old son and showed her the letter. I had three boys with my wife Fatma Najib: Muhamed, eleven; Jamil, eight; and Samsudeen, who was just one month old. I prayed in my heart that God will help me and my family overcome the tribulation of the moment. Muhamed and Jamil, who were beginning to understand my importance in the society, were confused by the sudden change of events.

My wife could not believe it and was speechless for a moment before bursting into tears. She could not understand why I was treated in that terrible manner. She knew how hard I had honestly been working for the people who were now bent on destroying our lives. She had keenly followed the beginning and development of the problem I had recently had with Colonel Babucarr Jatta over my new salary, but she also knew that the armed forces chief of staff was wrong, and I was right. So for the president to send me that letter, getting rid of me, was incomprehensible.

In my conscious mind I was not that remorseful or regretful. Between me and God, I had a strange good feeling in my heart that it was the best thing to happen to me. I told myself that whatever may happen now or later, I was never going to put on the GNA uniform again or serve in the Gambia Army. That was what I eventually told the religious elders after expressing my gratitude to all of them for their special concern. They were reluctant to readily accept that statement, so I went further to explain those times when I had left my house late at night on dangerous missions of life and death for the government. On numerous occasions, problems had unexpectedly emerged that in the process of resolving them had almost cost me my life.

Barely six months ago, I nearly got killed by a drunken armed soldier in Guinea-Bissau while on President Jammeh’s assignment to help find a peaceful solution to the factional war that erupted there between the president and his chief of staff. Therefore, if there was to be any mediation for me to go back to the job, I believe it should have been the government that should send an envoy to me for compromise and not from me to them. They could toy around with the politicians, but, in the military, I believed we deserved a better treatment.

The position of army commander in the GNA may have sounded or looked good to the ordinary individual; but, knowing what the implications were, few really had understood the fact that the risks far outweighed the benefits involved.

That night of my retirement, the chief of staff went further to withdraw all the guards at my house and seized the official vehicle issued to me and my family as commander. It was the vehicle that I had used to go to work every morning after dropping off my kids to school. That was certainly scary. It was like isolating me and my family at a corner where my safety was endangered. As commander for almost a year, any lunatic with a personal agenda could have walked into the house and hurt me or my family. All arms and ammunitions at the house were taken away that same evening. Things just got from bad to worse as time elapsed.

My mother, who could not understand anything about what had happened in the quick manner it did, blamed my troubles with Colonel Jatta to unnatural causes. She thought someone, who perhaps had envied my position, might have invoked the powers of a fetish or marabou, to cast an evil spell on me. And I think she even sought the help of her personal marabou who confirmed her fears and demanded D6,000 to lift the curse on me.

The marabous were perfect in reading the minds of the people in need of help at troubling times. And the gullible victims, before understanding the real truth behind their troubles, would in some instances be paying arms and legs of fortune to these marabous with no improvement in their predicaments. We were Muslims, as most Gambians were; but my mother like all of them, Christians inclusive, had believed seriously in the supernatural powers of the marabous and their spiritual powers.

In 1988, when I accidentally shot myself on the right leg and suffered multiple fracture on my thigh bone, she gave me a severe tongue lashing for not carrying the bulletproof jujus made by certain marabous; in 1990, when I was court-martialed and demoted in rank for disobeying the GNA command, she thought my disbelief on the potency of marabou work and unwillingness to accept any jujus from them was somehow responsible for my series of troubles. When I was arrested and jailed after the coup, she had the same issues to grind with me; and now with my removal from the position of command, she thought of the same juju solutions.

She was devastated when I refused to even meet the juju man with a warning that if he showed up at my residence, he would not be admitted in the house. Marabous are part of Gambian lives, like eating and sleeping was to their basic human needs. I believe God was greater than all the marabous combined.

Thank God, my wife’s sister, Samira Najib, came up with the timely assistance to our immediate problem; she had convinced her husband, Muhamed Kebbeh, a successful businessman to rescue us and he did. He offered us a comfortable house the next day where we moved into before night fell.

Knowing how dangerous or unpredictable the situation was, I thought I must do something to control the anger of the chief of staff before he came up with another wrathful order against me. The way things were happening, I could not rule out the possibility of an order sending me to Mile Two Central Prisons again. I had already taken the decision to leave the Gambia as soon as possible. But before that, I must be cautious not to let them know about my intentions and try to manage the crisis before it went out of hand. After all, I needed my retirement benefits paid to purchase a plane ticket and have some traveling funds to go with.

There was nothing I could do by staying in the country. I did not have any capital to start any work of my own. Even if I had had the money, I did not think the government would have allowed me the freedom and latitude to do anything of my own knowing that I knew too much about the government’s classified information. That knowledge alone was enough for me to go away if I did not want to work for them again. Perhaps all it would have taken for President Jammeh to order for my execution was for Colonel Jatta again to tell him that I was planning a coup with a group of soldiers. Already too many soldiers had lost their lives on charges of coup conspiracy that were later found to come from discredited sources.

Colonel Jatta was a witness to most of the killings that took place during the November 11, 1994, abortive countercoup, details of which he had narrated to me several times. I believed in what he had told me that he was the only person there who had made futile attempts to prevent the executions of the accused men. He was, however, positive that there was a countercoup plot but was doubtful over the government’s statement that the conspirators were poised to kill them all. He had revealed that the government or specifically Second Lt. Sana Sabally, the vice chairman of the ruling council at the time lied in his public announcement over how the soldiers died. All of them, said the colonel, were summarily executed in his presence except for Sergeant Fafa Nyang who was gunned down at Yundum Barracks by Lieutenant Singhateh.

Lieutenant Basiru Barrow was the first to be shot by the same Lieutenant Singhateh at Fajara Barracks. After Barrow was killed, the slaughtering orgy started and continued for days. But after the killing, in Sabally’s radio address, he had told the Gambians that all those who died were killed in gun battles.

I tried all I could to stop the unnecessary killing, Colonel Jatta once told me, but the council members, especially Singhateh, insisted on killing all the captured officers suspected of taking part in the conspiracy.

Some of the men escaped to Senegal. A few of them came back in 1997 in another attempt to topple the government again. They failed again. The majority of those killed and buried at the barracks’ toilets in 1994 were arrested and detained for over two days before the council members took the decision to kill all of the officers.

That was five years ago, and the mystery of that tragedy was still not resolved. The families of the dead soldiers still do not know what happened to their loved ones or where they were buried after being murdered.

My case was far from being considered a planned coup, but the little conflict I had had with Colonel Jatta was developing into a problem too dangerous to be taken lightly. Clearly my problem originated from the new salary I was paid as commander of the army. I was the colonel’s deputy for two years before I got the position on his recommendation. He was also promoted to the position of chief of staff, the first time the country had created such a military position. After enjoying my new salary scale for six months, he had suddenly decided that the money I was earning was too much. He wanted the amount reduced to what he thought was the right scale. He would not specify what that right scale should have been. He only wanted the defense department to figure out a lower pay than what I had been earning. Evidently, it was the salary he was earning as commander. I believe only a military government that had forced its way into power would allow such unthinkable action to happen.

When I confronted him about the problem, he exploded in my face, arguing that the amount I was paid was for colonels, not lieutenant colonels. That was absolutely incorrect. The salary was not for the rank but the appointment. We argued over it to a heated level. And that was it. Under normal circumstance, military rules and regulations do not tolerate junior officers arguing with their seniors at all. But this was the Gambia Army after a coup by the lower ranks.

I later learned that he had gone to the president and told him that I had physically assaulted him until I almost broke his arm. Soon the story began to spread all over the place that I had beaten up my boss mercilessly to the point where he had almost died. Kangkang news, as Gambians called information spreading by gossip, multiplied and divided the story until its true form was completely distorted. That was also scary. Beating up one’s boss in the military was a treasonable offence that could throw one in jail for good; and in the state of a post-coup d’etat era, one could even face a firing squad for the crime. If that was what Colonel Jatta actually told the president, the latter must have acted out of genuine fear. Colonel Jatta was not only the highest authority in the whole armed forces but physically far bigger and stronger than I in all respect. Plus he was younger.

The president from his home village of Kaninlai, therefore, gave the immediate order to the secretary general of the Gambia Civil Service, Mr. Tamsir Mbye, to retire me that day. Mr. Mbye was throughout aware of the developments of the problem and had assured me that, as far as he was concerned, the president had said nothing to him about reducing my salary, contradicting the colonel’s claim that the president ordered for it. Mr. Jallow, the permanent secretary at defense who authored the official letter of my new salary scale, also expressed the same sentiments, adding that it would be unheard of in the history of the Gambia Civil Service to do what Colonel Jatta wanted them to do. However, when the order was given by the president to write and retire me, they both acted without questioning the rationale behind it.

I do not know whether President Jammeh later learned about the truth. But at that moment, it was not necessarily important to me. I was out of the army, out of my house, and stripped of all powers and privileges; but I knew my troubles were not over yet, especially with the colonel. It was not easy to make sense out of what suddenly turned the colonel against me. But when I tried to, I merely arrived at the conclusion that the fellow was somewhat neurotic.

Before the coup, we had had our personal differences, but after I was released from detention by the armed forces government and reinstated back to the GNA, I had become a partner and confidante to Colonel Jatta. He was my senior, but he had treated me like his equal. Sometimes, he had even embarrassed me by his openness and friendliness to me despite being my superior. But it was the freedom he had allowed me to operate with that had really convinced me that the colonel was my greatest partner and boss.

I had also given him my total loyalty offering him my best advice when he had needed it, allowing him to take all the credit of even the work I had exclusively done on my own. Occasionally, however, hypocrites would make statements to the effect that if I had not been around him, the army would not be as successful as it was. But I had always denied that vehemently, making it clear to all that if it had not been his trust and confidence in me, my so-called special skills would never have been realized.

After Major Dennis Coker, his first right-hand man and deputy, quit the system and went to join his wife in the United States of America, the colonel had turned to me as his partner and most trusted deputy in his undertakings, whether it was an official matter or not. After work, we used to stay in the phone for hours in the night, basically mapping out strategies on how to manage the army better. We had discussed family matters, our wives, children, and even our parents.

The Gambia Armed Forces was after the coup divided into four major branches: the army, the navy, the national guards, and the state guards. Our major problem, however, was the state guard, a two-company size unit directly under the command of the president. President Jammeh had been ordering them into illegal activities of arresting, detaining, and torturing opposition party members; and that was giving the army, in general, a very bad name. Not too many people could differentiate soldiers under our command jurisdiction and those of the state guard because of the similarity of the uniforms and ranks both had carried.

However, whenever things went too bad, the colonel and I would never hesitate to go to President Jammeh and cautioned him against such bad operations. Most of the time, our intervention yielded positive results. I could state that in the three years that we had worked together, 1996 to 1999, the colonel and I had functioned in one voice and action, preventing the military from becoming the public’s enemy and had kept those under us as much professional as we could under the circumstances. Our teamwork was unique by all standards. With all the constraints involved, we were able to successfully prevent countercoup attempts or military-related troubles of serious significance. Apart from the mysterious death of the secretary of state for finance in June 1995 and the two insurgency-style attacks on two of our barracks in 1996 and 1997, the situation in the country was considerably stable and had gotten better within that time.

Almost all our peers in the precoup GNA officer corps were retired from the service, dismissed, or redeployed. Colonel Jatta and I were among the few who had so far survived the turbulence. Going by the seniority list of the officers’ nominal role, Major Christ Davis was, on day 1, arrested and briefly detained before being retired; Major Omar Faye was in the United States of America for a senior military officer course and had chosen not to return after the coup. He was granted political asylum by the American government. Major Lie Conteh was redeployed as chairman of (KMC), a district in the urban area; Major Malick Njie was detained for over a year before being retired; Captain Mamat Cham, detained and retired; Captain Momodou Sonko, detained and retired; Captain Benjamin Wilson, detained and retired; Captain James Johnson, detained and retired; and Captain Ndure Cham, detained and reinstated. Captain Lawrence Jarra was under training in the United States of America; he returned and continued to serve without problem. Other officers who were spared in the wave of arrests were Captain Dennis Coker, Captain Pa Modou Ann, Captain Momodou Bojang (commissioner), Captain Momodou Badjie (commissioner), Major Antouman Saho (mayor of Banjul), Captain Sam Gibba, and Captain M. F. K. Baldeh (commissioner). The Police Tactical Support Group (TSG) officers were also affected by the wave of arrests, detentions, retirements, and redeployments. It was the armed wing of the police force.

The remaining GNA officers were lieutenants and sublieutenants: Sheriff Gomez, Ebou Jallow, Alagie Kanteh, Alfa Kinteh, Yankuba Drammeh, Peter Singhateh, Masaneh Kinteh, Basiru Barrow, Mahmood Sarr, Assan Sarr, Fofana, Biram Saine, Modou Sowe, Momodou Dibba, Yankuba Touray, Lt. Pa Sanneh (in Liberia for peacekeeping), and the coup leaders, namely, Lt. Yaya Jammeh, Second Lt. Sana Sabally, Second Lt. Edward Singhateh, and Second Lt. Sadibou Haidara.

Leaving the Nigerians out, the GNA’s entire officer corps, including the Gambia Marine Unit, was, before the coup, less than fifty commissioned men. The other ranks, NCOs and private soldiers, also were less than one thousand altogether. After the coup, however, the number of officers dropped about 50 percent. Anyway, close to an equal number of the lost ones were promoted from the NCOs’ ranks as rewards for their role in the planning and execution of the coup. In addition, the Police Tactical Support Group became amalgamated into the GNA swelling up the manpower to about 1,600 men. But the officers still were not more than the usual fifty in number. But considering the size of the country, known to be the smallest in Africa with a population of less two million inhabitants and a land mass of about eleven thousand square kilometers, the army strength was proportionally reasonable for her security needs. The background of the TSG that was at first called the Gambia National Gendarmerie (GNG) will be discussed in subsequent chapters.

It is important to mention that Second Lt. Peter Singhateh was Second Lt. Edward Singhateh’s sibling. They shared the same British mother and Gambian father and had joined the army together on the same day. However, Peter was also in the United States of America on training when the coup took place.

Like most of the officers, neither Colonel Jatta nor I were part of the planning or execution of the takeover. He was one person who was always loyal to authority and would have never endorsed any conspiracy to overthrow any government even if his life had depended on it. I believe most GNA officers were just like him. It was a matter of a few radicals, junior officers for that matter—who exploited a sudden security blunder committed by the PPP government and boldly taking charge with success. The majority of the soldiers who took part in the operation that morning of July 22, 1994, did not even understand what the operation was all about.

Captain Momodou Sonko—the commander of B Company, the second unit used by the coup organizers—was forced to join the operation from start to finish. Then they arrested and threw him in jail before being released and retired. He left the country within a week or two and lived in the United States of America on political asylum.

Before the coup, Colonel Jatta was a major at the army headquarters under the Nigerian administration and quartermaster department. He was very unpopular among the junior officers because of his uncompromising attitude toward undisciplined soldiers or officers below his rank. He would charge and punish them whenever they fell out of line. However, on the day of the coup, he had run into Second Lieutenant Singhateh that afternoon who warned him to brace up for the consequences of being the bully he was at the army headquarters (HQ). The major, they said, hastily crossed the border to Cassamance, southern Senegal, where he had stayed until the situation was safe before returning. He had strongly denied that later calling it slanderous.

Wherever he was, by the time he surfaced from there, Captain Momodou Badjie was already appointed the first army commander by the new government. The colonel, who was still a major, was asked by Jammeh to go and work under Captain Badjie. But after a month or two at the HQ, he reported Badjie to the ruling council over his mismanagement of the feeding funds of the army. When Badjie was invited to the defense department to account for the money he was spending in the army, he could not. He was, as a result, ordered to handover the command to Jatta that same day.

He had wept like a baby, Jatta would later tell me about that incident. Badjie was later redeployed to the rural area as commissioner after which Jatta took complete control of the command. After the transition to civilian rule with Jammeh contesting the 1996 elections and winning it, Major Badjie was brought back to the army as a senior staff officer.

Some blamed Colonel Jatta for undermining Badjie’s position just