Veteran politician Omar Jallow (OJ) believes former President Jammeh shouldn’t be glorified in the wake of overwhelming accusations of tortures and killings surfacing recently.
Jammeh’s 22-year reign in the country has been muddied with right violations from 1994 when he and fellow lieutenants toppled Jawara’s 30-year tenure.
Victims of the now exiled former military man have been telling of woeful tales some of it of brutal killings, part of a healing process via a truth commission dubbed TRRC.
And on backdrop of this, OJ -apprehended 19 times on the orders of Jammeh – urged APRC supporters, the party formed by Jammeh, to desist from extolling the former statesman.
“I’m appealing to us politicians to help the TRRC -let us not politise what is happening at the TRRC. The victims are there and are seeing people glorifying the perpetrators who inflicted these things on them,” the erstwhile minister of Agriculture under the first public said, during his reconciliation with a soldier who mutilated his eye during his torture while in detention some two decades ago.
Suggesting adversely mentioned perpetrators show remorse to help TRRC’s bid to heal the nation of wounds of the past, OJ said: “They are not helping the TRRC. I will appeal to my friends at the APRC. Yaya Jammeh is history. Sir Dawda has become history and we will all go. But lets us not try to glorify a person who has killed, tortured and murdered.
“Let them (perpetrators) apologise to people. Let them show remorse and appeal for forgiveness. But do not glorify them when they have victims because then you’re trying to undermine. Let us be responsible and help the TRRC for reconciliation.”
