How World Leaders Enabled a Delusional Dictator's "AIDS Cure"
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 13, 2021: Courageous Gambians are forcing dozens to account for their roles in propping up a modern-day tyrant. Yet one group of powerful enablers still cowers in silence: the leaders of the so-called international community.
Over the course of nearly two and a half years, 392 witnesses testified before The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), which conducted public hearings into human rights violations committed under the presidency of former dictator Yahya Jammeh.
The TRRC hearings offered many shocking revelations about the malignancy of Jammeh’s 22-year rule. But the witnesses who described Jammeh’s HIV and AIDS “cure” programme to the TRRC elaborated on a story that was already well-known to the world. Jammeh never kept it a secret. On January 17, 2007—more than a decade before the TRRC was established—he announced before a group of foreign diplomats that he could cure HIV and AIDS. The idea for the “AIDS cure,” he said, came to him in a dream, CNN reported at the time. The announcement made headlines throughout the world.
The cameras of Al Jazeera, BBC, and Gambian state television were invited to document his bizarre and destructive “Presidential Alternative Treatment Programme.” Jammeh and his accomplices coerced Gambians living with HIV to reside in a state facility under the surveillance of armed guards. The victims were ordered to cease taking antiretroviral therapies and ingest a noxious concoction of herbs and spices. Jammeh himself slathered his herbal “remedies” on their partially nude bodies while chanting prayers. Patient autonomy and informed consent were ignored, with patients feeling they could not decline or question treatment procedures.
During the hearings, the TRRC named 31 individuals who died “either during the treatment programme or shortly after leaving it,” according to a TRRC statement. Our extensive work investigating Jammeh’s “AIDS cure” suggests that the number is likely much higher.
AIDS-Free World has assisted three survivors—Fatou Jatta, Ousman Sowe, and Lamin Ceesay—in filing a legal action against Jammeh in the High Court of The Gambia. The three seek financial damages for harm suffered and a declaration from the High Court that their human rights were violated. With our assistance, Jatta and Ceesay have also asked authorities in The Gambia to revoke the licenses of two medical doctors who worked with Jammeh to administer the “AIDS cure,” as both are still practicing medicine. AIDS-Free World is assisting the victims in partnership with the Gambian-based Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA).
We are engaged in these actions to highlight the unconscionable silence of the international community. Institutions and governments fell silent while people suffered and died. After one UN resident coordinator, Fadzai Gwaradzimba, challenged the efficacy of the “AIDS cure” in 2007, Jammeh had her ejected from the country. The UN compliantly sent a replacement. There is no evidence that Mr. Adamo Guindo, the new UN resident coordinator, uttered a word in protest of Jammeh’s actions. Nothing was heard from any of the other many UN officials in The Gambia, including personnel from WHO, WFP, UNICEF, UNFPA, and other entities.
The World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva welcomed representatives from The Gambia in 2008. In 2011, The Gambia was given the honor of sitting on the WHA General Committee. Jammeh addressed the UN General Assembly in New York in 2009, 2013, and 2014. African leaders did not step forward to criticize Jammeh’s “AIDS cure.” No protest was heard from the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The global health inequities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that the “international community” is dedicated above all to the benefit of the wealthiest countries at the expense of the poorest. So it was in this instance. What would happen if a leader of a Western nation coerced his or her citizens into a murderous “AIDS cure” programme? Would the response be silence? According to the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, The Gambia ranks 172 out of 189 countries and territories. Half of the population over 15 years of age is illiterate. In 29.9 percent of households, no adult has completed primary education.
Jammeh’s “AIDS cure” programme ran without hindrance from 2007 until 2016, when Jammeh lost a national election to real estate developer Adama Barrow. After initially contesting the results of the election, Jammeh fled to Equatorial Guinea in January 2017. Jammeh is reportedly living in a luxurious villa in the eastern part of the country.
President Barrow established the TRRC in December 2017 and the hearings began in January 2019. After he won reelection on December 4, 2021, President Barrow appeared before the press and declared that he was committed to following through on the TRRC recommendations.
“The TRRC is a very important project to me,” Barrow said at the postelection press conference. “It can be part of my legacy as president. … One thing we want to assure, there will be justice and reconciliation, reparation, it will all happen but we have to be patient.”
In all, ten survivors of Jammeh’s “AIDS cure” program braved stigma and discrimination to testify in public at the TRRC. “When I went for the ‘treatment’ and began to drink the ‘medicine,’ that’s when I realized I was getting weaker,” survivor Fatou Jatta steadfastly recounted during the televised hearings, detailing an experience she had shared with AIDS-Free World. “Many people thought I would die there.”
Astonishingly, one of the doctors who assisted Jammeh, Dr. Tamsir Mbowe, testified before the TRRC and claimed Jammeh’s “AIDS cure” worked. “The programme is true,” he said. “The treatment is true.”
At the close of the TRRC hearings in May 2021, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, tweeted that he concurred with the lead counsel of the TRRC, who said “justice must happen.” Several prominent legal experts in Africa—including the president of the Gambian Bar Association—strongly agree and favor the establishment of a hybrid court, which would allow justice to be carried out if not within, then near The Gambia.
On November 25, the TRRC delivered its final, 14,000-page report to President Adama Barrow. Neither the contents of the report nor its recommendations have yet been made public. But the chair of the TRRC said the report has “identified and recommended for prosecution those most responsible for gross human rights violations and abuses.”
According to the legislative act creating the TRRC, President Barrow has thirty days upon receipt of the report to submit a copy to the National Assembly, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and any “other regional and international institutions” he sees fit. He is also obligated to “make copies or summaries of it widely available to the public.” The thirty days are up on Christmas Day.
In six months, the government is required to issue a “white paper containing its proposed plan on the implementation of the recommendations” of the report, according to the language of the act.
The TRRC recommendations provide the government of The Gambia with the opportunity to bring a measure of justice to the survivors of Jammeh’s “AIDS cure.” It is AIDS-Free World’s hope that President Barrow’s verbal commitments translate into genuine action on behalf of all Jammeh’s victims. While they can never be sufficiently compensated for what they’ve endured, they deserve to have their suffering memorialized and the international community’s failure acknowledged. If the Gambian government declines to act, the international community must step up to prosecute those who perpetrated this atrocity. It’s the least that the world could do after its appalling indifference to the plight of the victims of the bogus “AIDS cure.”
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