Fatou A. Jallow was interviewed and named as part of the Human Rights Watch report on former Gambian president Yahya Jammeh’s sexual assault of young womenI had just won Gambia’s national beauty pageant and Yahya Jammeh immediately began to court me, lavishing me and my family with gifts. He had running water installed at my family’s house, gave us expensive furniture, and offered me a job as a “protocol girl” in the State House, which I turned down. He even offered to marry me. But I refused.
Today, it is Mr. Jammeh who is in exile, in Equatorial Guinea, and I am returning to Gambia to speak out. What Yahya Jammeh did to me was a crime. I know that many other women were abused by the dictator, who had set up a system to lure women to visit him or work for him in the presidential palace. Mr. Jammeh behaved as if the women of Gambia were his property. Well, we are not, and we never were.
Growing up, I saw young girls chastised for getting pregnant, but no one questioned how it happened. I remember seeing girls tremble at the sight of an uncle and do anything to avoid taking food into his room. They were in a horrific situation they had no name for. The TRRC will also hold hearings on sexual violence. I expect to testify before the TRRC, and I hope that other women will feel able to come forward, in closed session or in public, to tell their stories. I want them to be able to speak their truth, and take any shame they might feel, and put that shame where it belongs: on the rapists.The Commission has Gambians glued to their televisions and radios as former Jammeh accomplices accuse him directly of ordering murders and other crimes.
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