Dear Dr Loum,
On 12 January 2026, the Reparations Commission announced, with great ceremony, that it was reaching out to victims of the Jammeh regime. On that same day, acting in good faith and in the spirit of national healing, I wrote to you to present my case as a victim of unlawful detention between 1994 and 1995.
Today is 26 January 2026, and my letter has ostensibly vanished into bureaucratic darkness.
No acknowledgement, no reply, and no courtesy of even a receipt.
To me, this looks like a silent administrative discrimination. It tells me that while some victims are embraced, others are quietly erased, not by truth, but by indifference.
I therefore write this open petition not as a supplicant for money but as a man refusing to be buried under an institutional lie.
I was unlawfully arrested and detained at Mile Two Central Prison from 27 July 1994 to 15 May 1995, together with officers who are today publicly recognized as victims of that same injustice, including the current Chief of Defense Staff, General Mamat Cham, Major Malick Njie, and the current National Security Adviser, Mr. Aboubacarr Jeng. We were all shackled by the same arbitrary hand.
Yet history has been edited when their chains are remembered and mine deleted.
Worse still, I was denied the right to testify before the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission despite formally requesting to do so. This denial was publicly confirmed by Dr. Baba Galleh Jallow, former Secretary General of the TRRC. But the Commission then proceeded to write judgment against me without hearing me. In my book, that was a tribunal without a defendant and a verdict without a trial.
The government itself later threw out those findings in its White Paper precisely because I had been condemned without due process. That White Paper utterly exonerated me.
However, exonerated by the government, I am now condemned by silence.
The moral absurdity of this situation is best illustrated by the case of Balo Kanteh, a mercenary of Charles Taylor who took part in the 1996 Farafenni Barracks attack in which six Gambian soldiers were slaughtered in cold blood. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment and later pardoned by former President Yahya Jammeh, he walked into the TRRC not as a killer but as a “victim,” claiming torture for denying his participation in the attack.
He was reportedly rewarded with public money. Compensating Balo Kanteh is both an administrative blunder and a moral catastrophe. It amounts to the glorification of a remorseless killer and a shameful betrayal of the very men who once wore the nation’s uniform with honor. It is a cruel insult to the memory and sacrifice of late Staff Sergeant Lamin Badjie, Corporal Saihou Sidibeh, Corporal Essa Keita, Private Ebrima Manneh, Private Bakary Saidy, and Private Ebrima Bojang, soldiers whose lives were extinguished in cold blood by the same fellow now being rewarded. May their souls continue to rest in peace.
Later, the government itself stripped away that disguise and declared him what he truly was, a mercenary and a murderer who deserved punishment.
This leads to a question that no amount of administrative silence can bury:
By what twisted moral calculus does a convicted killer qualify for reparations while a lawfully exonerated officer is treated as radioactive?
Equally scandalous is the secrecy surrounding the early release of D50 million to the Victims’ Centre before the TRRC had even finished identifying victims and perpetrators. To this day, Gambians are kept in the dark about who shared that money, how much each pocketed, who decided their eligibility, and what lawful authority justified paying people while the truth was still under investigation.
When Jammeh’s seized assets were sold under questionable circumstances, the nation erupted, and a commission of inquiry was hurriedly assembled. But when millions were quietly distributed in the name of “victims,” the nation is instructed to be silent.
Why is secrecy a crime in asset sales but a virtue in reparations?
I therefore demand answers, not as a favor but as a right. I want to know why my petition of 12 January 2026 was not even acknowledged? On what legal or moral basis am I excluded from reparations despite unlawful detention and government exoneration? Who draws the line between victim and villain? And has silence now replaced justice as official policy?
Mind you, I am not pursuing reparations for money but to scrape off a stain painted on my name without trial, without truth, and without conscience. I will not reconcile myself to a lie.
Reparations without fairness become bribery.
Reconciliation without truth becomes theatre.
Silence, when weaponized against the innocent, becomes another form of punishment.
The Reparations Commission was created to heal wounds, not to reopen them with neglect and selective memory.
I trust that this matter will now be treated with the gravity it deserves, not with silence, but with an answer.
Yours faithfully,
Lt Colonel Samsudeen Sarr (Rtd.)
Kotu, KMC
