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Column: Gambia's president endangers all of Africa
It would be easy to dismiss the recent presidential election in Gambia, a sliver of a nation on Africa's west coast, as a matter of little concern to the United States. But if we've learned any lesson from ignoring megalomaniac leaders of corrupt states, it is that their mischief has a good chance of eventually affecting America's national interest.
DeWayne Wickham USATODAY columnist
More than the slapstick leader of the smallest country on the African mainland, Jammeh is a serious mischief maker. He is accused of condoning the shipment of Iranian weapons through Gambia to rebels in the Casamance region of neighboring Senegal. Crates of these weapons, marked as construction materials, were seized at a port in Nigeria last year.
Pressured to explain this discovery, the Iranian government has said that the weapons were products of a military assistance agreement it struck with Gambia — a deal that violated United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jammeh denied any knowledge of the weapons shipment, but such talk rings hollow with a leading American advocate for Africa.
Foote, who was in Gambia last year on a State Department-sponsored trip to West Africa to help nurture democratic values among the area's emerging young leaders, told me that there's a lot of grumbling about Jammeh in the region — but so far, no action. That's too bad.
While the U.S. has an interest in seeing to it that Jammeh doesn't undermine Senegal or other neighboring states in West Africa and create a base of operation there for Iran's adventurism, the Gambian president is a problem Africans must be encouraged to solve themselves.
They have to police their continent or run the risk of it becoming, as Africa did during the Cold War, a bloody surrogate for the fights of others.
DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.
