Gambia abuses create unease ahead of Africa summit

DAKAR, June 25 (Reuters) A leading journalist is shot dead, a newspaper is shut down and close to a dozen people are rounded up over links to an opposition Web site and all this in Gambia, home to Africa's human rights commission.

Small wonder the decision to hold this week's African Union summit in Gambia has caused unease among media and human rights campaigners who say it gives the tiny tourism-dependent West African country undeserved prestige as its abuses worsen.

''Gambia's brutal and arbitrary repression of the media is shameful,'' said Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this month.

''We urge the African Union to denounce the ongoing abuses in the Gambia and consider moving the summit elsewhere.'' The AU did not do so, and media and human rights watchdogs now hope to use the July 1-2 summit to spread their message.

Journalists have worked in increasingly difficult conditions since President Yahya Jammeh seized power in a 1994 coup.

But a watershed was crossed on the night of Dec. 16, 2004, when prominent local journalist Deyda Hydara was shot dead.

An official investigation into his death has still produced no result. Paris press rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders, for whom Hydara was the Gambia representative, says he had been threatened by Gambia's National Intelligence Agency and was under its surveillance minutes before his death.

WASHINGTON SLASHES AID IN PROTEST Several waves of detentions of journalists have followed.

The Independent newspaper was closed down last March and in May nearly a dozen journalists and others were detained over suspected links with an outspoken online newspaper run by a Gambian in the United States.

Media crackdowns have mirrored rising political tensions.

Two opposition leaders were charged with sedition last year in what Jammeh's critics said was a bid to weaken any alliance against him in elections in September. The charges were dropped after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo intervened.

But in March the government foiled what it said was a coup plot and 15 people, both security service members and civilians, are now on trial, eight of them charged with treason.

Washington suspended Gambia from its Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) aid fund on June 16 in protest at ''human rights abuses and increased restrictions on political rights, civil liberties, and press freedom by the government, as well as worsening economic policies and anti-corruption efforts''.

Human rights activists see as ironic the fact that the AU summit may consider a draft African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance aiming to underpin democracy and human rights on the continent.

One campaigner said however the scale of abuses in Gambia paled by comparison with some parts of Africa.

''It's just not on a par with Libya or the Sudan,'' said the campaigner, who declined to be identified.

REUTERS SY PC1616