Africa-Press – Gambia. Latest information has revealed that a Swiss NGO is set to charge the former president Yahya AJJ Jammeh to court for environmental crime for Rosewood trafficking between Senegal and Gambia: According a story published on Seneweb over the weekend states that “the case dates back to June 2019. The Swiss NGO Trial International sends a criminal report to the Public Prosecutor of the Confederation (MPC). In the line of fire: a Swiss businessman, Nicolae Bogdan Buzaianu, then domiciled in the canton of Fribourg, is suspected of having illegally felled, between 2014 and 2017, thousands of tons of rosewood in The Gambia and especially in the Senegal, in Casamance. This traffic would have been organized with the complicity of former Gambian President Yaya Jammeh, overthrown in 2017. Rosewood, a protected species, was exported via the Westwood Company from the port of Banjul, Gambia, to be marketed in China, where it is transformed into furniture and luxury items. Swiss justice took its time before taking up the complaint. Following a press release from Trial International, the MPC simply replied in March 2020 that it was studying the file well…
Finally, it was Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) which revealed in June 2022 that the Confederation had ended up sending a request for international legal assistance to the Gambian Ministry of Justice, on the occasion of a documentary entitled Trafic de timber, environmental criminals. Fund a separatist organization This case goes beyond The Gambia. This small territory of 11,300 km2 has practically no rosewood left. From now on, traffickers will use Casamance, a region in southern Senegal. They do so all the more easily since Casamance has been plagued by armed conflict for decades. This illegal trade in precious wood would also fund a separatist organization, the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC). However, according to Trial International, “the illegal exploitation of natural resources in conflict zones can thus be considered as an act of pillage, which is a war crime under international law and Swiss law”.
For its part, the RTS did not hesitate in its documentary to speak of “criminals of the environment”. On her site, she hopes that Switzerland “could be the first to deliver justice and break the impunity and silence surrounding environmental crimes committed abroad”. Indeed, the scandal is not limited to the millions of dollars that were illegally put in the pockets of a Swiss businessman and a former African dictator, who will probably never be imprisoned. The deforestation of The Gambia and Casamance (we are talking about two million trees felled over the past fifteen years) has above all caused dramatic climate change with a drop in rainfall and an increase in desertification. An impoverishment of local populations which also risks fueling the causes of conflict.
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