Gambiaj.com – (BANJUL, The Gambia) – Retired Lieutenant Colonel Samsudeen Sarr has accused The Gambia’s Reparations Commission of excluding him from the reparations process, describing the framework as opaque, misleading and morally incoherent.
In an open letter addressed to the Chairperson of the Reparations Commission, Dr. Badara Loum, Sarr said he was responding to remarks made by the Commission during a discussion on Coffee Time with Peter Gomez concerning a petition he submitted over his alleged exclusion.
Sarr disputed the Commission’s claim that he was formally notified of its position. He said he never received the Commission’s letter dated 15 January 2026, noting that a search of both his inbox and spam folder yielded no such correspondence.
According to him, he only became aware of the letter on 27 January after personally calling the Commission and speaking with the Deputy Executive Secretary, Ms. Ngenarr Yassin Jeng, who resent the response to him.
“Had that response reached me in time, there would have been no open petition and no public debate,” Sarr said.
He also accused the Commission of issuing a misleading press release on 12 January 2026 by omission. The statement announced the commencement of reparations for “victims of human rights violations committed between July 1994 and January 2017” and called on the public to assist victims with registration and verification.
Sarr argued that the statement failed to clarify that reparations were limited exclusively to victims identified by the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), a condition he said only emerged in the Commission’s later response to him.
“This silence reasonably led many victims, myself included, to believe that all victims stood to benefit,” he said.
Beyond eligibility, Sarr said his most serious concern, transparency, remains unaddressed. He questioned why the list of TRRC-identified victims is being kept confidential despite the reparations programme being funded with public resources.
According to him, shielding beneficiaries from public scrutiny forces Gambians to place blind trust in the process, a situation he warned could encourage arbitrariness and abuse. He argued that reparations must not only be lawful but “visibly just,” adding that secrecy undermines public confidence and fuels suspicion.
Sarr further raised concerns about the possibility that individuals identified as perpetrators may be benefiting from reparations.
He cited ‘Mballow Kanteh’, whom he described as a mercenary involved in the killing of six Gambia National Army soldiers in 1996, and questioned how such a person could be treated as a victim solely on the basis of being listed by the TRRC, despite the Government White Paper identifying him as a perpetrator who should face justice.
“A system that crowns killers with the title of victims while excluding genuine political detainees such as myself is both morally perverse and legally incoherent,” Sarr said.
While acknowledging the Commission’s statutory mandate to prioritise TRRC-identified victims, Sarr argued that legality should not be conflated with justice.
He said the TRRC denied him the opportunity to testify as a victim, a fact he noted was publicly confirmed by its former Secretary General, yet relied on what he described as untested allegations to implicate him in its final report.
He added that those findings were later rejected by the Government for lack of due process.
Sarr said he has since been advised on the procedure for registering as a new victim and intends to comply. However, he maintained that he reserves the right to challenge a reparations framework he believes sacrifices transparency and moral logic for administrative convenience.
“Reparations are meant to heal wounds, restore dignity, and rebuild trust,” he said, warning that the process should not reward perpetrators in silence while excluding victims in secrecy.
