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A newspaper in the western Africa nation of Gambia claimed the President of Gambia had received awards from the White House. Turns out Yahya Jammeh did not. Anchor Marco Werman gets details from Frank Smyth, Washington representive for the Committee to Protect Journalists, the group that investigated the claims.

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MARCO WERMAN: Now to Gambia. It’s the smallest country on the African mainland. But its president, Yahya Jammeh, has a very big ego. Recently, a Gambian newspaper reported that Jammeh had won several distinguished awards. Two were said to have been conferred by none other than the President of the United States. Another was described as an “admiralship” from the state of Nebraska. The landlocked state of Nebraska. The Committee to Protect Journalists regularly checks in on what the press reports in Gambia. The committee says President Jammeh’s government is responsible for the brutal repression of journalists there. When the report on the president’s awards surfaced, the CPJ decided to look into it. Frank Smyth got on the case.

FRANK SMYTH:  My initial reaction was, why in the world did the White House give this African dictator these awards? I couldn’t – I was shocked but it was finally the White House National Security Press Office that gave me a comment on the record. In essence, the awards from Obama do not exist at all and President Obama, nor anyone else in the White House, did not provide them or give them to President Jammeh. President Jammeh is trying to suggest, it seems here, that he’s being recognized by the international community for his service to the Gambian community and nothing could be further from the truth. So this is his attempt at both boosting his ego and trying to put a veneer over his extremely brutal regime.

WERMAN:  Tell us who President Yahya Jammeh is. I mean he’s been labeled an eccentric military buffoon by the Free Africa Foundation. Encapsulate this man for us.

SMYTH: I mean he’s one of the sort of oddest leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa we’ve seen in some time. Not only are journalists, or anyone who’s remotely associated with any possible opposition activities in the Gambia severely threatened, and have documented cases of torture and imprisonment, even Gambian diplomats have gone into hiding and been threatened for appearing to fall out, or somehow contradicting, President Jammeh. We know of cases where a diplomat even for speaking to a member of Congress or a staff member of Congress, could then get recalled to the nation and be fearful that they could end up being in prison or their family members could be in prison and tortured for their alleged activity. So this is a very eccentric and at the same time extremely brutal West African dictator.

WERMAN: How do you think this all happened? I mean did President Jammeh kind of pull the big encyclopedia of international awards of his bookshelf and say, what can I award myself this year?

SMYTH: He seems to have a relationship with this Sicilian-based organization called the International Parliament for Safety and Peace, which was founded in 1975 by a Cypriot Orthodox Church cleric. And this is an organization that according to The Times of London will give out honorific titles to individuals if they pay a certain fee. So it’s an organization, this International Parliament, that’s highly dubious. It’s worth noting that in the Gambian official statehouse website, you say President Jammeh receiving all of these awards from an unidentified official who’s stated as being from the International Parliament for Safety and Peace. So the whole thing is very, very odd.

WERMAN: Now even stranger is the admiralship we mentioned earlier that President Yahya Jammeh claims he was awarded from the State of Nebraska. Since when does Nebraska have a navy?

SMYTH: That’s right, the admiralship, in fact the only one that is actually real, the governor of Nebraska, the governor’s office, processes thousands of requests for admiralships each year. It’s sort of a tongue in cheek award that has some significance in Nebraska and the certificate on the award itself says things like, “we order all seamen, tadpoles and goldfish” and that’s a direct quote “to obey orders under your command now that you are an admiral.” So clearly it’s not a serious award, it’s an award designed only for people that have done something to further the interests of Nebraskans. And the governor’s office I think was somewhat embarrassed that President Jammeh is touting this award as having come from the governor and the governor’s office made clear that he may have received the award, but the governor certainly did not bestow it upon him.

WERMAN: Okay, anchors aweigh. Frank Smyth with the Committee to Protect Journalists. Thank you so much.

SMYTH: My pleasure, Marco.

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