President calls homosexuals "vermin"

On 18 February 2014, Gambia celebrated the forty-ninth anniversary of its independence from Britain. President Yahya Jammeh used his speech for an attack that caused horror around the world. Homosexuals were "vermin", he declared in the capital Banjul. They would be fought like the mosquitoes that cause malaria, if not more aggressively.

And that was not all. For him, the abbreviation LGBT stood only for leprosy, gonorrhoea, bacteria and tuberculosis, all things harmful to humanity. Gambia would reject foreign aid tied to rights for sexual minorities.

Jammeh had been in power since a military coup in 1994 and was notorious for such outbursts. A few months earlier, he had told the UN General Assembly that homosexuality was one of the greatest threats to humanity. The speech also came at a time when Uganda and Nigeria were drastically tightening their laws against queer people.

The criticism came quickly. The very next day, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he was "deeply concerned". All people must be able to live free from discrimination, including with regard to their sexual orientation. The international community should make clear that such statements were unacceptable.

Gambia was undeterred. That same year, parliament passed a law providing for life imprisonment for so-called "aggravated homosexuality". Even before that, same-sex acts carried up to fourteen years in prison.

The president's rule ended only after more than two decades. At the end of 2016, Jammeh was voted out, and a few weeks later he went into exile. For queer people in Gambia, however, the change of power brought no liberation. The criminal provisions remained in place.