This series on state repression and police brutality in Senegal arrives as the nation transitions to a new presidency. It documents the case of state violence that would be investigated if the Amnesty Bill adopted in the last month of the Macky Sall regime was reconsidered. La Maison des Reporters investigated and documented cases of torture, killings, and unlawful arrests suffered by political opponents and ordinary citizens in major Senegalese cities like Dakar and Ziguinchor, providing clear evidence to the public of the abuses under the Macky Sall regime. ROAPE shares two pieces by journalist Moussa Ngom, which are introduced by Senegalese Scholar-activist Rama Salla Dieng and contextualised by historian-activist Florian Bobin.
Introduction
By Rama Salla Dieng
On the day after the election of a new president in Senegal, I am very emotional yet filled with a sense of duty to write an introduction to this series on State Brutality and Police Repression from La Maison des Reporters of Senegal. As Senegalese citizens celebrate (at last) to see their democracy at work after many years of repression, human rights violations and protests under President Macky Sall, lest we forget about the survivors and the victims of this violence and their families. On 6 March 2024, the outgoing president Macky Sall and his government proposed a fast-track Amnesty bill related to the deadly protests between March 2021 and February 2024, which was discussed and adopted by the Senegalese Parliament the same day. The Amnesty bill covers ‘all acts likely to be classified as criminal or disciplinary offences committed between 1 February 2021 and 25 February 2024, both in Senegal and abroad, relating to demonstrations or having political motivations’.
According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the enactment of the amnesty legislation by the Parliament represents a derogation from the state’s responsibility under international legal frameworks to ensure the provision of justice, truth, and reparations to the families of more than 60 individuals deceased in the course of demonstrations. Fifteen families who have instituted legal proceedings before the judiciary are awaiting resolution. For Amnesty International’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Samira Daoud: “This draft law would be a denial of justice for victims, as well as their families, who are waiting for justice, truth and reparations. By passing such a law, the Senegalese state would not only fail in its national and international obligations but also promote impunity for blood crimes”.
The Amnesty bill is comparable to the 2005 Ezzan Amnesty law, contested by the opposition and civil society. Article 1 of the Ezzan bill granted a ‘complete amnesty for all crimes committed in Senegal and abroad, relating to the general or local elections or committed with political motivations between 1 January 1983 and 31 December 2004, whether the authors have been judged or not.’ As for the law’s article 2, which was found unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court on 12 February 2005, it sought to grant a similar amnesty for all crimes committed in relation to the death of Babacar Sèye. Sèye, a judge and then Vice-President of the Constitutional Court, was assassinated on 15 May 1993, the day after the results of the legislative elections (won by the Senegalese Socialist Party-PS) results were announced.
Despite the case being still unresolved, three men, including Cledor Sene, were condemned in 1994 for murder and arrested. Both human rights organisations and the local civil society have indicated their suspicions of a political killing and pointed to the responsibility of activists in the Senegalese Democratic Party (PDS) then led by Abdoulaye Wade. Abdou Latif Coulibaly, an investigative journalist and former minister (who resigned during the February events), also suspected that Judge Sèye’s assassination was a contract killing and the liberation of Sene and his co-accused in 2002 by Wade, two years after he became president fuelled the suspicions on his involvement.
Considering this past and the fact that President Senghor introduced the first Amnesty law in Senegal to ‘pardon’ his former prime minister Mamadou Dia in 1976 and the 2005 Ezzan Amnesty bill introduced by Wade, the question must be asked: Is history repeating itself in 2024 with Macky Sall’s proposed Amnesty?
This mission is ever more vital as there has been recent evidence of the involvement of the EU-funded Rapid Action Surveillance and Intervention Group (also known as GAR-SI), violently crushing Senegalese protestors. Such evidence revives questions of accountability and justice on the one hand and sovereignty from former imperial powers on the other, within the struggle of Senegalese citizens rethinking their social contract with the ruling class.
As former investigative journalist Abdou Latif Coulibaly (and minister under Macky Sall) reminds us in his book Sénégal Affaire Me Sèye: Un Meurtre sur Commande: “The task of elucidation is part and parcel of mourning. A task that has not yet been fully evacuated, even though the nation has been wearing the costume for over a decade. This mourning process continues because one element is missing in the unfolding of history and time that will put a definitive end to it. That element is the identity of those who ordered the crime. No amnesty law will be able to add the missing link or links until history delivers the identity of those who plotted in the shadows against the life of Judge Babacar Seye.”
It is in this bloody history that this series on State brutality and Police Repression is rooted. This series comes as a gesture of healing-justice, and solidarity. Against Amnesty and amnesia, we (researchers, journalists and ordinary citizens) stand today in solidarity and sisterhood with the families of the victims and the survivors to situate the responsibilities for these acts of brutality and unlawful repression for which we seek justice and reparations for the victims.
No justice, no peace
Police repression in Senegal: documenting history today
By Florian Bobin
In recent years, the Senegalese people have become accustomed to images of demonstrations broken up by tear gas grenades, live ammunition fired by police forces and harrowing testimonies from former detainees describing the torture they were subjected to. If the security apparatus has been able to grow in this way, we need to look at the environment that has allowed it to do so.
Although Senegal has enjoyed an image as a “democratic exception” since independence, shaped early on by President Senghor and consolidated by the multi-party system introduced in the 1980s and the two government changeovers of 2000 and 2012, political repression remains a common thread running through these years of building an authoritarian state.
Since the early 1960s, the Senegalese authorities have pursued a dual strategy of strengthening the executive through institutional mechanisms and weakening the opposition through coercive practices. Those in power maintained their authority by muzzling obstacles to their policies, psychologically intimidating opponents, interning and conscripting striking students, using live ammunition against demonstrators, and physically torturing detainees. For example, a sulphurous French officer called André Castorel, who epitomised the continuity of the colonial police, oversaw endless torture sessions on dissidents of Senghor’s regime: waterboarding them; electrocuting their sensitive areas (genitals, ears, tongue); tearing their anuses with bottlenecks. Some, like Omar Blondin Diop, had their lives cut short.
Today, these police methods still structure the relationship between the Senegalese state and its opposition. Public demonstrations calling for better living conditions and against growing inequalities, political arbitrariness, and democratic restrictions are often violently dispersed. The tragic events of March 2021 (14 dead) and June 2023 (30 dead) were thus part of a long colonial tradition of “pacifying” dissent in the public space by force.
This repressive culture has been able to survive for so long because impunity is the norm of governance in autocratic states born out of the colonial rule. In such a context, the role of investigative journalism is crucial: it acts as a counterweight by documenting the abuses of a system whose brutality crushes lives. La Maison des Reporters has taken up this salutary challenge with its series of investigations into police violence in contemporary Senegal.
Episode 1: In Ziguinchor, the story of the tortured of 17 June 2022.
By Moussa Ngom
A day of protests was called by the Yewwi Askan Wi coalition, led by Ousmane Sonko. In Ziguinchor, the Hlm Néma district is ablaze, one month before the 2022 legislative elections, against the Constitutional Council’s invalidation of the national list of opposition candidates. This afternoon, Rodrigue Tendeng saw the crowd stampede towards him, but the sales agent, convinced he had nothing to fear, watched on. He suddenly became aware of the danger, however, when the gendarmes’ pick-up deliberately sped towards him. His attempt to escape is cut short.
The gendarme tackled me then I fell from a height into the gutter. He found me in there, then drowned me in the dirty water and called me a bad rebel. He kicked me everywhere he could: head, stomach, chest, all in the dirty water.
Rodrigue was then taken on board. Or almost. When he stumbles at the foot of the vehicle, the fury of the gendarmes descends on him. “The whole team came down and they kicked me up.” Lying under the seat of the pick-up, the 38-year-old was used, in his words, as a “footrest” by the gendarmes, and was subjected to a multitude of degrading insults.
He describes an ordeal lasting over four hours after his transfer from the pick-up to the gendarmerie van. “I was bleeding heavily from the head, but they wouldn’t let me wipe the blood off, and kept hitting the same spot. Sometimes, their superior would come and pretend to enquire about the situation, then played along. As soon as he came down, the torture continued, becoming more and more vile, sometimes with blows from the butts of their weapons – large sticks, I think, prepared for the occasion – and sometimes with gris-gris taken from the inmates.”
Among the improvised instruments of torture was a leather talisman violently torn from the waist of a certain Cheikh Sourat Youssouph Sagna, who spoke at length to us, La Maison Des Reporters:
“Cheikh Sourat is the one who suffered the worst torture among us, I was the third to enter the vehicle and I found him completely covered in blood”, says I. Thiam. “They asked me to offer them something to drink, then as I was bringing it to them, one of them grabbed me by the wrist.”
Gradually, other people, already in a bad shape, joined them as the arrests went on. “The heat was stifling inside, it was full, but they put us on top of each other, beating us endlessly”, recalls Sidy Pascal Dhiédhiou, arrested at the same time as his friend Tamsir. All were repeatedly beaten, even Georges Mendy, a student in Seconde at Lycée Djignabo. One of the gendarmes, wearing a balaclava, made a particular impression on the passengers in the armoured vehicle. “At one point, one of his colleagues said: ‘Kalach, hit less hard’, and that’s when I remembered his name”, said Mendy
Sidy Diédhiou adds: “When I asked him not to hit me in the chest because I had breathing problems, he said he would only hit there from now on [with a stick].”
At around 10pm, the uniformed men’s vehicle finally made its way to the Néma gendarmerie headquarters. On the spot, the companions in misfortune, exhausted by the long hours of violence, thought the violence was over, but were soon disillusioned. To “welcome” them, the company’s gendarmes formed a cynical hedge from the foot of the truck to their cell. “They had formed two lines on either side, and right up to the entrance, we received blows of all kinds”, explain the high-school student and Cheikh Sourat Sagna.
Their ordeal continued in appalling conditions. The detainees were crammed into two cramped cells, where not only the arrestees but also others from Bignona (another nearby city) were crammed together. With no space to lie down properly, Sidy suffocated and almost imagined himself dying: “During the night, I started banging on the door to get the guard to open, because I couldn’t breathe any more, there was so little ventilation.”
One by one, the detainees were removed from their cells. They all recount how they were forced to sign their statement without the possibility of contesting it. One of them was slapped when he complained that he couldn’t read French: “If you didn’t give them the exact answer that they wanted, they hit you with anything they could get their hands on,” recalls Georges Mendy.
Held in police custody over the weekend before being transferred to prison on Tuesday, the gendarmes’ victims went on trial a week later for “taking part in an unarmed gathering” and various other offences. Cheikh Sourat, carried to the courtroom in poor health, attended the hearing but appeared seated due to his state of health.
On June 28, after twelve long days in detention, the prosecutor, “unable to establish accountability for the facts”, requested the acquittal of Rodrigue and 28 of his co-defendants. Cheikh Sourat, on the other hand, received a one-month suspended sentence and a financial penalty that the former hotelier is still unable to digest. “I’m the one who was tortured and fined 50,000 FCFA [US$65], even though my condition after the abuse was obvious […] They destroyed my life and left me with lasting consequences that I still can’t measure,” he says, still bitter, two years later.
Episode 2: “Break his legs!” Pape Abdoulaye Touré and the leaked video that exposes the Senegalese gendarmes.
By Moussa Ngom
A confidential video consulted by La Maison Des Reporters confirms the acts of torture committed by gendarmes on activist Pape Abdoulaye Touré. It’s a chilling video, barely two minutes long. Pape Abdoulaye Touré appears in it, with a bloody nose and a red eye from a kick he received, surrounded in a room packed with uniformed gendarmes. Some of them are armed with truncheons. The photos immortalising his posture, handcuffed from behind, shoulder pressed against a decrepit wall, have been widely shared on the internet. These photos are, however, a pale copy of the violence conveyed by the film.
“Chef Sow, can I speak?” pleads Pape Abdoulaye Touré.
“Break his legs,” someone replies in the audience.
Behind Pape, another gendarme is shown about to pour the contents of a large bottle over him several times as the activist is questioned by his superior. The constable is holding a mixture of sand and water designed to make the blows more violent. But the liquid was used for more than just this purpose during the long torture session.
“They made me lie down, with my back on the ground, before pouring the water in my face, and I almost drowned,” testifies Pape Abdoulaye Touré.
On February 15, 2024, Toure who is a member of the organization “Sénégal, notre Priorité” [Senegal, our priority] was released in a wave of “decrispation” in the political arena (to paraphrase the terms used by President Macky Sall). Neither Toure’s double fractured on his right leg and left hand, nor his multiple bruises, nor the confidential video added to his file, were enough to free the activist, who had spent nine months behind bars.
“This is the last time you’ll ever speak”
On June 1, 2023, as Dakar became the theatre of protests following the sentencing of opposition figure Ousmane Sonko to two years of imprisonment for “corrupting the youth”, Pape Abdoulaye Touré returned late to his second home, where he lived with his friend. Not far from the alley leading to his home, the activist was talking on the phone with his “girlfriend”.
“It was around 11pm… He was telling me he was on his way home. It was calm so I could hear him,” she recalls.
It was only the following day that Aissatou (pseudonym) learned of Pape Abdoulaye’s arrest on social networks.
“I remember asking him if he or his team were involved in the ransacking at UCAD, and he told me no; and that it had been a while since he’d organised such things… Then I asked him: ‘so, where are you at this late hour? You’re still out on the street, aren’t you going home?’ He replied that he was well on his way, walking home, and even told me he’d call me back if he arrived early and I wasn’t asleep”, says Aissatou.
It was at this moment that her companion was intercepted by men in civilian clothes claiming to be politicians and members of the Senegalese government [more on this later].
“That’s the last time you’ll talk!” they threaten, before dragging Toure off to what he fears is another vehicle on which he would be put.
Luckily, the incident took place just a few dozen meters from the Leclerc gendarmes’ barracks at Liberté 6. Pape Abdoulaye Touré managed to call a nearby gendarme for help. It was the latter who led the three protagonists to the gendarmerie. At first, Touré couldn’t recognise this sort of “headquarters” of gendarmes as the latter were still in the process of stripping off their law-and-order equipment. Hell was awaiting Toure who thought he’d found an escape route from the violence of the “thugs”.
As he was carrying his personal telephone and that of the Forces Vives de la Nation (F24) movement, for which he manages communication matters, as well as a wallet containing his certificate of residence, he intended to present these items to the uniformed men as evidence that he lived on the spot to contest the thugs allegations.
On the leaked video, one of them, very audible in the narrow room, accuses Touré of having been caught “calling the crowd”, while the latter begs the gendarmes’ chief to check on his phone the nature of his last call, as well as his publications on social networks.
A few moments earlier, the interrogation turned sour when the famous “Chef Sow” discovered a photo of the opposition leader Ousmane Sonko that Toure uses as his phone’s wallpaper.
“I recognize you […] You’re one of Sonko’s boys”, he told him.
The violence that followed led him to be temporarily unable to work (for 90 days). “In 23 years at the bar, I’ve seen a lot of police violence, but Toure clearly escaped death,” exclaims his lawyer, Moussa Sarr.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really Senegalese”
After his release, Pape Abdoulaye Touré appeared fitter than in his old photos. Between the Pavillon Spécial of Le Dantec hospital, a medical prison unit and the Rebeuss prison, Toure, who spoke to La Maison Des Reporters on several occasions, spent his detention between care, despair and hunger strikes, more worried about his studies than the state of his health.
Under provisional release in another case dating from 2019, he was placed under a committal order on June 9, notably for “participation in an insurrectional movement”, three days before his first semester exam. He later missed the second one, despite his optimism and multiple sessions of course revision on his hospital bed. The prosecutor remains categorically opposed to any provisional release for the man who was arrested “at least ten times” between 2021 and 2023. As fate would have it, Pape Abdoulaye Touré did not pass his second year exams in 2020 after being arrested and “savagely assaulted” by police officers during his student days at Cheikh Anta Diop University. After that, he was tried and then released.
This is now a distant memory, because since 2021, the student pursuing his studies in a private education institution has been banned from all public university establishments for a period of five years on suspicion of ransacking a public restaurant.
“An exclusion without proof”, retorts the activist before adding: “I succeeded my A-Level in 2018, until now (2024) I’m running behind my Bachelor degree, can you believe that? All my classmates have validated the second year of their Masters in 2023.”
“That alone is enough to traumatize you” confides his doctor at the psychiatric hospital where he received psychological follow-up two months after the gendarmes’ abuse.
“Sometimes I ask myself this question: Am I really Senegalese?” concludes a disappointed Pape Abdoulaye Touré.
In both episodes attempts to question the spokesman of the national Gendarmerie have so far been unsuccessful. La Maison des Reporters have also addressed a correspondence to General Moussa Fall, High Commander of the National Gendarmerie and will update this article with any replies received.
Are you a witness or a victim of torture in Senegal? Or do you have information to share? Contact La Maison des Reporters on Whatsapp or Signal on +221 76 194 63 40 or by email: redaction@lamaisondesreporters.com
Rama Salla Dieng is a scholar activist and currently a lecturer at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Féminismes Africains: Une histoire Décoloniale (Présence Africaine, Paris, 2021), co-author of Gagner le Monde, Quelques Héritages Féministes (La Fabrique, Paris, 2023). She is also an editor of ROAPE.
Florian Bobin is an activist-researcher in history at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar. His research focuses on liberation struggles and state violence in Senegal.
Moussa Ngom is a Senegalese journalist and the Founder of la Maison des Reporters, Senegal’s first publicly-funded, independent media site which takes the side of the people
Feature Photograph: Police repressing protests in Senegal (Wikicommons)
