[All Africa] The president had found a cure for AIDS. That was the news that reached Ousman Sowe, the head of a Gambia... The Gambia is actually surrounded by Senegal on all sides but its west coast. It has a population of about 1.7 million. The difference between the two is that in colonial days Senegal was ruled by La Belle France and The Gambia (so-called because there's only one of it, unlike Guinea, of which there are the Republic of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, New Guinea, the English coin in circulation between 1663 and 1813, and Guyana, which sounds like it should be another one) was ruled by Britain...
n AIDS support network, one day in 2007. He was overjoyed.
"We all went with the hope that we were going to take a drop of some wonderful medication and be cured," Sowe, 64, a tall man with greying hair, told the Thomson Rooters Foundation in an office outside Gambia's rundown seaside capital.
But he was not allowed to go home after showing up at the state house that day. Gambia's ex-president Yahya Jammeh forced him to drink herbal concoctions morning and night for seven months until he was declared cured - but in reality, near death.
Jammeh, whose 22-year rule over the tiny West African country was marked by accusations of human rights
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
abuses, fled into exile last year after losing an election.
Now survivors of Jammeh's bogus AIDS treatment are doing what once seemed impossible - speaking out about their suffering and pursuing justice against the man who endangered their lives.
An estimated 9,000 Gambians, most with HIV, passed through Jammeh's treatment programmes and were forced to give up conventional medicine in favour of his homemade cures, said AIDS-Free World, a U.S.-based charity working with survivors.
The fake AIDS treatment not only had grave health consequences for the patients, some of whom died, but hindered real HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in the country, UNAIDS said.
"There was sort of a blackout of information on HIV, because everything was related to the president's treatment," said the U.N. agency's country director Sirra Ndow.