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 The Gambia portal |
The Gambia followed a formal policy of non-alignment throughout most of former President Dawda Jawara's tenure. It maintained close relations with the United Kingdom, Senegal, and other African countries. The July 1994 coup strained The Gambia's relationship with Western powers, particularly the United States. Starting in 1995, President Yahya Jammeh established diplomatic relations with several additional countries, including Libya, the Republic of China (on Taiwan, before 2013), and Cuba. As scholars on Gambia's foreign policy have argued, throughout Jammeh's period, the country's foreign policy was a shifting sand, with little of direction.
Amat Jeng, a scholar on Gambia's foreign policy, argues that "The Gambia under Jammeh was not constrained by the bureaucratic hurly-burly which characterizes the foreign policy terrain of big democracies. In The Gambia, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) had, on several occasions, been left in a vacuum, thereby placing it under the Office of the President. Between 1997 and 2013, the MFA had been occupied by more than 18 different ministers in more than 20 sworn-in occasions. This qualifies the argument that Jammeh had always had the power to fire ministers at will. In North Korea, the MFA has been occupied only by ten different foreign ministers since 1948."[1]
During his last years, the EU grew increasingly intolerant of Jammeh's iron-fist rule. Consequently, Brussels withheld millions of Euros to The Gambia. Jammeh fired back by expelling the EU's top diplomat in the country after he had accused the bloc and human rights activists of conniving to besmirch the image of his government for its stance on homosexuality.[2]
- ^ Jeng, Amat Tidjaann. "Gambia's Foreign Policy: The Gradual Shift Toward China and the Gulf".
- ^ Jeng, Amat. "Gambia's Foreign Policy: The Gradual Shift Toward China and the Gulf".