Gambia's President To Homosexuals: 'If you do it here, I will slit your throat'

By R. Siva Kumar - 14 May '15 08:02AM

For LGBTs, the tiny African nation of Gambia is not safe, as President Yahya Jammeh threatens to kill anyone who is homosexual, according to rt.

"If you do it [in The Gambia] I will slit your throat," President Yahya Jammeh declared in Wolof language, cited by VICE News. "If you are a man and want to marry another man in this country and we catch you, no one will ever set eyes on you again, and no white person can do anything about it."

He was on a farm tour of his country, and spoke in the town of Farafeni.

In December, 2014, the European Union had stopped €13 million aid for The Gambia due to its lousy human rights record. As 95 percent of Gambia's population is Muslim, it gets aid from the Middle-East, according to VICE.

After last November, Jammeh signed a law on "aggravated homosexualism", announcing life imprisonment for gays who repeat the "offence", are HIV-positive or sick with AIDS. Earlier too, homosexuality had been outlawed, and gays could be imprisoned for 14 years.

Jammeh had never spared homosexuals. He addressed them as "vermin" and "like malaria-causing mosquitoes" earlier this year. In 2008, he told them to flee Gambia, if they did not want their heads to be "chopped off".

In 2013, he said that he had never seen a "homosexual chicken, or turkey". "Homosexuality is anti-god, anti-human, and anti-civilization. Homosexuals are not welcome in the Gambia. If we catch you, you will regret why you are born. I have buffaloes from South Africa and Brazil and they never date each other. We are ready to eat grass but we will not compromise on this," he said in Parliament, according to ibtimes.

He had assumed power after a 1996 coup, and managed to come through an attempt last December 2014 to overthrow him. US citizens had tried "to restore democracy to the Gambia and to improve the lives of its people," according to the US Department of Justice.

Jammeh has also made some other interesting statements, blaming sorcerers for his aunt's 1999 death and claiming in 2007 that he could cure HIV/AIDS with herbs.