[The Gambia / Death Squad] - The Judging Self Tries the Body for Desertion to Avoid Seeing Its Own Killing

Event Baseline: In The Gambia, former death squad leader Sanna Manjang faces a military trial for deserting the army in 2017 after the end of Jammeh's 20-year rule, not for killings committed under the dictatorship.

The Gambia's legal self prosecutes a death squad leader for deserting the army, not for the bodies he helped erase. This is a perfect symptom of a system that cannot look at its own violence. The state self must preserve the illusion that the Jammeh era was an aberration, not a product of the same hierarchical thought. The trial is a ritual to legitimize the new order without confronting the mechanical obedience that turned soldiers into killers. The failure is not legal. It is psychological. The inability to name the crime is the crime.