Ferry prices down but border tension still high

Gambia has announced plans to cut rates on ferry crossings to and from Senegal, a possible first step in healing a widening rift between two culturally-similar yet fractious neighbours left to deal with a difficult border legacy. As a gesture of goodwill marking the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the government-owned Gambia Ports Authority (GPA) said this week that it would partially reverse a fare increase that outraged Senegalese transportation workers, already battered by high worldwide oil prices. Tiny English-speaking Gambia, a mere 35 km wide by 300 km long, is wedged inside far bigger French-speaking Senegal, prompting a West African historian to describe it as "a banana crammed down the throat" of Senegal. It effectively cuts off northern Senegal, including the capital Dakar, from the lush Casamance region in the south. This means the quickest route from north to south or vice-versa is across the Gambia River ferry. But the proposed 15 percent reduction in the price of the Gambian ferry crossing, set to come into effect next week, is unlikely to settle the dispute sparked by August's 100 percent hike. "This announcement doesn't change anything," the Senegalese National Union of Road Transport's Alioune Soum told IRIN. "We're sticking to our guns." Following the GPA's surprise August decision, angry Senegalese truck drivers refused to pay, opting instead to make the long detour on bad and currently often flooded roads around Gambia. And to show their displeasure and disrupt trans-border traffic, they have maintained blockades at the main border crossings ever since. ECOWAS steps in The outcome has been a new diplomatic row between the two countries, one serious enough to prompt the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to appoint Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as mediator last week. According to unionist Soum, such high-level discussions are the only way out of the impasse. "It's an international problem so it will have to be settled at the diplomatic level," he said. "For now, the blockades will remain and we'll continue to go around Gambia." This week's GPA press release made no outright reference to Senegal and its disgruntled drivers however, referring more obliquely to "foreign vehicles paying in CFA francs", the currency used in Senegal as well as a number of other West African nations. "This move is a purely Gambian thing," a senior manager at the GPA told IRIN, stressing that the decision was not the result of outside pressure. All bravado aside, Gambia's economy depends heavily on re-export trade, and since the blockade reports of shortages in Gambia's markets abound. As for Senegal, it may be feeling less of an economic pinch but the dispute has left the country virtually split in two. For the southern region of Casamance, scene of two decades of separatist violence before last December's peace accord, isolation is a perennial problem but has been particularly acute this year. In addition to the reduced flow of vehicles due to the dispute with Gambia, unusually heavy seasonal rains left many roads flooded. To compound the problem, the sea link between Dakar and the regional capital of Ziguinchor has been down since the lone passenger ship plying the route sank in 2002, killing nearly 2,000 people. Senegal's president wants to dig a tunnel under Gambia Speaking last month at a ceremony marking the third anniversary of the sinking of the Joola, which claimed more lives than the loss of the Titanic, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade called for a lasting solution to the recurring border dispute. Protests and blockades also occurred in July 2002. "The Senegalese government has made an irreversible decision to circumvent Gambia," he said in Ziguinchor. "We plan to build a road and railroad around it." He even suggested building a tunnel under the Gambia to link Senegal's north and south, saying that the Chinese had indicated a willingness to undertake the project. But the funds are not available. Senegal's foreign ministry has declined comment on Gambia's latest move, waiting instead for ECOWAS to go ahead as promised with a plan to organise talks between Senegal’s prime minister and the Gambian vice-president. But on Monday, before Gambia’s ferry operators brought down the price of tickets, Senegal’s Foreign Minister Cheikh Tidiane Gadio said he understood the frustration of transportation workers over the August price hike, which he described as a unilateral decision taken without warning. "We can't go down there, playing policeman, and say to drivers 'No, in the interest of good relations between our two countries, go pay the 100 percent increase,'" he said. "We're not going to do that." Far from discouraging this resistance, in fact, the government is providing fuel subsidies to drivers making the detour to Casamance. Gadio stressed the point that the two countries, which he said consisted of a single people separated by colonial history, were not in conflict but he made no attempt to hide the seriousness of their differences. “The two heads of state simply can’t sit at the same table right now,” he said at a press conference. "The issue of the ferry is just one symptom of a much bigger problem which is there permanently." Gadio said Senegalese citizens traveling through Gambia were sometimes mistreated and forced to pay bribes while Gambian authorities had refused to hand over wanted criminals as well as closing their eyes to separatists crossing the border. The two mainly Muslim countries for a time in the 1980s came together to form the Senegambian Confederation. "Given their geographic, ethnic and religious make-up, these two countries should get along perfectly, but often they don't," said Saliou Fall, who heads a transport workers' union, the SATS. "It's a situation that doesn't make any sense."