I'm Bob Garfield with your regularly scheduled midweek OTM podcast.

The process called Truth and Reconciliation has played out in many places, but in many different forms.

The denazification of post-World War II Germany commenced an ongoing 74-year reckoning of the layers of culpability in German society, but was long

marked by shame and retribution. In South Africa, by contrast, through restorative justice. In Serbia,

the commission to confront Bosnian genocide was shut down shortly after it was chartered,

mired in the very identity politics that triggered

the brutal Balkan wars. And now there is Gambia, the tiny West African nation seeking to document

the corruption and atrocities under the 22-year rule of fugitive ex-president Yaya Jemma.

Culprits have testified one after another with gruesome accounts of political violence,

streamed live to transfix a nation on broadcast and especially social media.

Julie Turkowitz is a New York Times reporter working in West Africa, and she's been reporting

on the story. Julie, welcome to O'TM. Thanks. Thanks so much, Bob, for having me.

Yaya Jemma was a particularly brutal president of Gambia for 22 years before he was voted out of

all of us in 2016.

What was life like in Gambia under his rule?

He came to power in 1994 following a coup.

Before that, the country had really been seen as a model of democracy on the continent

at a time when many countries were living

under authoritarian rulers. So he came in and he really had a talent, I think, for obscuring the truth.

He at one point claimed to have invented a cure for AIDS and, in fact, took many people with HIV and asked them to

live on his compound and gave them a supposed cure a body rub and a banana.

Yahya Jame has, he says, received a mandate to cure AIDS as long as it's on a Thursday,

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