There is a grim, almost slapstick symmetry in the news that the lavish Potomac, Maryland estate once occupied by Yahya Jammeh—the exiled Gambian despot whose eccentricities were matched only by his bloodlust—will finally be liquidated to compensate the victims of his twenty-two-year reign. For once, the lumbering apparatus of transnational asset forfeiture has stumbled backward into an act resembling natural justice. The proceeds of a multi-million-dollar suburban palace, purchased with the squeezed sweat of Gambian taxpayers and the spoils of sheer plunder, are to be remitted to those whose bodies and livelihoods Jammeh shattered. It is an outcome so clean that even the most cynical observer of statecraft must pause, tip his hat to the auctioneer, and then, immediately, check his wallet [1].
[1] Let us dispense immediately with the objection from the sovereign-immunity apologists at the Hague, whose devotion to procedural Westphalian etiquette invariably blinds them to the elementary distinction between legitimate governance and armed robbery.
To understand the moral economy of the Jammeh estate is to recognize that modern tyranny is essentially an export-import racket. The despot extracts rents at home via arbitrary decree and state-sanctioned terror, then launders the surplus value through the polite, leafy suburbs of Montgomery County, where title companies and zoning boards ask remarkably few questions so long as the wire clears. Jammeh did not build wealth; he merely monopolized force. His American sanctuary was not real property in the Lockean sense, for it possessed no legitimate pedigree of voluntary exchange. It was an unburied sarcophagus of stolen goods, perched smugly on American soil while its architect fled to Equatorial Guinea.
Yet my libertarian brethren will rightly raise an eyebrow at the mechanism employed here. Civil asset forfeiture, as practiced by the American Leviathan, is ordinarily an obscene racket—a modern writ of assistance that allows sheriffs and federal prosecutors to seize automobiles and bank rolls on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing, flipping the burden of proof upon the bewildered citizen [2]. In Jammeh’s case, the guilt is undisputed and the crimes monstrous. But the precedent remains fraught. When the state claims the unilateral right to fence foreign real estate, the line between restitution and sovereign piracy depends entirely on which bureaucrat holds the gavel.
[2] See my prolonged, unrequited correspondence with the Department of Justice’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section, which remains conspicuously silent on the arithmetic behind their administrative retention fees.
Furthermore, the real test of this liquidation lies in the transmission mechanism. Will the proceeds actually reach the tortured journalists, the arbitrarily detained dissidents, and the families of the murdered? Or will they simply evaporate into the bureaucratic sinkhole of Banjul’s successor regime, swallowed by administrative fees, NGO conferences, and oversight committees? History provides a depressing forecast. When the state acts as an escrow agent for justice, the victims usually receive the pennies while the paper-pushers dine on the principle. Restitution is an individual entitlement, not a slush fund for a nascent Gambian civil service eager to balance its balance-of-payments deficit.
Observe the stark contrast across the morning wires: while the victims of state terror must wait nearly a decade for the liquidation of a single stolen McMansion, the state mobilizes with terrifying, instantaneous velocity whenever its own monopolies are threatened. Halfway across the globe in Pakistan, law enforcement has apprehended a man accused of defrauding the United States Postal Service out of $126 million in counterfeit postage. Challenge the sovereign’s exclusive, archaic monopoly on moving paper through the mail, and the full weight of international extradition falls upon you overnight. Strip an entire African nation of its treasury, however, and you can enjoy Maryland golf courses for years before the paperwork catches up.
If the Jammeh auction is to mean anything beyond diplomatic theater, every last dollar from the gavel must be disbursed directly to individual claimants, audited by independent parties, and kept far from the sticky fingers of both Washington’s treasury and Banjul’s ministries. Restitution is the only moral justification for the seizure of property. If the state cannot manage to return stolen loot without taking a twenty percent rake-off for its trouble, it is not an instrument of justice at all—merely the senior partner in the crime.
Cornelius Bragg