Senegalese Prime Minister accuses the West of wanting to “impose homosexuality on the rest of the world”

Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko denounced this Friday “a tyranny” of the West which wants to “impose homosexuality on the rest of the world”. In an address to MPs, he rejected any moratorium on the application of the recent law toughening penalties against homosexual relations in the predominantly Muslim West African country.

Senegal passed a new law in early March doubling the penalties for homosexual relations, now punishable by five to ten years in prison, before its promulgation on March 31 by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. It comes in a context marked by a wave of homophobia in the country and a series of arrests for alleged homosexuality.

“There is a kind of tyranny. We are eight billion human beings in the world but there is a small core called the West, within which the debate is not settled, but because it has the means and controls the media, wants to impose it (homosexuality) to the rest of the world. In the name of what? », criticized Ousmane Sonko.

He claimed to have, after the vote on the law, “heard a lot of gesticulations (criticizing Senegal) in foreign countries, particularly in France. If they opted for these practices, that’s their problem but we have no lessons to learn from them, absolutely not.”

“Complex” elites

Contrary to the position of the West which “wants to impose its diktat, no Asian, African or Arab country criticizes us”, said the head of the Senegalese government, “if the law must be strengthened, it will be”. He called on justice “to ensure” its “total, impersonal and perfect” application because “the main objective” of the new text is to “put an end to the proliferation of the phenomenon of homosexuality”.

Ousmane Sonko also rejected any “moratorium” on the application of the law after a request to this effect from a collective of around thirty personalities of African origin, in an article published in mid-May in the French newspaper Libération. This request is expressed by the authors of this column in the face, according to them, of a “climate of fear, hatred and violence” which “has taken hold in the country” since the law was passed.

“There will be no moratorium. Some of our elites are self-conscious,” replied the head of the Senegalese government. Relations between people of the same sex are considered a deviance in Senegal and the toughening of their repression is a long-standing promise of the camp in power, politically promising in this country.