We are Gambians! My friends at the Independent Baba Galleh Jallow and Yorro Jallow, are undergoing what I did in 1995: The NIA, having failed to frighten me from writing my weekly pungent column with threats on the phone and on the streets, resorted to a clandestine investigation into my nationality with a view to "deporting" me. To where I never imagined. A team of NIA officials interrogated my parents in Basse to ascertain their nationalities. Daba Marenah, a callous NIA officer he was, and now shocking as it is, the commissioner of my home town, was part of the campaign against me, having once arrested and maltreated me during my first detention at the NIA headquarters. I left The Gambia in 1996, an opportune time said my friends and well-wishers given the unhealthy political environment at the time. My family told me the NIA agents never came back after my departure. But they are all the same worried any time I write in the Gambian press. The main reason why my writings inside The Gambia have scaled down considerably these days. The tyranny of government is incalculable in its capacity to inflict harm on society. Dictatorships are inebriated with a coarseness of behaviour that makes them culpable yet worry less about the consequences of their culpability. In 1995, I concluded that the AFPRC could have just kicked me out into an unknown place, declaring me an "undesirable element." If they didn't have the authority to do it, they did have the absolute power;it was a dictatorship. Moreover, "deportation" of citizens would have been unprecedented in The Gambia but not in a dictatorial system. In the 1970s, a despotic Nigerian government deported its own citizen Alhaji Suhagba, who would later challenge the action and win a court verdict. The Independent editors are facing the frontal assaults of a government incapable of reasoning and accountability. It is allergic to press freedom. The Independent is and will always be, a target for its objectivity and fearlessness. So the only way to inhibit its effective functioning is to trump up nationality falsities against the paper's editors. Perhaps any Gambian journalist bearing the last name JALLOW,is subject to the same immigration treatment. If Mathew K. Jallow, a brilliant writer and now residing in Wisconsin, were still living in The Gambia, his nationality would perhaps have also been questioned. The truth is inescapable: both Baba Galleh and Yorro are Gambians. Damn it! I am Gambian, too. Cherno Baba Jallow Detroit, MI ------------------------------------------ > >To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L >Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------