There is a saying that when a despondent fool, on the brink of collapse,
finds himself in a hole, he resorts to digging himself deeper into the hole
and end up burying himself. Perhaps, this can help explain Jammeh's decision
to expel the Deputy British High Commissioner to the Gambia, Bharat Joshi,
from the Gambia. As they say over here, the panic buttons are being punched
faster and frantically than you can imagine. Welcome to the beginning of the
end of the Jammeh tyranny. The die is now cast.

Diplomatic tension mutated into froideur is the best way to describe
Britain's uneasy relationship the AFPRC junta and its subsequent mutation,
the APRC. Forget Britain's recent re-establishment of military ties with the
APRC government. This was done primarily on a cold national interest
calculation. From John Major's government's travel advice to CommonWealth
diplomatic strictures, Britain's relation with Jammeh has never been an easy
ride. Where the Major gov't was expressly cold and difficult, the Blair gov't
was merely ambiguous. So when Blair re-established military ties with the
Gambia, it was understandably received with mixed reponses and feelings. It
is time we evaluate the context of the re-establishment of the said military
ties and rescue its Realpolitik logic from the premature euphoria that has
greeted it from the APRC gov't.

 Since constituents back in Britain are loath to sending British nationals to
far-off places like Sierra Leone, the Blair government coldly calculated -
succoured by the Realpolitik arguments - that to avoid bringing home body
bags from foreign lands where British material interest is negligible, it is
a safer bet to train regional armies to militarily intervene on humanitarian
grounds in sub-Saharan Africa's civil strifes. I understand that prior to
this becoming policy, a demurrer came from a very formidable woman: Clare
Short, Britain's Development Secretary. The demurrer, as i understand it, was
that such military training programmes must be conditional and crackpot
dictatorships should be ineligible from the said military programmes. The
Gambia, was made eligible on the grounds that it does have what amounts to a
semblance of democratic governance. Ms Short, it is said remained impervious
to demonstration: she knew that despite the cosmetic make-over of 1996, the
Gambia remains a military dictatorship. But she was over-ruled. This was the
basis of the re-establishment of the military ties. Fancy now mandarins and
foreign policy advisers to the moron interpreting this retrogressive
development as signs of resuscitating the health of British-Gambian
relations. Wishful thinking.

Unbeknownst to them, Ms Short didn't let the matter rest; she became a keen
observer of the Gambia's political scene. Once Jammeh started behaving like
Jammeh, especially after he fired Bishop Johnson, the Chief Justice, Master
of the Supreme and the Accountant General, Ms Short wrote a tersely worded
letter to the Gambia's development partners and a copy was handed over to the
Jammeh himself. In that letter, Ms Short waxed indignant on what she
described as the Gambia's unacceptable governance milieu which is a cause for
real concern. From there, the silent euphoria that greeted the
re-establishment of the military ties, rapidly evaporated into a diplomatic
froideur. Matters certainly were not helped by Bharat Joshi, who is
activist-minded and seems to have an innate ability to see beyond the
ordinary prism of diplomatic reportage of foreign countries. This is
understandable: Joshi is a British Indian and unlike the passive and naive
middle-class gentry that serve the British foreign service, he seems to
understand how despotic governments manipulate the Diplomatic Corp into
passivity. Joshi, therefore, graces both sides of the political argument.
Where the Opposition extends an invitation, Joshi will go and listen. The
same goes for the government. In traditional diplomatic nuance, this has the
propensity to raise eye-brows of disapproval. Traditionalists would argue
that State functions or those functions that will not compromise the
perceived neutratlity of diplomats are the functions that diplomats ought to
grace. Here, 'State' is referred to mean the government of the day. Anything
short of this is peculiar to diplomacy.

There are two things wrong with this viewpoint. The first is that perceived
neutrality is bunkum when one has an interest to protect. There is nothing
like perceived neutrality when decisions have to be made about an issue that
impacts expressed self-interests. Just as a football referee cannot be
neutral when making decisions, diplomats are neutral only in name. What can
be desired and the best to be hoped for is fair-mindedness. The second
argument against the aforementioned view is one of a sloppy interpretation of
the notion of 'State'. Most people when they speak of the 'State', refer to
it to mean the government of the day. Hence if the APRC has a rally and
diplomats attend it, they have just attended a State function. This is a
mistaken view for the State encompasses more than just the government of the
day and its vested interests. The State is what incorporates a political
community and this goes as far to include the legitimate Opposition parties
and pressure groups. So it stands to reason that if Joshi attends an
Opposition function, he is in fact attending a State function.

Which brings me to Joshi's expulsion from the Gambia on the grounds that he
attended an Opposition function - in this case the Alliance's maiden rally in
Brikama. This is nonsense. The morons that are pretending to "run" our
country cannot distinquish between State and government; and deduced from
their ignorance that they have grounds to clip the wings of the
activist-minded Joshi. The truth of the matter is that Joshi's expulsion
signally represents a panic-stricken APRC frantically clutching at straws as
its wobbly legs begin to give way to the momentum created by the Alliance.
With Joshi's expulsion, i sense panic in the air.

Hamjatta Kanteh

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