Hamjatta,
We have now reached Banjul and we will be holding a meeting precisely where
you suggested. I hope the people you mentioned will be able to attend the
meeting. If you have somebody who can get a copy of one of our recorded
meetings to forward to you, you may ask him or her to contact us.
After the Banjul meeting, I hope you will get a feedback and will
communicate that feedback to the L. I am sure that the notion that your
comments engender would become void when weighed against the reality.
Frankly speaking, I do not think you understand what is meant by expansion
of a 'democratic space'. I believe if I explain we may see eye to eye.
Suffice it to say, PDOIS' Social Clinic has been operating for 13 years to
look into the problems that you have highlighted in your posting. I would
imagine that you know that everyday people queue in our office to lodge
complaints about social injustice. We write letters for some; use our
telephone on behalf of others; send our volunteers to settle contradictions
among the people or between people and authorities free of charge. We refer
cases to lawyers and monitor cases in court. We give counselling to parents,
marital couples, and children. It would be best to refer the young man you
mentioned to us for any possible assistance.
In fact, the cases that should be pursued in court but could not because of
the lack of financial means of the victims had grown so much over the years
that we had to assign Sam Sarr to do a correspondent course in law so as to
take care of the legal aspect of our Social Clinic. He has, in fact, passed
all his exams and is about to go for his legal practice for one year in
order to establish a foundation to defend the marginalized.
After the meeting scheduled for Tobacco Road, I will then respond to your
last piece, a part of which reads:
"Since you have said you are on a nation-wide tour, and has finished the
provinces and the Kombos, chances are that now you are ready to take to
Banjul. And should you come to Banjul North, the Tobacco Area, there is a
family there that sure would love to hear you lecture on this vacuous
aggrandized theme of yours, the creation of a democratic space. I advice
that
instead of taking your podium to your usual venue of Box Bar Road, this time
go around the AMRC confiscated compound of Saihou Ceesay's just opposite
Saint Augustine's High's fences. Once your PA system starts blaring, this
family would hear you loud and clear. Former Lance Corporal Kebbeh then of
Army Ordnance and now virtually a cripple with an extended family to feed
out
of his silent trauma. This gentleman, before his incarceration in the
aftermath of the November, 11 bloodshed, was a bedrock of his family and
community. Then he became a victim of the endless and unjustified paranoia
of
Jammeh and internal military politics. With a bullet lodged in his pelvic
bone, he is reduced to a virtual cripple discharged from the army with an
extended family to feed. According to his doctor, if the bullet lodged in
his
pelvic bone is tampered with, he would have no choice but be reduced to
being
a complete disabled person. He has no access to social justice even though
people like you are going about with this shameful charade that you have
created a 'democratic space' that have created a breathing space for those
who were caught in between the cross fire of military politics and Jammeh's
tyrannical misuse of power. There is the Koro Ceesay family. The post mortem
report of their son lies somewhere gathering dust whilst they are still
crying out for social justice. And you dare flaunt around here this shameful
charade of yours that you have created a 'democratic space' that has seen
the
end of the absolutism of the executive? Try telling that to Lance Corporal
Kebbeh's eldest son, Mamadi Kebbeh, a precocious, well brought up and
ambitious teenager. He dreams of being a pilot one day and works damn hard
on
it. But the last time I saw him, he is beginning to show the toll that their
silent trauma is having on him. He has given up on being a pilot. And
thinking and saying stuff that I pretty well know will lead to degeneration
in character and moral tact. The long and short of it is that, this is a
family breaking apart because there is no breathing space in social justice
long since we were supposed to be under your 'democratic space.' There are
hundreds of families like the Kebbeh family who are suffering in silent
trauma. Before you keep on with this shameful charade of yours and filling
your paper with sympathetic reports of the Pateh Buwaro diamond saga, think
of these families and include them in your priorities as innocent victims of
a silent trauma in no way their own making. So long as there is no justice
for these families your democratic space and anything of similitude would be
self serving farcical nonsense. As Albert Einstein once said of the 'human
soul engineering' of the Communist 50's, if the shoe does not fit, it is no
use saying that time and wear will make it less uncomfortable, or that the
shape of the foot should be altered, or that the pain is an illusion. I hope
you take that into stock in your unit of analysis, Comrade Halifa."
Halifa Sallah.
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