Dear Mr. Nordam,
The question of the moral imperative of peoples who have traumatically been
the victims of injustices and their claim to vengeance and the need for
good-will intervention on the part of outsiders to the conflict, who preach
forgiveness and reconciliation in order not to shackle future generations to
a tragic past, is indeed a very vital one to ALL troubled and tragic-infested
societies and i salute you for raising it.
Whilst i will grant that your assertion that forgiveness and reconciliation
is a prerequisite for a post-conflict society to become wholesome again is a
lucid judgement, yet, it is morally emaciated if applied to the Gambia **as
things stand** with the perpetrators of the injustices that prevail in that
society. Your reasoning and call for such a consideration whilst laudable, is
at best ill-timed and lacks a philosophical understanding of why vengeance in
the first place and how we draw the line where we can effectively say that
the time is ripe to reach out to each other, forgive and reconcile.
Psychologists like Freud, who spent a lot of precious time, energy and
resources on war ravaged souls in the aftermath of the First World War, have
noticeably come up with a diagnosis that perfectly understands the inner
anguish of those who were at the brunt of injustices and the **legitimacy**
of their inner drive to demand an eye for an eye. Indeed, in James Joyce's
Ulysses - which many critics are now describing as the greatest novel of the
20th. Century - the central moral theme of this novel amongst others, is an
ethical, political and historical inquiry into the vengeance seething from
those who were at the brunt of the inujustices of the Irish Troubles. Whilst
he was no Republican and was full of condemnation - albeit subtly - of the
Republican Movement's invocation of the memories of the tragedy that has
befallen the Irish peoples to sustain their vengeance, Joyce was in no doubt
that Irish vengeance was legitimate and justified. But he was indignant that
the Republican Movement should use history of the injustices visited upon the
Irish by the English as fate or a morality card to impede forgiveness and the
road to reconciliation should be closed forever because of this alone. Yet,
throughout the book, Joyce made it crystal that before vengeance can
effectively be disarmed, perpetrators of such injustices or its inheritors
must at least own up to what they have inflicted upon those at the receiving
end of the said injustices. And so long as the perpetrators of the injustices
are not ready to make atonements for what they have caused to the victims of
such injustices, then vengeance is legitimate - morally.
One of the most profound and philosophically insightful book to be written on
the issue of vengeance and reconciliation, is "The Warriors Honour" by
Michael Ignatieff, who is now Harvard's Human Rights Centre's Director. In
the "The Warriors's Honour" - which is written more or less like a roving
journalist-cum-philosopher in the mode of the American writer, Rober Kaplan,
of the Atlantic Monthly's, style of vignette musings - Ignatieff
roved/shuttled to such troubled spots of the 90s like Rwanda, Somalia, former
Yugoslavia, and Cambodia where he saw first hand the extent to which lack of
understanding of the moral impetus of vengeance lessens the scope for genuine
reconciliation. As he wrote of this ignorance: "The chief moral obstacle in
the path of reconciliation is the desire for revenge. Now, revenge is
commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion, and because it is regarded
as such, its deep moral hold on people is rarely understood. But revenge -
morally considered - is a desire to keep faith with the dead, to honor their
memory by taking up their cause where they left off. Revenge keeps faith
between generation; the violence it engenders is a ritual form of respect for
the community's dead - therein lies its legitimacy. Reconciliation is
difficult precisely because it must compete with the powerful alternative
morality to violence."
With that ignorance cleared out of the way, you can understand why when
writers like me pen anything about Jammeh and what he continues to wreak on
our country, we are filled with anger, venom, undisguised contempt and a
naked desire for vengeance. And this shall continue until and unless those
who perpetrated and continue to act like wise against the Gambian peoples own
up to their deeds and publicly repent. Even then, it will only lessen the
anger and we will obviate vengeance by recoursing to judicial means to seek
redress against those who really acted with callous barbarity against the
Gambian peoples. The road to reconciliation after a traumatic experience is
for the wrong-doers to first accept what they have done and there and then
those wronged can be counselled by our common humanity to accept such
repentance. As Ignatieff has written: "Reconciliation means breaking the
spiral of intergenerational vengeance. It means substituting the vicious
downward spiral of violence with the virtuous upward spiral of mutually
reinforcing respect. Reconciliation can stop the cycle of vengeance only if
it can equal vengeance as a form of respect for the dead. What each side, in
the aftermath of a civil war, essentially demands is that "the other side"
face up to the deaths it caused. To deny the reality of these deaths is to
treat them as a dream, as a nightmare. Without an apology, without
recognition of what happened, the past cannot return to its place as the
past. The ghosts will continue to stalk the battlements."
Yet, this is precisely the fundamental defect of what has and continues to
unfold in the Gambia since April last year when Jammeh callously ordered the
murder of the school children. At this stage, we might as well pause and pose
the question: what has the APRC gov't done to show its repentance or its lack
thereof? First of all, it failed to properly accept full responsibilities of
an incident that could have been avoided when it issued defiant press
releases that bespoke of unrepentance, arrogance and downright insentivity.
It has done virtually nothing for the maimed and injured children; infact
some the children were shabbily treated in conditions best left for war
ravaged countries. Some time after the April incidents, political thuggery
and mismanagement were seen on the lurch: we witnessed the arsonist attack on
Radio 1 FM; the arrest of Dumo Sarho and others for allegedly conspiring to
overthrow the government; harrassment of the Opposition leadership continues
unabated; until just recently, the gov't was hell-bent on trying some of the
student leadership for organising the demonstrations; a Bill has just been
passed by the gov't to absolve all those implicated in the heinous crimes of
April 10 and 11; during the first anniversary memorials of the April
Massacres, a former student leader, Alaghi Nyabally was arrested for being
critical of Jammeh's shabby handling of the crisis. The list is just too long
to go into here. Gauging from the aforesaid, how can or does one detect any
signs of an olive branch from the gov't leadership since April 10 and 11? How
then can we even start talking about forgiveness and reconciliation when
those who perpetrated these heinous crimes are defiant in their unrepentance
and the criminals continue to enjoy a scot-free and luxurious life at the
expense of the victims of these heinous crimes?
Reconciliation and forgiveness, as Ignatieff sagely noted, "has no chance
against vengeance unless it respects the emotion that sustain vengeance,
unless it can replace the respect entailed in vengeance with rituals in which
communities once at war learn to mourn their dead together." Talk of
reconciliation in the Gambia, can only be mooted if the APRC gov't disarms
our justified and legitimate vengeance for the crimes it has and continues to
commit against the Gambian peoples by completely owning up to their crimes;
repenting publicly and setting in motion, measures that will fully pursue a
judicial redress of all the crimes committed against the Gambian peoples.
Until then, the moral imperative of what sustains our vengeance will blossom
and each move of the gov't that reeks of recalcitrance and remorselessness,
can only harden our resolves to seek vengeance.
All the best,
Hamjatta Kanteh
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