Hamjatta,
One thing is becoming abundantly clear: the Ebou Collys and Kebba Damphas
are in plain English, the most realistic camp of our struggle. And who's
making them that? Yaya Jammeh! You see, Yaya is his worst enemy. I mean,
this guy is so uncultured, he simply has no clue as to how to attract and
keep people. Look at the amount of goodwill (if you'll let me quantify
goodwill,) that he has squandered. And how about the anti-Jawara alliance he
built in '94? They're all gone. And even as the softies are treating him
with padded gloves (nice/rational letters, etc) he's digging himself into a
deeper hole. His behavior is becoming so irrational, and alarming that even
the so-called pacifists, (who are nothing but closet supporters of this man,
or "UDP is the same as PPP proponents" if you ask me,) are beginning to
realize that something needs to be done. And very quickly at that. Every
extra day this man spends as head of state, is a day too long. And like I
said a few days ago, if we had an honorable parliament, there won't even be
any crisis. They need to do what the Equadorians did to Bakharam. If you're
unfortunate to have a mad person at the helm, you need to act quickly in
order to cut your losses. Where else on this planet do you hear a president
make such serious threats on national TV? And he follows through! If anyone
doubts the man's insanity, please explain to me how one pays half a Million
dollars to "clean" one's image in Wash DC, and while those efforts are
underway, that same person goes on national TV to threaten his opponents
with execution, and urge his supporters to defy the rule of law! As crude
and uncouth as Yaya is, I doubt he'll do that if he were of sound mind. So,
what we have here is a totally deranged individual who simply can't keep
track of his own utterances, commitments, or the need to observe basic rules
of peaceful human co-existence. Thanks to him, we're now an acephalous
society!
But somehow, "reasoning" with him will do it. First he butchers all those
within the army who he considers as threats. Then he gradually went after
civilians. What happened in April to little school children was very
predictable as far as I'm concern. It's just a natural progression of
things. There's a certain symmetry about this man's daring brutality. And
some of us have been trying to sound the alarm for some years now. Yet, all
we've ever gotten is dismissal as being "paranoid," or "people with an
agenda." Well, who's eating their words now? The strategies/approaches that
have been adopted by ALL the parties back home against Yaya, are simply not
working! Common sense should tell these parties to try something different.
I wish this wasn't the case, but it is.
I'll gladly buy a copy of the 19th Century American writer Henry Thoureau's
"Civil Disobedience" for the three parties back home if they'll promise to
study it. The painful irony here is that Thoureau was agitating against a
system then, that is much better than what we're up against -today. There
won't be any need for guns. All people need to do is to stop recognizing the
govt: no tax payment, no govt work, etc. Like many have already alluded to:
People Power. Pure and simple. I mean, what the hell will Yaya do? Send his
thugs to force every govt employee to go to work? Jail all Gambians who
refuse to pay taxes? The Apartheid govt in S. Africa who are a Million times
more powerful than Yaya could EVER be, tried this and failed! And if Yaya
dares to kill innocent people for refusing to recognize his illegitimate
govt, I bet you my life that some country will remove him. There is a
precedence for this: Marcos in the Phillipines, the former Eastern block
leaders in Europe. The International community will not stand by and witness
such a crime. But the impetus has to come from Gambians.
If rational approaches were enough, we won't be hearing about this latest
nationally broadcast threat of chopping up opponents, and burying them six
feet deep. Too many people have died at the hands of this monster including
children, too many careers destroyed, some very good and decent folks have
been publicly humiliated, the economy is all but in tatters, the education
system is a joke, the national treasury is synonymous with Yaya's personal
checking account, while he continues to chase out educated Gambians at a
rate that parrallels that of Ethiopia in the mid-80s. The simple question
now is whether the civic leaders have the courage and determination to stand
up and lead people in an "enough is enough" coup that would bring sanity to
that little place we all call "home."
Saul.
>From the outset, when the tyranny of Jammeh manifested itself again through
>ther murder of our school children, mainly three schools of thought
>
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