YAHYA JAMMEH'S JUSTICE PAUL
 
                                          By Ebrima G. Sankareh
                                                    Raleigh, NC, USA
 
            The preliminary objections by the NADD trio: Messrs. Halifa Sallah, Omar A. Jallow and Amat Bah not to be tried by Justice Paul, constitute the bedrock of any legal system worthy of its name. The key word is IMPARTIALITY! All three accused persons, men of finesse, timber and caliber, see in Justice Paul, himself a subject of parliamentary investigation, an irrelevant legal quantity prior to his meteoric rise to the bench as a laughing stalk of the Gambian legal system. In sum, Paul is a partisan jurist whose financial activities at the erstwhile AMRC has raised and continue to raise eyebrows. It was Hon. Amat Bah who alleged in the National Assembly that Paul was involved in dubious activities while at the AMRC. It was Hon. Halifa Sallah who suggested that allegations alone were not enough, that an inquiry was required for purposes of fairness to both Paul and the public. In the subsequent investigation, the Committee found evidence of impropriety as alleged. The one million-Dollar question to all men of reason is: how can Justice Paul preside over this pending case judiciously? You ponder!      
                I have said elsewhere and I will repeat that Paul is a gold digger turned jurist in the service of the grand dictator of Banjul. Like Jammeh the anti-corruption crusader who metastasized to an idiot of a dictator, the sickest ever to assume the mantle of power in West Africa, Paul is a legal embryo tasked with the delicate and complex business of the literati and not of the glitterati. "Paul is perhaps the lowest caliber lawyer I have ever encountered in my entire legal career" a high profile judge told me last night during a privileged conversation on the phone. So if the dude is so low how come he is a high court justice I posed. "Well Mr. Sankareh not only that, Paul lacks candor. but this is the precarious situation that The Gambia is in today" my conversationalist judge said. Chilling words as they are, this is the sad reality confronting a nation whose sons of independence: Jammeh, Sabally, Singhateh and Hydara told us on July 22, 1994, that they have come to rescue from rampant corruption, thirty years of PPP misrule etc, etc. Little did we know that, eleven years later, "the gallant four" as Gabriel Roberts eulogized them at The Gambia college graduation shortly after the coup, will be presiding over the most callous and wanting regime. The Gambia under Yahya Jammeh has become Liberia under Doe or Uganda under Idi Amin.
            As has always been the case in history, mediocrities like Paul will take advantage of the situation with little or no regard to the rule of law. For Paul to say in open court "that Gambians don't like me .and some politicians don't like me" speaks volumes about the legal mind in Justice Paul. After all, before WWII there were legal luminaries in Germany who aided and certainly abetted the Nazi perpetrators all the way to the crematorium. Theoretically, they were taught the concepts of the Rule of Law and Separation of Powers, yet these ideals did not mean anything to these criminals. A lethal force, state power, blinded them. In a fashion reminiscent of Hitler, Ho Chi Min presided over Vietnam and liquidated well over two million of his countrymen. Like wise Paul Pot in Cambodia. The situation in The Gambia is so bad that all too often, when you call friends, they feign a faulty phone line only to avoid being tapped by the NIA, an all too powerful state agency, a nasty embodiment of the political oxymoron of intelligence. And as if by divine intervention, the architect of this very witch hunting agency, Mr. Samba Bah is himself "vegetating behind iron bars at Mile II prisons" to quote his lawyer Antouman Gaye. In all honesty, Samba bah (Bah) is facing an all too familiar side of Jammeh's law, injustice. Like Jammeh, Bah rose to prominence in the wake of the July 22 coup with so much anger about Jawara's regime. For those who do not know, Batch was fired for unsubstantiated claims that a coup plot was underfoot to oust the PPP from littoral Banjul. He was placed on indefinite leave and subsequently sacked by the then National Security Service (NSS), a sequel to his brainchild, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). In fact, at the time of the coup Batch was a litigant at the Supreme Court for wrongful dismissal. By a concommitant twist of fate his lawyer was Ousman Sillah a fantastic legal mind who almost lost his life after a hail of bullets were fired at him only because he represented Baba Jobe, an old lieutenant who ran afoul of the dictator. Back tracking Bah's record, I report with absolute certainty that he was at the epicenter of Jammeh's regime and his signature was so precious for most major arrests and human rights violations to be effected. In so doing he has made himself so many enemies. For it is one thing to be angry at a deposed regime, but is another thing to remain conscious of the vicissitudes of time. Whatever your intentions for renaming the NSS were, one thing remains certain; that you have an ugly legacy for creating an arrogant agency more competent at witch hunting, fabrications, lies, manipulations, abuse, torture and all forms of inhuman degradation than intelligence. Your very detention and all the stupid charges that you faced are a testament to this. The very regime you helped to consolidate.  Now charges you with espionage, terrorism and economic crimes. Your former Operations Director and successor, Daba Marena the most brutal agent I have ever encountered in my journalism career must learn from your own experiences now. He too, has a story to be written at a later date, for "the evil that men do live after them."                 
                                   Of Power and Arrogance 
Ever since coming to power on July 22, 1994 power and arrogance are the most dubious distinctions of Yahya Jammeh's government. These, together with religious myopia and an envy of the glitterati personify a President who is neither Muslim nor Christian. There is evidence aplenty! He has the longest bastardized name of both faiths thus: Yahya Abdul Aziz Jamus Junkung Jammeh. To please the Muslims, he will dress like a sultan, carry the palpable paradox of prayer beads and a sword and utter a few words in Arabic. To please the Christians, he will call the imams at State Joke (no more State House), speak rudely to them and since September, 11, 2001, arrest some Arab hustlers and charged them with terrorism to gain American recognition. When he comes to Washington he dines with the rich and powerful. He lavishly gives out hard currency to his sycophants while his country is at the precipice of a state made famine. 
            However, at the crescendo of his arrogance he has met his match in Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade. Their only difference is that while Wade is an intellectual turned authoritarian dictator, Jammeh is a quasi-baked sub-lieutenant who quickly metamorphosed to a deadly dictator. Feeling embarrassed, defeated, dejected and probably threatened by his more militarily muscular neighbor, his arrogance dissipated. He jetted to Dakar and apologized to his almost Octogenarian neighbor. Little wonder, once he returned to Banjul a humiliated President, he turned to officials of the National Alliance for Democracy & Development (NADD) to unleash his anger in a familiar fashion of state terror. And once again, his choice of jurist is the Nigerian hustler Justice Paul; a buffoon dressed in judicial regalia with no judicial background except that like the rest, he needs money regardless of the consequences.  Consequences that will be really costly!  
                         

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