These magical words can determine legitimacy or illegitimacy; sanctions or no sanctions; life or death for our children; destitution or subsistence for our farmers; Yaya or no Yaya. So called human rights activists and elections monitors in the country should pay great attention before they declare these magical words. As we said here months ago and on numerous occasions subsequently, elections are not won or lost on election day. The absence of APRC thugs like Baba Jobe on election day holding machetes and telling voters how to cast their votes, does not mean that the elections are free, fair and transparent. As I said before, these blatant abuses only become necessary when more subtle methods (like vote-buying) do not do the trick. As we warned before, Opposition parties should not put themselves in a position where they would be seen as helping to legitimize Yaya. Election monitors all over the world are always eager to declare elections free, fair and transparent. They usually just focus on the happenings on election day and care less about events leading to the elections. It is the job of the Opposition to monitor events leading to the election and if they see that the playing field is not level, they should boycott the elections. One of the lessons we should have learnt in 1996 (and should surely learn from events of the past few days) is that some people are very myopic and have short memories. To a lot of people it is not enough to just complain about electoral malpractice prior to the election and still contest the election. If we adopt that modus operandi, they will think that we are endorsing the malpractice. They will wait until after the election and if we complain about it, they will pretend that the problem was never there to begin with. Now if one was to talk to Sheikh Lewis, he would tell you that lines were orderly on election day, votes were counted in front of party representatives, Baba Jobe did not show up with a machete asking people to vote for APRC, etc. Lewis will not talk about the people that did not show up because they know that before you can vote you have to present your voter's card and these people had already sold their voter's cards. Events leading to the elections have to be factored into the equation before declaring an election 'free, fair and transparent'. A lot hinges on this. If the Opposition cannot get the observers to see this, they should not participate in any scheme to legitimize Yaya. It is insulting to us Gambians that foreigners in the U.S. State department or at Africa Confidential would detect that our elections are NOT free, fair and transparent, while we have seemingly educated and objective Gambians going around telling people that the elections are fair. KB _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask] if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------