Ebou,
Would you kindly answer these two questions from both gentlemen? How you
seem to miss them is beyond but here they are:
Ebrima Sillah wrote :
"If we are to go by your defination of individual rights and the
collective efforts of national security, then there is no need
monitor government excesses and their attendent risks. Because
i wander how human rights abuses can be justifiable in a society
that wants to maintain national security?
Alieu Bah wrote:
"I am more interested in the end results of Human Rights than all the
nitty gritty, in layman's terms, are the citizenry free to express
themselves without the fear of been prosecuted?
Pardon me for butting in. Thanks in advance..
Grg Srr ;-)
From: Ebou Jallow <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Human Rights and the Gambian Polity
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: May 18, 2002
This is a rejoinder to the observations, questions and comments
raised by Alieu Bah and Ebrima Sillah. I would like to establish here
that my previous article is just groundwork of ideas that I think might
incite very fruitful solutions to human rights issues in the Gambia.
Let me emphasize again that my opinion is purely apolitical, and I try
as much as possible to avoid specific trends or facts in the Gambia
that might embroil the discussions into a partisan debate. This being
the case, I believe that Mr. Sillah is completely wrong to infer that I
argue in support of state abuse of human rights to maintain dictators
in power. This statement is far from the truth. I stated very
clearly, and I quote: “...the use of coercion will sure lead to
anarchy because it interrupts the necessary equilibrium between order
and novelty ...that any society needs to evolve.” The rest of Mr.
Sillah’s arguments are all but further misrepresentations of my essay.
However, I will elaborate later on those issues.
On the other hand, Alieu Bah implicitly invokes the old debate of
cultural relativism with respect to human rights that the West and the
Rest has been wrestling with for decades. Again this is far from the
case in my essay. My approach has its deep roots in Western culture-
Western history, scientific method and philosophy. I did emphasis on
the scientific method and history in order to ensure neutrality and
objective analysis. Scientific epistemology is convincingly the only
one faculty of human cognition that enjoys universal appeal. The gist
of my whole argument is for Gambians to exercise their “practical
freedom”; the freedom that is feasible within their socio-economic
context and not those imposed from without. I further argued that the
only way to break through the Western dogma of “human rights” that has
sedimented in contemporary political discourse is to revise and
critique its universal claims such as to emancipate our minds. And
here is my argument that essentially reflects my essay.
The French Revolution started this modern understanding of human
rights. It generated the common concept of collective rights i.e. (1)
Liberty-which implies political and civil rights; (2) Equality-
essentially means socio-economic rights; and (3) Fraternity- or the
fundamental right to solidarity or nationhood. Out of all these three,
Western history has constantly slanted more towards individual liberty
over the harmony of the triad. During the French Revolution,
the “champions” of rights were the nouveau riche, bourgeoisie and the
upper middle class, in other words the “propertied class”. Their
strategic emphasis on individual liberty was deliberately calculated to
ensure their unfettered access to wealth and the exploitation of the
low class i.e. women, slaves and the workers. Over the years until
this present generation the same age old argument has been repackaged,
refined and re-modified to fit the salient agenda of the wealthy. Even
in current international politics, the USA is one of only few countries
that fails to ratify the convention for socio-economic rights. No
wonder the immediate product of the French revolution was death,
squalor and anarchy. Martha Nussbaum, a well respected prominent
American scholar has argued that the emphasis of human rights over
socio-economic rights is a moral lapse of the West, and it is also an
asymmetry of justice. Noam Chomsky, who is never my favourite, has
articulated the hoax of these western crusades as generating more
instability whilst weakening the indigenous “social capital”. John
Rawls and Robert Nozick’s priotizing of individual rights over socio-
economic rights is fundamentally based on certain assumptions
on “institutions” that do not prevail in third world countries.
Finally, Samuel Huntington of Harvard did introduce an interesting
angle to the debate of socio-economic rights and individual political
rights. In essence he adopts a very practical cost benefit analysis of
the whole problem: human rights demand political rights to speak,
organize and protest; socio-economic rights requires the economic
freedom to own property, work, invest, produce and consume without
government intrusion. However, the real catch is in the implementation
of these two rights: It is easier for any government to draft human
rights laws than to implement a sustainable economic development plan.
So if one considers all options and inherent obstacles, it becomes very
clear that it is to the best interest of poor countries like Gambia to
priotize values within their socio-economic means .i.e. civil society
must politically balance the triad of rights; and this balancing act is
the only way to guarantee a “practical freedom” that ensure peace,
harmony and economic progress.
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