Ebou, let me also emphasis that whatever i say on this
forum is independent of any political party's opinion
so to say that your comments are apolitical is of no
relevance to my objection to your discourse. The fact
of the matter is you loaded your piece with
revolutionary thinking of philosphers, the very
purpose of whose arguments were completely
misrepresented at the tail end of your previous
posting.
Ebou i did not misrepresent anything for i read and
read you several times before i sent my take on your
arguments on 'human rights and the Gambian polity'.
Reading the last few sentences of your latest reply to
me once again confirm my position that you still dont
want to come clean about your position on human rights
and the Gambian polity. You wrote "it is in the best
interest of poor countries like the Gambia to priotize
values within their socio-economic means i.e. civil
society must politically balance the triads; and this
balancing act is the only way to gurantee a practical
freedom that ensure peace, harmony and economic
progress"...but Ebou you know very well(having served
in the AFPRC council) that the tactics used by any
dictatorship to balance political rights with
so-called national security interest is to destroy the
very fabric that gives civil society the power and
courage to speak against abuses by(1)thruogh abnoxious
regulatory decrees and (2)if the first one fails like
in the case of the Gambia uses terror to either force
the civil society to caw down to their pressure or
prostitute the very people who the civil society
defends with all sort of inducements so that they no
longer differentiate the evil intentions of the
dictatorship from their basic human rights.
So in a situation like this the balancing senario you
talked about between individual rights and
socio-economic
means becomes secondry because the very people who
should bring about that socio-economic progress have
are now subject of state sanctioned terror. And that's
why Martha Nussbaum's arguments in a situation of ours
becomes unworthy of its strenght. Nussbaum had in mind
a conducive society where all the practical rights are
operational with the state taking the lead in
providing the enabling environment for that balance
between individual rights and socio-economic progress.
But in a country where child killers are indemnified
and can do the same act and get away with it; in a
society where the very fundamental principles that
make the balance work well between individual rights
and socio-econimic progress are set aside for the
interest of a only few individuals and their business
interest, the Nussabaum theory Ebou becomes useless.
Am however happy that you say you abhor abuse in all
its forms. If you and i can agree on this then we will
be able to forge ahead.
Have a good day.
E Sillah.
--- Ebou Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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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