Diplomacy Weeps The Independent (Banjul) EDITORIAL August 27, 2001 Posted to the web August 27, 2001 Banjul, the Gambia Diplomacy, as we know it, has a no pact with adventurism. Nor is it in any league with instinct. Its breathing substance is tact and reason lines its path. That is why throwing caution to the wind is seen as a grievous sin in the international system. The same is true of telling foreign diplomats in their faces, that their countries, our benefactors, should go hang. Both flow from the ranks of naivety and effrontery, which have become recurring decimals in The Gambia's foreign policy engineering. The hallmark of any good foreign policy dispensation is its ability to maintain state and non-state actor friends in the international system and win over as many enemy actors as possible, neutralizing the rest. In The Gambia, however, the reverse appears to be the case as the thrust has been towards turning friends into enemies, all in the name of sounding tough and self-assertive. Or how else can we explain the recent expulsion of the British Deputy High Commissioner, Bharat Joshi? Simply put, it represents another level of the Gambia government's underpinnings of the international community, which has no place for free-style, erratic diplomacy and despotism. And if the reasons were not unconnected with Joshi's presence at an opposition press conference in his capacity as his country's desk officer in The Gambia, then the international perception of the action as geared towards making sure that the October presidential elections turned out in favour of the incumbent is not out of place. Of a certainty, the repercussions would not tarry. The British foreign office has said the British government would react in the strongest possible terms, meaning it may not stop at expelling a Gambian diplomat of commensurate status with Mr. Joshi. The chances are that it may sever diplomatic relations with The Gambia and hence stop all grants and technical assistance, including the 600, 000 pounds sterling support to the Independent Electoral Commission and the various grants given through the Department for International Development (DFID). It may also cut off British air links with The Gambia, spelling doom for the country's precarious tourism industry, which receives about 45 percent of its tourists from the British market. The very fact that in 1994, the British tourist advice brought the industry to its knees is tortous to remember let alone relive. In fact, the country is yet to recover from the devastating impact of that advice, and if the British government re-enacted it, it would be a nun dimitis for the industry, which plays a key role in our already dehydrated economy. We should of course expect the European Union and the Commonwealth to lend support to any retaliatory action by the British government in view of its influential role therein. Can we really afford yet another such situation? Ours is a highly import-oriented nation and foreign loans and grants dependent, and most of them come from the EU and the Commonwealth. The Gambia government should therefore be wary of fueling the locomotive engine of our isolation in the international arena. We need more genuine international friends, not enemies. We need a foreign policy engineering anchored on clear-sighted people-focused ideals, not a sham. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------