Mr Ceesay, I'll start with your objections of the labels I put on this President and his regime. I have called him a murderer, a thief, a thug and outside of the polite confines of Gambia -L I would use an expletive to describe him. I use all of those adjectives with all the emphasis I can muster for justifiable reasons. This is a government that has murdered innocent people in cold blood and treated the families and memories of the victims with absolute churlishness and contempt. This is a government that has shamelessly and maliciously stolen from the near destitute Gambian population and used the money to lavish it on themselves. This is a government that unleashes terror on innocent people. Don't you see these are unforgivable crimes that ordinary human beings cannot tolerate. Your President most recently abducted people from Kiang and brought them to his doorstep in Kanilai to torture them for no absolute reason other than the fact that he has thugs at his beck and call who can drag these people from their families and subject them to inhuman treatment. Doesn't this cruelty bother you not because you know or care about the victims of this kind of lawlessness but because you are human being, a Muslim and someone from and with a family? Have you no sense decency or even right and wrong? Why is all of the atrocious behavior of these regime insufficient for you to conclude that our people deserve their liberties and dignity? I don't like Yahoo Jammeh and folks around him because they are collectively drenched in the blood of my fellow citizens. And while I can afford to take care of my family's needs I am incensed that the rest of my fellow citizens are right at the doorstep of destitution and have to also live with terror and denial of rights. Why can't you honestly say that a lieutenant who in 1994 can hardly afford an apple cannot be in a position to cynically queue the very people he has by designed impoverished and pretend to be giving them gifts. why aren't you bothered by the fate of the people in the part of Nuimi you purport to come from. Tell me what you think is going to happen to a pregnant woman taken ill in the middle of the night in your village. She doesn't have a prayer because she is unlikely to go to a clinic with anything other than the sympathetic face of a demomaralised nurse and she is not likely to have any money to go to private clinics. How many people in your area are scrounging on poor and inadequate food? Somehow you relegate all of these important existential questions affecting people you know and can entirely identify with because they are your own people. Not only are you unwilling to acknowledge their predicament, but you spend all your time to publicly rationalize all the additional wrongs brought on them by a government you know demonstrably doesn't give a hoot about them. I don't know what your reasons for supporting this bad group of people are and I frankly don't care. I just find your disagreements insincere and driven mainly by selfishness. Why should I even attempt to constructively engage you about politics when your initial approach is that infact these people aren't bad and those of us describing them thus are somehow guilty of heresy? I am a committed democrat. all I want is for the Gambian people to able to forge ahead in their own country under the rule of law and full democracy. The politicians I don't philosophically agree with will make me a better informed voter if I have the opportunity to hear them out. That is exactly what I want for our people. You cannot even bring yourself to say that our entire country deserve to hear all the contestants in their bid for leadership. While I will not vote for this regime I will sincerely and respectfully view them as the legitimate leaders of our country if the Gambian people of their own volition choose to elect them. Then they would have won fair and square in an open validation of the people's wishes. Then all of us on the other side can begin to constructively engage a government with a clear and unsullied mandate. Our nation and our system would be better of because everyone can feel they fully participated. The repressive and brutal nature of this regime's tactics is what lies at the core of our problems. We are left with either putting up with terrible injustice or doing away with it. I opt for the latter Karamba ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------