There is a saying that when a despondent fool, on the brink of collapse, finds himself in a hole, he resorts to digging himself deeper into the hole and end up burying himself. Perhaps, this can help explain Jammeh's decision to expel the Deputy British High Commissioner to the Gambia, Bharat Joshi, from the Gambia. As they say over here, the panic buttons are being punched faster and frantically than you can imagine. Welcome to the beginning of the end of the Jammeh tyranny. The die is now cast. Diplomatic tension mutated into froideur is the best way to describe Britain's uneasy relationship the AFPRC junta and its subsequent mutation, the APRC. Forget Britain's recent re-establishment of military ties with the APRC government. This was done primarily on a cold national interest calculation. From John Major's government's travel advice to CommonWealth diplomatic strictures, Britain's relation with Jammeh has never been an easy ride. Where the Major gov't was expressly cold and difficult, the Blair gov't was merely ambiguous. So when Blair re-established military ties with the Gambia, it was understandably received with mixed reponses and feelings. It is time we evaluate the context of the re-establishment of the said military ties and rescue its Realpolitik logic from the premature euphoria that has greeted it from the APRC gov't. Since constituents back in Britain are loath to sending British nationals to far-off places like Sierra Leone, the Blair government coldly calculated - succoured by the Realpolitik arguments - that to avoid bringing home body bags from foreign lands where British material interest is negligible, it is a safer bet to train regional armies to militarily intervene on humanitarian grounds in sub-Saharan Africa's civil strifes. I understand that prior to this becoming policy, a demurrer came from a very formidable woman: Clare Short, Britain's Development Secretary. The demurrer, as i understand it, was that such military training programmes must be conditional and crackpot dictatorships should be ineligible from the said military programmes. The Gambia, was made eligible on the grounds that it does have what amounts to a semblance of democratic governance. Ms Short, it is said remained impervious to demonstration: she knew that despite the cosmetic make-over of 1996, the Gambia remains a military dictatorship. But she was over-ruled. This was the basis of the re-establishment of the military ties. Fancy now mandarins and foreign policy advisers to the moron interpreting this retrogressive development as signs of resuscitating the health of British-Gambian relations. Wishful thinking. Unbeknownst to them, Ms Short didn't let the matter rest; she became a keen observer of the Gambia's political scene. Once Jammeh started behaving like Jammeh, especially after he fired Bishop Johnson, the Chief Justice, Master of the Supreme and the Accountant General, Ms Short wrote a tersely worded letter to the Gambia's development partners and a copy was handed over to the Jammeh himself. In that letter, Ms Short waxed indignant on what she described as the Gambia's unacceptable governance milieu which is a cause for real concern. From there, the silent euphoria that greeted the re-establishment of the military ties, rapidly evaporated into a diplomatic froideur. Matters certainly were not helped by Bharat Joshi, who is activist-minded and seems to have an innate ability to see beyond the ordinary prism of diplomatic reportage of foreign countries. This is understandable: Joshi is a British Indian and unlike the passive and naive middle-class gentry that serve the British foreign service, he seems to understand how despotic governments manipulate the Diplomatic Corp into passivity. Joshi, therefore, graces both sides of the political argument. Where the Opposition extends an invitation, Joshi will go and listen. The same goes for the government. In traditional diplomatic nuance, this has the propensity to raise eye-brows of disapproval. Traditionalists would argue that State functions or those functions that will not compromise the perceived neutratlity of diplomats are the functions that diplomats ought to grace. Here, 'State' is referred to mean the government of the day. Anything short of this is peculiar to diplomacy. There are two things wrong with this viewpoint. The first is that perceived neutrality is bunkum when one has an interest to protect. There is nothing like perceived neutrality when decisions have to be made about an issue that impacts expressed self-interests. Just as a football referee cannot be neutral when making decisions, diplomats are neutral only in name. What can be desired and the best to be hoped for is fair-mindedness. The second argument against the aforementioned view is one of a sloppy interpretation of the notion of 'State'. Most people when they speak of the 'State', refer to it to mean the government of the day. Hence if the APRC has a rally and diplomats attend it, they have just attended a State function. This is a mistaken view for the State encompasses more than just the government of the day and its vested interests. The State is what incorporates a political community and this goes as far to include the legitimate Opposition parties and pressure groups. So it stands to reason that if Joshi attends an Opposition function, he is in fact attending a State function. Which brings me to Joshi's expulsion from the Gambia on the grounds that he attended an Opposition function - in this case the Alliance's maiden rally in Brikama. This is nonsense. The morons that are pretending to "run" our country cannot distinquish between State and government; and deduced from their ignorance that they have grounds to clip the wings of the activist-minded Joshi. The truth of the matter is that Joshi's expulsion signally represents a panic-stricken APRC frantically clutching at straws as its wobbly legs begin to give way to the momentum created by the Alliance. With Joshi's expulsion, i sense panic in the air. Hamjatta Kanteh ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------