GAMBIANS UNITED TO SECURE THE COALITION BOX 56436 WASHINGTON, DC. 20011 February 15, 2005 His Excellency Mr. Kofi Annan Secretary General United Nations UN Plaza, 405 E. 42 St. New York, New York. 10017 Dear Sir: We hereby express our collective wishes of a happy and prosperous new year to you and your staff with the hope that all your efforts to bring normalcy in the “troubled spots” in the world become a reality. To us who love Africa and freedom, 2005 will be a decisive year in the future of Gambia. In April 2004, in commemoration of the 4th anniversary of the students’ massacre by the Gambian armed and security forces, we wrote to you expressing our despair with increasing uncertainty for our peaceful existence in the Gambia. We hope the content of that letter was brought to your attention so that you can intervene and help us in aborting the gestation of the horrible end the Jammeh regime is heading towards. Sir, we are writing to you again at a more alarming state of mind because matters have gotten worse and the terror, brutality and intimidation of the Jammeh regime is steadily on the increase. “Drive-by shooting” Has become the choice of assassination of Gambians who oppose the regime’s draconian decrees and Jammeh’s abominable abuse of “power.” The most recent case in point is the heinous assassination of the prominent journalist, Deyda Hydara on December 16, 2004. Following the premeditated murder of Mr. Hydara, as usual, the regime made some irate vows to bring the murderer(s) to justice and even made overtures of praises to his prominence as a journalist only to sign into law the repressive “media bill” which will erase the memory of Deyda Hydara, abrogate “press freedom” and speech. A similar case in point of a “drive-by shooting happened on December 26, 2003, when Mr. Ousman Sillah, a prominent Gambian lawyer was shot twice in the head near his residence but miraculously survived with permanent kidney damage and facial deformities requiring constructive surgeries. We are still waiting for the investigation on the assassination attempt on Mr. Sillah. We know better than to believe that the regime will investigate this horrible act of the murder of Mr. Hydara, one of the most harmless and peaceful Gambians. We can cite several instances of criminal atrocities that are still UN-investigated let alone bringing the perpetrators to “justice.” In their first two years following their “lift on to the saddles of power,” all the criminal atrocities committed by the regime were justified on the grounds of: consolidating the rule of terror typical of military coups. Subsequent to being “ civilianized” and the massive rigging of the 1996 presidential elections, all the criminal atrocities committed against Gambians were promised to be investigated and to this date no reports has been made public or private. On January 17, 2005, an event of historic significance took place at the Atlantic Hotel in Banjul, where a coalition of all the “opposition parties” - better known as the “alternative”- signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) under the leadership of National Alliance for Democracy and Development (NADD) to select a flag bearer to contest the upcoming presidential elections in 2006. As expected, Jammeh saw this honorable act as a challenge to his “ president for life” aspirations and made repeated threats that none of the “ opposition leaders” will be around by the 2006 presidential elections. In addition to these threats, Jammeh said “I sacrificed my life to get to this position, whoever wants my post will have to sacrifice his life.” We take these threats against our leaders seriously based on what happened during the 1996 presidential elections, the recent murder of Mr. Hydara and the assassination attempt on Mr. Sillah It was under the brutal period of the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council (AFPRC) and its later civilian regime, Alliance for Patriotic Reconciliation Council (APRC) that Gambians witnessed the worst ten years in our recent history. The vast majority of Gambians are fed-up with the daily threats of “ heads will roll” and “six feet deep”, hence the pressure on the “opposition parties” to form a coalition to relief Gambians of this nightmare. Since the signing of the MOU by the coalition, the regime has embarked on a spate of arrests and indefinite detentions of civilians, armed and security forces personnel without any due process of law. In fact the only law in the Gambia is the “law according to Jammeh” which is “guilty until proven innocent” as oppose to “innocent until proven guilty”; a blatant reversal of the dictum of justice. In our view, Jammeh is preparing the grounds to foul-up the process to the elections so as to provoke incidents and there by justify any repressive actions in the name of “national security.” Unlike Sierra Leone, Liberia and Rwanda, we are raising the alarm on the warning signs of the horrible end of a state operating on greed and tyranny. We are hoping that someone is listening and paying attention to bring about an end to this impending horror in the Gambia. Mr. Secretary, we are going on record again as did other oppressed countries and people in the past to exhaust every possible source for redress of the violations of our human rights by the Jammeh regime. We harbor no illusions about what the past ten years has done to our existence. We have been very disappointed with alarming suspicion of the recent actions of the African Union according the Jammeh regime the privilege of hosting the upcoming AU summit in 2006, the same year for the presidential elections. We see it as an attempt to authenticate the regime with total disregard for the human rights violations against the Gambian people. This is the most inappropriate time to hold such an event in the Gambia. Finally, we hope you will give our concerns and worries a critical consideration and take action before matters become regrettable. We also hope that you or your designated representative will be able to meet with our delegation for a brief discussion. We await your kind and considerate reply. Yours respectfully, The Undersigned: Movement for the Restoration of Democracy in The Gambia[NY] Gambian Diasporan for National Alliance for Democracy and Development[USA] Gambians for Change Gambians United to Secure the Coalition To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?S1=gambia-l To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to: [log in to unmask]