I think the possession of any form of ID would be primarily to the holder's advantage. People die in road accidents or in civil violence such as during the 1981 abortive coup and they may end up in the morgue waiting for identification. To this day some families in The Gambia don't have a clue as to how their loved ones "disappeared" on the fateful days of July 30th-31st, 1981. Most of them ended up in mass graves! Some form of ID does help, indeed, albeit not at the cost of a beating or "monkey-dance". However, when the ID card becomes a tool for the harassment, intimidation, and humiliation of innocent people its whole purpose is negated and the very acquisition of one becomes a distasteful process. On countless occasions during and after the Jawara government I witnessed the persistent questioning of all light-skinned looking people to produce ID cards while on cross-country public transportation, assuming that all such people are Fulanis and all Fulanis are Guineans. On one such occasion, a friend of mine who was a Staff Sergeant in the then Gendarmerie nearly got pulled off a public bus going up-country because he was light-skinned. Addressing him in somewhat broken pulaar in a not so polite manner, the police officer asked him to produce his ID. Imagine the look on the face of the officer's when my friend tendered his gendarme ID and spoke to him in Mandinka, for he is a Mandinka. The greatest twist to this incident is that the officer did not ask our other friend sitting next to the gendarme for any ID, yet he was the Fulani. Perhaps because he was of a dark complexion. We were quite sure that there were other West African nationals in the bus, but who for a discriminatory reason were not paraded off the bus like the poor Guinean Fulanis. Recently, The Independent carried the story of a certain Muktarr Jallow, who got seriously beaten by Immigration officers in Talingding. They had suspected him of being a foreigner due to his Fulani traits and stopped him as he was passing by their office to ask for his ID. They disputed that the ID he produced for them was not authentic and set upon beating him regardless of the fact that he was born in Talingding. Most African governments are notorious for using such ploys to intimidate political or ethnic minorities as is the present case of former IMF deputy GM, Allasan Drame Outtara in Cote Ivoire. We also know that ruling parties in Africa give IDs to nationalities from neighbouring countries specifically to boost up their electoral votes. The APRC government should treat people with respect, for respect is nothing if it is not mutual. The arbitrary detention and humiliation of people regardless of their political affiliation, ethnic origin or nationality go against the grain of basic human respect. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------