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Full-name: HKanteh
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Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 13:29:18 EST
Subject: Re: Question  for Hamjatta & Saul
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Bass,
    in your posting "Question for Hamjatta & Saul," you wrote: "give credit
to those who sacrifice their time, knowledge and energy for a better Gambia
and please shut up if you cannot give anything." I don't have any problems
with people who continue to pour hagiolatries on Halifa but you it is
uncalled for and provocative for you to ask us to shut it when clearly you
don't have the capacity to comprehend the debate and have chosen to mistaken
"critique" with "scorning" or "sullying" Halifa's person. However, the spirit
of Ramadan restrains me from plunging headlong into a name calling orgy. I
won't stoop that low.
    However, before I "shut up" I will put before you a plate of meat that I
earlier put before your saint which he never chewed; assuming you do have the
literary capacity to complete this feat. In a posting entitled "A Pox On
Halifa's Semantic Sophistry," I asserted to Halifa that: "your precious
faultless 1997 constitution which you so vigorously advocated and campaigned
for, renders Koro's family hapless in their pursuit for justice for their
son." Halifa's reply to this assertion was bordered on the inscrutable and
the periphery of Orwellian double speak. He wrote: "in my view, I had lived
under the 1970 constitution. Hence, if I could get a constitution with more
advanced provisions with the same flaws all the better." I hope this is not
the same Halifa who raved and ranted against the interventionist Senegalese
forces and subsequently the Senegambia Confederation, Jawara's Emergency
Regulations and the Indemnity Act that the PPP used to absolve itself after
the 1981 coup? So if it was a travesty of justice then why not now? If Jawara
fed us dung and the same is being forcibly guzzled down our throat by Jammeh
albeit he adds sugar to it, "all the better." Frankly Halifa disappoints me.
Does this equation of justice add up?
    The fact is that no matter what your politics is, you just have to be
honest to realise how the Indemnity Clause of the 1997 constitution is a
monstrous travesty of justice just like Jawara's Indemnity Act and Emergency
Regulations.
    I assert here again the IRREFUTABLE: that Koro's murderers/killers can
never be brought to trial so long as we have that Indemnity Clause which
renders Koro's family hapless in their quest for justice. Let me see all of
you doubters and Halifa hagiographers refute this assertion. It is a
challenge to you all out there now that the dust has supposedly "settled."
    What continues to puzzle me is Halifa's attempt to shrug this off for the
simple reason that since Jawara was doing it before so Jammeh can do it so
long as he passes some few bobs to us masses we will be "all the better" for
it. Doesn't this reek of those vestiges of anti-Jawara sentiments we kept
being entertained with the during the transition whenever Rights were
trampled upon? I hope your "compatriot" Koro hears this; believe me he would
turn in his grave.
    I look forward to your debunking of my aforementioned assertions. Happy
holidays.
Cordially,
Hamjatta Kanteh

hkanteh