Return-path: [log in to unmask] From: [log in to unmask] Full-name: HKanteh Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 13:29:18 EST Subject: Re: Question for Hamjatta & Saul To: [log in to unmask] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Windows AOL sub 32 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