Saturday, August 6, 2016

U.K. endorses U.N Adviser's condemnation of Jammeh's use of inflammatory rhetoric against Mandinka ethnic group

UK Ambassador to UN- Mr. Mathew  Rycroft 
United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations, Mathew Rycroft, is the latest to join the growing voices of concern over Yaya Jammeh's increasing use of inflammatory language that has been described by the U.N Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide as "dangerous and irresponsible" when he threatened members of the Mandinka ethic group with expulsion and extermination because they are considered his "enemies and foreigners."

The UK government, through its United Nation's Mission has expressed its support of Mr. Adama Dieng's condemnation of Jammeh's incitement of violence against an ethnic group by none other than the president of the country. The stigmatization and threats against the Mandinkas by Jammeh was equally condemned by Ambassador Rycroft.  The deplorable record of the Jammeh regime was also came under scrutiny and condemnation from the United Kingdom.

The U.K position was welcomed by the human rights community as well as many dissident groups abroad.  Predictably, the same cannot be said of a small band of renegades represented by the Deputy Head of Gambia's United Nation's Mission who has taken it upon himself - and over the head of the Ambassador - to spew incomprehensible and disjointed rebuttals every time the Jammeh regime is criticized.

If such rebuttals are meant to advance the interests of Yaya Jammeh and his regime, they are far from achieving them.  We do not see how applying the pejorative and derogatory epithet (Uncle Tom) to describe an African - more precisely, a Senegalese - for performing his international duties as Adviser to the U.N. Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide can be helpful to Yaya Jammeh's cause.

Or referring to the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations as one of the "dangerous people" whom the U.N. Secretary General should be "wary" of because they are "dangerous people constantly posing a threat to world peace and security"on the sole premise that he served as Private Secretary to former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, an ally to President George W. Bush the architect of the Iraq War.  The use of such coarse language is unacceptable and has no place in modern diplomacy.

Unfortunately, insults and an assortment of petulant behavior have become the trademark of a regime that has little respect for good and decent behavior.  And when Jammeh told the Secretary General of the United Nations to "go to hell", it unleashed the Deputy Mission head at Gambia's U.N. Mission - an unhinged character in his own right - to incessantly attack with hollow verbosity anyone who dares criticize or oppose the corrupt and incompetent regime of Yaya Jammeh.