OP

Team Outpost

Alagie Saidy-Barrow, former TRRC Investigator has called on the government of President Adama Barrow to take a new paradigm shift towards tackling crime rates in the country. 

In his regular contribution on Coffee Time show on Tuesday, he said keeping data on crime will help reduce the high rate of crimes in the country. 

“Keeping statistic on crime is critical in internal security. Not that does this guides authorities or resource allocation, but it also helps with the formulation of crime policies. 

Importantly data on  crime rates helps with the perception of crime trends,” he said 

Statistic on crime and development he said,  can be very political. 

“We have reduce our security matters into partisan politics. Instead of a holistic debate in crime and its cause and consequences, it becomes an emotionally charged and minds of back of forth without any substance”. 

He continued: “given the lack of centralised crime data base. The level of crime in The Gambia becomes a matter of perspectives and not facts. 

The safety and security of the people deserves better that that,” 

He recounted the number of unaccounted crimes committed during the former government of Yahya Jammeh. 

“I remember how so many of my colleagues were shot at the number of an unaccounted when we worked on an enforced Disappearances during the dark days of the APRC government. 

We were unable to get any accurate data on the number of Disappearances but we at least manage  to lay hands on the files of over one hundred missing persons in The Gambia. 

When people think that crime is rampant it creates an atmosphere of fear. And the population leaves in fear of each other. And that in itself creates insecurity,” he said. 

Hr added: “our idea of security is limited to thieves not being able to break into our houses, whilst our government central theme is how to maintain their government positions and privileges. 

A place is not secure when food is scarce, a person cannot be secure knowing that when they sick they cannot afford good health care. A person cannot be secure when they have no income. 

We should take a pause and see who are secure ones among us. They are the very people who claim to be working for us. They are secure but the majority of us are not” he concluded.

By Pa Louis Sambou

For most people, the Israel - Palestine question is probably the one conflict whose ugly scenes of horror has regularly appeared before their screens for a period of time spanning their entire lifetime. Although not the only unresolved historic territorial question, it is certainly the only none-frozen one, which fact probably explains why it evokes strenuous opinion from even folks afar, with Gambians not an exception. Whether pro Israel or pro Palestine, far too many well-meaning people the world over, find themselves holding very strong views on this subject matter, but which position is in most cases predominantly driven and sustained by subjective factors and considerations. A particular news article which I recently came across on a Gambian newspaper, exhibited a spectacular example and presentation of this phenomenon. 

Without offering a line by line review of the news article in question, which is definitely not the objective of this article, I will draw out a key substance from it which is of relevance to the question at hand: Comments attributed to the individual named and quoted in the news article states: 

“the UK, above all else, must be held responsible for this conflict since they were the colonial power in Palestine and also because they were the ones who granted Palestine as a home for Jews in 1917.”

This claim incorrectly implies that: the respective territories were part of the British empire, and that Jews did not form part of the indigenous population prior to the stated period, and that Palestine was granted to Israel by the UK. However, as is elucidated in the subsequent detail below, there is no credible factual or historical basis to these broad-brush claims. 

The United Nations publication, Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 has it that, following World War 1 (WW1) and the subsequent fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the Middle East territories which the Ottomans controlled, came under British and French control. Effectively, the territories which today constitute Israel and Palestine, were under British control as part of this arrangement which rather than being colonialism in the name of the British Crown, was a mandate which had the support and formal approval of the League of Nations (subsequently the United Nations). In view of these historical facts, in addition to the claim that Palestine was a British colony being historically inaccurate, it considerably misconstrues the nature of British colonialism, and inadvertently downplays the adversities suffered by, and does injustice to parts of the world which were arbitrarily occupied in the name of the British Crown and subject to the control of its imperial authority without the benefit of an international instrument, and a third party arbiter such as the League of Nations as was the case with the Palestine British mandate. Furthermore, without taking too much of a pivot away from the subject, it is of historical relevance to elaborate on the backdrop against which this arrangement emerged: WW1 broke, and the Allied European powers, Britain, France and Russia sought to defeat the Central powers (Germany, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire and Bulgaria) with whom they were at war, and on the other hand, the Arabs who were under the colonial subjugation of the Ottoman Turks, wanted Arab independence. This was especially so, following the coup in 1908 by the Young Turks (also the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide) who subsequently embarked on a Turkification policy throughout the Ottoman Empire which policy most Arabs felt threatened their distinctive cultures. It was against this backdrop that the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire and the European Allied powers conspired to pursue their mutual interests of bringing the Ottoman Empire to its knees, subsequently giving rise to everything else which followed including the emergence of new Arab countries and monarchies as exists today. So, contrary to what the news article in question implies, rather than a coloniser, Britain was a strategic collaborator (with the respective Arab figureheads) against the Ottoman Turks’s colonial interests and ambitions.

In addition to the above, according to the Institute for Palestine Studies, in the first century after the Ottoman conquest of the territories, the Jewish population in Jerusalem “dropped from 1,330 in 1525 to 980 in 1587”. The same source also details that, when the Ottomans designated the three districts of Palestine, although the majority of its 600,000 inhabitants were Muslims, and 10% Christians, “25,000 of its inhabitants were Jews”, which historical fact is also consistent with the fact that the territories host historical and spiritual sites which are of significance to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. As these historical facts abundantly evidence that, the territories have at all material times in historical memory, always been inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Jews, it is therefore entirely inaccurate to suggest that the presence of Jewish people in Palestine (or modern day Israel), is a feature or relic of the historically nonexistent British ‘colonialism’ in Palestine. 

For the avoidance of historical doubt, contrary to popular warped belief, the historical facts on World Atlas indicate that no contemporary western power had any colonies in the Middle East (not to be confused with South East Asia), as that part of the world has been under Ottoman rule since around the year 1517, and right through to 1922 when the Ottoman Empire was officially ended, having been defeated alongside its WW1 allies Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire and Bulgaria.

On the third claim regarding the granting of Palestine to the Jews by the British as the “colonial power”, although a widely held view, this is merely an assumption if not a myth. Britain’s administration of the territories (which constituted modern day Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and modern day Jordan which was carved out as an independent country in May 1946, towards the tail end of the British mandate) was mandated and governed by the League of Nations’ approved mandate for Palestine 1922, Article 2 of which 13 - page international instrument, mandated for the “establishment of a Jewish national home” as follows: 

“The mandate shall be responsible for placing the country under such political; administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”

Further to the above, the British administration of this mandate ended in 1947, and the successor to the League of Nations (the UN general assembly), passed  resolution 181(II) to partition the Palestinian territories and create the State of Israel, which subsequently became a recognised country in 1948. It is therefore entirely inaccurate to characterise the events so as to suggest that “the UK” was responsible for handing over Palestinian land to the Jews for them to establish modern day Israel. No prejudice intended, but quite clearly, the claim in contention could not be further from reality.

The news article went on to quote the author of the inaccurate historical claims, also making reference to the Balfour Declaration as being the authority upon whose basis the State of Israel was created. The declaration is a historical fact, however, it carried no such weight. If it did, then unless it is the author’s claim that the international community was completely unaware of the existence of such declaration, the League of Nations would have had no course to institute the mandate for Palestine in 1922 as set out earlier in this article, nor would the UN have any course to pass resolution 181(II) to create the State of Israel, which it subsequently recognised.

For additional contextual information, I would draw your attention to the armed Zionist groups which emerged and operated within the territories during the time period of the British mandate. These armed Zionist groups did not spare the British, the wrath of their violence and carnage; a significant historic example of such is the 1946 bombing of the King David hotel in Jerusalem by these, which killed and injured British personnel among other innocent victims. So, if the British government indeed acted in cahoots with these, with the objective of “granting Palestine” to them as the news article inaccurately suggests, then the Zionist armed groups (which the British authorities rightly designated as terrorists and pursued accordingly) would certainly not have actively sought to target British interests in Palestine during that period, would they? Surely, the fatal encounters which rout

By Sheriff Saidykhan

Momodou Gassama, of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that one in every eight person in the world has a mental health disorder. 

He made these remarks on Thursday at a press briefing, held at Kanifing in collaboration with the Ministry of Health  on the Mental Health draft Bill. 

“Which means one billion of the world population  has a mental health disorder” he said.

He said two per cent of the global health ministries budgets are pumped into the mental health disorders. 

“All the health Ministries, and compile all their mental health budgets together. Only two per cent of world health budgets goes to mental health disorder.

 In some countries it is far less that that. Some 0.5 per cent  of their budgets goes into mental health” he revealed. 

He added that the world is not doing ‘enough’ to tackle global mental health disorders. 

“The world is not doing enough to address the needs. The mental health is high, and the response are slow,”

He said people reeling with mental health disorders lack the services of treatment. 

“Fifty per cent of people with chronic mental health disorders, don\