Thursday, March 5, 2015

"We congratulated only the people of the Gambia, not Jammeh says Obama Administration

It did not take long for the Obama administration to distance itself from a claim by the Gambian dictator that he was "felicitated" by the U.S. President on the occasion of the Gambia's 50th Anniversary of its independence from Britain in 1965.

The administration, on Thursday, denied issuing the letter that said Gambians "have much to celebrate" implying that the Obama administration endorses Jammeh's rule.

In denying that the letter congratulated Yaya Jammeh, the U.S. administration took the trouble of stating that they "continue to have serious differences with the government of the Gambia across a range of issues, including its human rights record."

The Daily Observer, the official mouth piece of the Gambian dictator reported with the blaring headline falsely claiming that "Barack Obama, president of the United States of America has felicitated the Gambian leader, His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Yaya AJJ Jammeh."

Suspicious of the letter, the Gambia activists in the United States and Europe collaborated with the Robert F. Kennedy Center to seek clarification from the Administration regarding both the source and the content of the letter.

It soon became evident that the letter that The Daily Observer quoted was a concoction of the imagination of the editors of a paper whose glaring propaganda and distortions have brought nothing but an embarrassment of an increasingly unpopular regime.

The deliberate distortion of a simple letter that the U.S. routinely issues to countries on their National Days by the Daily Observer has been trending on social media and has become an international scandal that the Jammeh regime could do without.

The Jammeh regime is its own worse enemy because of its persistent desire to seek validation of its existence by publishing routine congratulatory letters from Heads of State that, in normal countries, are not meant for public consumption.