Just as in the past, reading through Sabally’s latest article, this time paying a tribute to his buddy the late Sadibou Haidara once again drove my emotions on a rollercoaster of disbelief, anger and excruciating resistance to respond. Anyhow I couldn’t bear it this time.

 I have always asked myself what in the world has Sabally been smoking to be coming here trying to project his image and that of his collaborators as being victims of an evil conspiracy that has ultimately turned them into believable preachers and saints. Punctuating his language with references quoted from various scriptures, particularly from the Quran and Bible doesn’t exonerate him from the terror he had unleashed in The Gambia during the six months he had served as Vice Chairman of the AFPRC government. And juxtaposing the outrageous crimes he had committed as Vice Chairman and the punishments he was given by being locked up for nine years was, to me, rather disproportionate in volume and intensity. If justice was served accordingly, Sabally and Haidara’s track record of brutality, irrationality and of course terror in the early days of the AFPRC government should have fittingly sent them straight to a gallows or firing squad. With the guns in their hands as their only advantage over their preys, these predators had arrested, tortured and killed their fellow officers in a way that had defied all human reasoning.

Mr. Sabally needs to be constantly reminded that his crimes against his countrymen that had bordered on genocide in some cases are not just still fresh in our minds but that most of them were documented and filed for possible future reference. When he mentioned being arrested on false charges of treason on January 27, 1995, he certainly couldn’t imagine that I was peeping from my cell room, Confinement Block #2 of the Mile Two Central Prison at the exact minute he and Haidara were herded in on cuffs by their associate in crime Edward Singhateh.

I had looked at my timepiece that morning and to my amazement it was around 9.30 am.

Amazing in the sense that exactly six months before, on that same date and time July 27, 1994 at around 9.30 am, Sabally and Haidara had shackled Captain Mamat Cham, Major Malick Njie, ASP Abou Jeng and me into that same dungeon with no charges or reasons given for that bastardization.

And we were not the only four innocent officers subjected to that terror by those two thugs and lunatics, but in that hell house epitomizing human degradation were over thirty-four other officers who had suffered tremendously for nothing Sabally could explain today.

However, as if incarcerating us was not enough punishment for committing no definitive crime, Sabally on September 6, 1994 had converged at the prisons with his Council members and armed guards at 1.00 am to orchestrate one of the most brutal orgy of torture on three helpless officers. By the time they left, over an hour later with promises of coming back the next morning for more brutality, most of us were left with the impression that the three officers had died of their injuries. Bludgeoned with wooden AK 47 butts, and trampled upon with iron studded boots, these officers were handcuffed, punched and kicked on the cement floor with what seemed as a calculated attempt to at least murder one of them.

And my records still show that Haidara and Sabally had passionately named the jailhouse their “Hotel Teranga” with stern injunctions to the prison guards not to ever allow any sick or injured detainee to be taken to the hospital (RVH) for any kind of treatment even if our lives had depended on it.

Sgt. Musa Manneh, an ordinary driver who had committed no known crime was paralyzed out of severe emotional distress after being informed that his father had died and wouldn’t be allowed by Sabally and Haidara to attend the funeral. Captain James Johnson had metal screws holding together his fractured hip sustained from a vehicle accident that had worsened by the day for sleeping on the hard plywood beds supported by concrete slabs in our cells; but as their draconian rules further stipulated, comfort in any form or shape was absolutely forbidden.

I could go on and on from one page of my voluminous diary to the other with recorded incidents of Sabally and Haidara inflicting endless pain and suffering to people and their families who had done nothing wrong other that perhaps being at the wrong place and time while they were on the rampage.

Talking about being framed with his friend Haidara and wrongly thrown in jail, I think we need to remind Sabally of their atrocities committed on November 11, 1994; the Gambians are still trying to understand and reconcile the magnitude of the terror, lies and shamelessness they had perpetrated that dense macabre.

Although the incident had found me in jail, I was later able to investigate and document every detail of what happened, especially the role played by Sabally and his fellow Council members in the unwarranted death of Barrow, Saye and the others. When Saye’s father denied the death of his son in a firefight that was peddled by the government in a bid to conceal his summarily execution at Silo Forest, it was Haidara who threatened the old man with the same fate as that of his son if he had attempted to dispute their lies and fabrications. By the way, was it not Haidara who drove a nine-millimeter pistol into the rectum of Faal and fired the shots that ruptured his internal organs leaving him to die in a long painful death? How would Sabally justify that in “Suratul Bahara”?  Let him spare us the toxic garbage. It is not as if he is reflecting on things that had happened centuries ago. The live witnesses are still alive and the story will all be told in its true context.

Characterizing Haidara as a conscientious religious martyr as Sabally was trying to impress on those who did not know his true legacy as an AFPRC Councilman would tantamount to calling Lucifer, Saint. No amount of spinning the truth now with that hypocritical tendency of being a scholar of the scriptures will undo the evil deeds done by Sabally and Haidara in the six long months they had been tested with absolute power in their hands. Thank God it was only six months or else the damage would have been irreparable.