Religious law, morality, customs and traditions, and the modern civil law of our country exist to defend the 5 fundamental freedoms of any individual: the protection of his life, the protection of his honor, the protection of his goods (property), the protection of his faith (belief) and protection his spirit (his thought, his ideas and opinions). The protection of these 5 freedoms is the foundation of any law. They are necessary for any individual and any society.
Their repression stifles the ways of expression of the man by which he produces in society. When someone is unjustly deprived of it, we are all targeted. We must all oppose it. The arrest of Simon Faye de la Sen TV is an infringement of the freedom to think and inform.
No remarks by Simon Faye caused public disorder, although acts of disorder would have been the responsibility of those who commit them. He is an honorable journalist, neither provocateur nor a source of destabilization of civil peace or our institutions. It does not matter that Simon Faye is not the author of the article of which he is accused of being the source, regardless of the author, his arrest and his police custody are the bullying of the press and an attempt to pack the Senegalese to live in the fear of their own opinions, as long as they vex the Prime Minister ousmane Sonko or tarnish his image. The susceptibility or the annoyance of a Prime Minister are not sufficient reasons to pursue a citizen or journalist, even less to hold him in police custody. It is an abuse that deny the speech of the President of the Republic, during his last interview with the press. He tried to make us believe that the arrests have never been linked to his PM.
His tongue has rail. All observers know that the PM is the source of these arrests, it does not matter that it has formally requested an action or not from the DIC or the prosecutor to act. It is the characteristic of the regimes of terror that the latter act without order in zealous agents, dedicated to the defense of the image and the appearances of the supreme authorities. This makes no difference whether these authorities give order or not. Their tacit deposit justifies all their zeal. The declaration of the President of the Republic, by denying the facts, endorsed the continuation of a practice that some believed to be a temporary dysfunction. Unfortunately, the intimidation and instrumentalization of the DIC as a political police continue. The Senegalese expected that these practices disappear definitively.
Is it enough to recall that:
Every citizen is free to look at all the facts of his society, say and write what he thinks of public action and his authorities which implement it, without having to justify himself. Any Senegalese citizen, a fortiori a journalist, intellectual, thinker, analyst who produces gray matter, is free to write and publish his reflections, analyzes and interpretations of facts. He is free to read, interpret, describe, characterize, qualify these facts according to his understanding, his own ideological inclinations, his pessimistic or optimistic penchant, his imagination, his illusions, his desires, his ambitions, his fears, his feelings. All this forms his mind.
-He can publish them, share them, discuss them, correct them, maintain them or disavow them afterwards. All of this is freedom to think, citizen dialectic and intellectual rights. He can criticize directly and namely Ousmane Sonko or Diomaye Faye, or any other. He can read and even qualify his trip to Abidjan as he sees, thinks and performer. He can read his visit to the general Caliph as a political act. He can interpret his decrees as abuses of power. He can judge his inaction as fear. He can suspect him of not telling the truth. He can bear it, flatter it or wither as he wants. The new leaders should rather accept with honor these easements of their function. They are subject to the general circumspection. It is a servitude of public mandates. They should know what has become of them, work, stop being susceptibility and stop wasting the time and resources of the DIC which, in turn, should devote themselves to more important things for the safety of Senegalese than the Peccadils of the Prime Minister.
The economic sufferings of the Senegalese are dramatic as they remain enduring. They do not care if Sonko is summoned to Abidjan, London, Bamako or elsewhere. And he should take inspiration from their resilience and be gossip of things that are only speculation. Moreover, if it annoys it or requires being clarified, it is free to react to rectify. This dialectic is a citizen, public, fundamental in the space of republican freedom. Any action of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister or a Minister or Director who, it must be remembered, are public functions conferred on behalf and for the people, cannot escape this freedom of judgment, criticism, analysis and assessment, whatever the author’s perspective, is positive or negative, speculative, descriptive, true or false.
The desire to repress the law of citizens and journalists to say what they think of the actions of the authorities really reflects a deep intellectual handicap on the part of the current regime.
Their acts of repression to curb the freedom to inform Senegalese will be buried by the long step of this country towards more freedom, and no less freedom. Even more freedom. The rights consubstantial with the freedom of men are supra constitutional and unalterable. You have to be true, noble, just to govern men and respect their unalterable rights. You have to have an empty memory of history to believe that terror could end the propensity of men to criticize what is happening before their eyes, in their own countries. It is necessary to have a vacant memory to believe that the prison, the DIC and the convictions will be right for the determination of the Senegalese to think and write without any prior permission. The two Siamese brothers who govern should more read the history of men and societies. They should be inspired by the prophets whose beard and posture they cultivate, but do not keep any authentic trait if we judge by intimidation, arbitrary imprisonment and increasingly clear judicial instrumentalization as a way of settling of accounts and strategy of control of public opinion by attacking the spaces of freedom of the press.
Authentic prophets and revolutionaries are first of all liberators who expand and deepen the rights of their contemporaries and the society they want to transform. We remember them like those who have freed the men and women of unjust yokes. The governance of the current regime is a disappointment from this point of view of public freedoms.
There is still time to rectify. You have to let intellectual and democratic liveliness live from its dynamism, without trying to suppress it. This cannot take place without a real free press. The editorial line of a newspaper is its choice. For or against power, it is also his choice.
The Senegalese expect anything else from the DIC, the prosecutor and the PM than to prosecute Simon Faye.
Amadou Gueye
President of the United
