Ambassador Jackson May Not Be Telling Us the Full Story

The American Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Robert Jackson, is reported to have told some students on the Wa campus of the University of Development Studies (UDS), that he was “surprised” to learn that the two Saudi-born Yemeni terror suspects resettled in Ghana by the erstwhile Obama Administration have been granted refugee status (See “US Ambassador Shocked by Refugee Status of GITMO 2” MyJoyOnline.com / Modernghana.com 1/30/18). The actual word used by the editors of MyJoyOnline.com, as parenthetically captured in the preceding reference, was “shocked.” What this means is that Ambassador Jackson likely expected former President John Dramani Mahama to have acted more wisely by, perhaps, waiting until the 2-year resettlement agreement with the Obama Administration had elapsed. Ghana would then still have had the final say in deciding whether to let Messrs. Mahmud Umar Muhammed Bin-Atef and Khalid Muhammed Salih Al-Dhuby continue to stay in the country or relocate to another country.

What Ambassador Jackson is not saying, because international diplomacy precludes him from revealing, is the fact that former President Mahama and Ms. Hanna Tetteh, the Foreign Minister under the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), may very well have broken the agreement that allowed the two terror suspects to be resettled in the country, after having been detained by the United States’ government at the Guantanamo Bay Maximum-Security Prison, Cuba, for more than a decade. In other words, if sanity and respect for the law had been allowed to prevail, the power to determine the final destination or residential fate of Messrs. Bin-Atef and Al-Dhuby would have been made a part of the handing-over-notes that Mr. Mahama and his exiting team prepared for the incoming Akufo-Addo team.

If the preceding observation has validity, what this means is that Ghana would still have retained the right to return the Gitmo 2 to their original captors, namely, the United States, at the very least. Unfortunately, the woefully premature and criminally mischievous granting of refugee status to these two men automatically empowers them to invoke international law to back up their desire to live and work in Ghana permanently, unless, of course, Messrs. Bin-Atef and Al-Dhuby could be found to have criminally breached the laws of their host country. But what is even more significant to highlight here is the paradoxical fact that even while asserting that Messrs. Bin-Atef and Al-Dhuby had been carefully screened before being resettled in Ghana, that Ambassador Jackson was still flabbergasted to learn, like the rest of us ordinary Ghanaian citizens, that these “carefully screened” non-terrorist terror suspects had, nevertheless, been granted refugee status and Ghanaian passports! Now, we are literally left holding the “shit-bowl” of and for the Americans.

What interests me most here is Ambassador Jackson’s assertion that the Chief Diplomatic Representative of the United States had not been consulted prior to former President Mahama’s “illegally” granting refugee status to the GITMO 2. Couple the foregoing with Mr. Jackson’s expression of “surprise” or “shock,” and the unspoken but, nonetheless, deafening subtext is that had the United States been consulted on this issue, Messrs. Bin-Atef and Al-Dhuby would likely not have been granted refugee status. And on the latter count must be vividly recalled the fact that the GITMO 2, so-called, had been captured in the killing fields of Afghanistan, in the jolly company of Mr. Osama Bin-Laden, late, and the Taliban warlords, and not raucously celebrating their birthday parties or wedding fiestas. In other words, any strict definition of “refugee” would likely not capture the activities of these Saudi-born Yemeni natives at the time of their capture. And this is the caliber of humans that the likes of Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa would have Ghanaians believe qualify as prime candidates to be casually integrated into our society.

I have said this before and hereby repeat the same, that our immunity-hobbling 1992 Republican Constitution ought to be promptly revised and radically amended in order to make impenitent and pathological scofflaws like former President Mahama and his pathologically self-serving Abongo Boys and Girls face the full-throated music of justice.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
January 30, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]