By Mama A. Touray
Authorities of the Supreme Islamic Council are expected to help in fixing the unresolved caste problems in the country after they got trained by the National Human Right Commission on sensitising the hard-hit communities.
Speaking at a news conference held in Kotu on Tuesday, the human rights commission chairman Emmanuel Daniel Joof said: ”There have been a training of religious leaders and the caste system and one of the flagships of our program really is to settle the issues of caste system in this country.”
He added: “there have been issues relating to cast especially in the URR of the country, although the caste system you find it in The Gambia right across, you will discover that it causes so many issues and that necessitated the NHRC to come up with a task force.”
“In this task force we have key stakeholders like the Ministry of Interior, Regional Local Government, TANGO, Ministry of Justice and Supreme Islamic Council takes the leadership. This is because in these communities we are talking about it is almost 100 percent Muslims and it is therefore important that we involve the Supreme Islamic Council and the religious leaders to talk about Islam as well,” he stated.
According to him, caste system is still a concern and as far as discrimination and slavery is concern, “we believe that by using the religious leaders which are practice by those members in those various communities we will be able to put a stop to it.”
He went on explained that caste system is in such a way that certain people are classified either by their surnames or the profession they belong to and if you belong to some of the caste you cannot even get some of the rights. He said that they trained the media about capacity building, human rights and ethical reporting of the code of conduct of the police and guidelines of public assemblies which was validated and we conducted a training of trainers on how to implement the training of code of conduct and the guidelines of the public assemblies.