“Bring back our girls” has become the rallying cry in Nigeria as protests continue over the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls from a northern boarding school. On April 14, Islamic militants stormed an all-girl secondary school and seized the students. On Monday, a video was released showing the leader of Boko Haram claiming responsibility. State officials report some of the girls have already been sold off as brides for as little as $12. Others were reportedly forced to marry their abductors, and taken to neighboring Cameroon and Chad. The area in northeastern Nigeria where the girls were kidnapped has been under a state of emergency for nearly a year, and their school was reportedly the only one still open.
Omoyele Sowore talking:
they’re taken away township known as Gwoza, very close to Maiduguri. So what has happened here is that there are two things. The abduction did happen, but the Nigerian government does not want people to know that this abduction took place. And after—the day after it took place, the army came out and said, you know, the girls have been rescued, only for the principal to say this was a big lie. And then, for the first time, the Nigerian army or defense forces did retract that story.
So, the girls, nobody knows their whereabout. President Jonathan says he doesn’t even know where the girls are located, as the chief—the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in Nigeria. And then, people within his Cabinet do not—believe that this is some kind of conspiracy against the president, and as a result, this should not be made a major issue. As a matter of fact, it will be almost three weeks now that the abduction had taken place. We’re just getting to put pressure on him, or he’s responding to pressure, two weeks after. It is likely because of the World Economic Forum that is taking place. So, nothing is known about the whereabout of the girls, and there’s just a lot of speculation as to where they are.
What I know and I can tell the public is that Boko Haram has begun to create its own territory within today—I mean, four countries—Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. So, whenever they do anything, they carry out their own little government within that path. So when they say they are distributed in Niger, no, there’s nothing like Niger, Chad or Cameroon anymore: Boko Haram has its own country now.
Boko Haram are Islamist militants that became really deadly when the Nigerian government in 2009 went and extrajudicially killed their leaders. And there was no—they never got justice. And it was known that this was like mass killing by the Nigerian government of a likely fanatic, but peaceful, group that had schools and preached, you know, that the Islamic—I mean, they want pure Islam to reign in Nigeria. But it was not until the Nigerian police went and killed their leaders that Boko Haram became a big problem for Nigeria and Nigerians.
“Boko Haram” means Western education is a sin. but you’ll be shocked that most of their leaders and operatives are actually graduates, so—and speak fluent English very well, because we talk to—we used to be able to talk to some of them, but now they’ve mostly gone underground and become more deadly.
what we’ve seen now is that they’re increasingly becoming bolder. And like I said, they are creating territory, and they’re becoming a regional problem. In that region of four countries where you have Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria, they are creating a territory there. And they are carrying out more deadly activities, not only in Nigeria, but they will in Cameroon. In Cameroon yesterday, they broke into an army barracks in northern Cameroon and freed one of their two high-profile leaders from an army barrack. They’ve become more audacious, to the extent that when they go for attacks, they actually film the attacks and release the audited video—I mean, edited videos of the attacks. So that tells you that these guys are not joking. We will just wake up one day and find out that these guys have overrun parts of Nigeria, especially northern Nigeria. And they’re coming closer and closer to the south. I mean, in the last three weeks, they’ve bombed a major bus station in Abuja twice. And there was raid this Monday of a primary school, which the police is saying is just armed robbery, but you never know.
Something like 275 people on the Malaysian airliner. The whole world was involved in what happened to this airliner. These are children who have been kidnapped.
if half of the aircraft put in the air to search for debris in the ocean looking for the Malaysian airline was put in this particular part of Nigeria, we would have rescued the girls by now and probably ended the insurgency. But the truth is that, you know, an aircraft is an elite system of transportation. More people probably die in road accidents in Nigeria every day, and nobody cares. But, you know, when you have to deal with rich people, people will have more concern. And, of course, you know, airliners are big businesses around the world. So, but I’m not in any way trying to say that the Malaysian airline crash, or whatever happened to it, is less important than these girls, but I think it would have been fair if the world paid the same amount of attention to finding the girls, you know, and not, in a way, just talking about it, you know, hashtagging it, without really physically trying to rescue the girls. I was listening to President Jonathan. He said he’s going to rescue the girls. But he tells around in the same media chat that he doesn’t know their location. How do you rescue people whose location you can’t even track—I mean, people you can’t even track? So there’s a dilemma for Nigeria.
But this is what we’ve been saying on our website, that this government, the Nigerian government, has been so corrupt, too corrupt, to get anything done. Just two months ago, they fired the Central Bank governor because he said over $50 billion was stolen by the national—Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. Army generals are pocketing moneys meant for buying weapons, motivating soldiers and police, that are supposed to be fighting Boko Haram. We published all of this. We obtained pictures from soldiers who are fighting Boko Haram who have nowhere to sleep, you know, have no water to drink, have no good food to eat. So, Boko Haram is actually better equipped and better motivated than the Nigerian army or the Nigerian police and security forces fighting them. So that’s the major dilemma. You know, this is, again, the outcome of years of corruption that has ravaged Nigeria for the last 50 years, you know, within which over $500 billion was stolen by Nigerian elites, sometimes to buy private jets.
Last June, The New York Times reported on the accounts of Nigerians in the north who accused the military of a terror campaign in their offensive to root out the Boko Haram. The refugees described, quote, “indiscriminate bombing and shooting, unexplained civilian deaths, nighttime roundups of young men by security forces. All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram—a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents—for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it.”
the Nigerian military has always been known for brutality and high-handedness. I was a student activist for years in Nigeria, and we experienced a long period of military rule. They have no respect for human rights, and so I’m not surprised that we’re hearing that. We’ve documented several of these killings, indiscriminate killings of civilians. As a matter of fact, as I mentioned at the beginning of the program, Boko Haram became deadly because of this high-handedness, this reckless, you know, extrajudicial killing of its innocent leaders—innocent members, at that time, of—you know, we won’t say “innocent leaders,” but by the time they were killing them, these guys had not become as deadly as we know now.
— source democracynow.org
Omoyele Sowore, the publisher of SaharaReporters.com.