Nigeria: a nation in fear of becoming the next Rwanda
The #bringbackourgirls campaign has gripped the world's attention. But
why has the country's horror story gone unheard until now?

Harmony and horror: children of both Muslim and Christian faiths at
Yolde-Kohi primary school Photo: Tom Saater
 By Colin Freeman
7:00AM BST 10 May 2014
Yayirus Abel, a disc jockey and bar owner, never saw the faces of the
masked Islamist gunmen who rampaged through his home town of Ganye in
eastern Nigeria. But as he recalls how they shot him at point-blank
range, one detail about their appearance sticks in his mind. None of
them looked older than 14.
"They were standing with Kalashnikovs and chanting 'Allah Akhbar' (God
is Great)," he said this week as he sat outside the charred remains of
Racey's, a mudhut disco the gunmen torched. "But while they had masks
on, you could see how small and thin they were – the one who shot me
was just a kid."
Local DJ Yayirus Abel (TOM SAATER FOR THE TELEGRAPH)
Yayirus was one of the lucky ones. Either because of the teen gunmen's
inexperience, or through sheer good luck, he got away with just a
bullet through his shoulder. One of his employees died after being
shot in the back and stomach, and 24 others in Ganye also perished as
the attackers laid waste to the church, bank, prison and police
station. A year on, the police station is still being rebuilt, with a
sign outside that says it was "destroyed by unknown gunmen".
No one, indeed, knows for certain who was responsible. But ask around
Ganye, and few doubt that it was the work of Boko Haram, the Islamic
militant group that has claimed responsibility for the abduction of
276 schoolgirls from a boarding school in Chibok in Nigeria's
north-eastern Borno State.
For while the group's threats to use the girls as child-brides is a
new tactic, it already has a long history of press-ganging young boys
into service as child-soldiers. The brainwashing is done via radical
Islam rather than witchcraft or drugs, but otherwise the group bears
chilling similarities to Africa's other sinister death cult, Joseph
Koni's Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.
Until last month's mass kidnapping, though, its members had terrorised
Nigeria largely unnoticed by the outside world. The attack in Ganye,
which took place in March last year, was just one of hundreds of
atrocities that the group has inflicted around its heartlands in
north-east Nigeria since its campaign began five years ago.
In that time it has killed about 4,000 people and forced some half a
million to flee their homes, creating vast swaths of ghost towns
across Nigeria's arid north. In the capital, Abuja, and the
megalopolis of Lagos, meanwhile, car bombs have become yet another
hardship alongside the grinding poverty that is daily life for the 170
million inhabitants of Africa's most populous nation.
The kidnapping of the 276 girls – which Amnesty International
yesterday claimed Nigerian security officials were warned about but
failed to act upon – might have been ignored too, had it not become
the subject of two very different social-media campaigns. The first
was a Twitter-based support group, sparked by public anger at the
Nigerian government's initially slow response, which gained an
international following under the hashtag #bringbackourgirls.
But it was the second – the work of Boko Haram itself – that
inadvertently galvanised world powers into pledging to get them back.
In a horrific propaganda video released on Monday, leader Abubakar
Shekau vowed to auction his captives as "slaves".
Abubakar Shekau delivers his horrific speech
"I will sell them in the market, by Allah," he cackled to the camera,
dressed in military fatigues. "I will marry off a woman at the age of
12. I will marry off a girl at the age of nine."
Whether Shekau actually has the hostages is still unconfirmed. Some
Nigerians speculate that it might be an elaborate hoax to discredit
their government, wondering how such a large number of captives could
possibly remain undetected for so long.
But the tape alone, with its taunting, sexual overtones, has been
enough to convince the international community. Within hours, offers
of help to find the hostages came in from Washington and Downing
Street, and in the days since, Michelle Obama and Angelina Jolie have
been among those to voice their concern. Almost overnight, Nigeria's
long-ignored insurgency has become a celebrity cause.
From left: Michelle Obama, Cara Delevingne and Malala Yousafzai call
for the girls to be returned
It will, however, take more than Hollywood's finest and offers of
Western military advice to end the threat posed by Boko Haram. Like
most Islamic militant groups, it works partly by portraying modern,
secular government as corrupt and immoral. And in the case of Nigeria,
that is not a difficult argument to make. Despite being the world's
eighth-largest oil producer, half a century after independence from
Britain it is still desperately poor – especially in the
Muslim-dominated north, where 70 per cent of people live on less than
a dollar a day.
So when a cleric named Mohammed Yusuf formed Boko Haram in Borno's
dusty capital, Maiduguri, in the late Nineties, he quickly gained a
following. Not only did he seek to impose traditional Sharia (law),
with flogging and amputations, he also wanted all secular education
banned from Nigeria – the name Boko Haram translates roughly as
"Western education is sinful".
"The group's upper leaders are driven by the desire to turn Nigeria
into a theocratic state," said Shehu Sani, a civil rights activist who
has tried to hold peace talks with the group. "But the footsoldiers
are simply conscripts from poor and destitute families."
In its early years, Boko Haram gained the ear of the north's
governors, several of whom imposed moderate versions of Sharia in
their states, albeit sometimes simply as a cynical election ploy.
But they drew the line at Yusuf's hardline vision, and when some of
his followers began taking up arms, the Nigerian government responded
in typically robust fashion. In a battle in Maiduguri in 2009 that
cost 600 lives, the security forces demolished the group's mosque and
detained hundreds of Boko Haram supporters, including Yusuf. He died
in custody shortly afterwards, in what is widely believed to have been
a cold-blooded execution.
Claims from the then information minister, Dora Akunyili, that Yusuf's
death was "the best thing that could have happened to Nigeria" proved
to be anything but true. Surviving members fled north to Chad, Mali
and Niger, where they received training from al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb, and by 2012 Boko Haram was back, pursuing not just local
vengeance but also a transnational jihadist agenda. Into Yusuf's shoes
as leader, meanwhile, stepped his former acolyte Shekau, a much more
hardline figure whose furious video rants make the late Osama bin
Laden look almost statesmanlike by comparison.
"He comes across as completely insane, and that accentuates the risk,"
said Lawan Abana, a relative of one the kidnapped girls. "You cannot
predict his behaviour. He is just a sadist out to kill."
Under Shekau, the group has stepped up its campaign, buying up weapons
that flooded into the Sahara after Libya's civil war and mounting
constant hit-and-runs on Nigeria's ill-equipped military. It has also
committed several classroom massacres, forcing hundreds of schools
across the region to shut. The one in Chibok where last month's
abduction took place had only opened so that its pupils could sit
exams.
One reason why such horrors have gained so little outside attention is
the sheer difficulty of reporting them. Much of the north-east is now
effectively in Boko Haram's control, rendering it off-limits even to
most Nigerian reporters, who must contend not just with Boko Haram
checkpoints but those run by the military, which does not encourage
prying eyes.
This week, though, The Telegraph was able to visit the group's newest
area of activity, the state of Adamawa on eastern Nigeria's
mountainous border with Cameroon. A lush region of rivers, green
plains and baobab trees, its roughly even balance of Christians and
Muslims mostly live in peace. But that is now under threat from the
militants, who have taken to launching sectarian raids from hideouts
in the area's densely wooded peaks. Their assault on Ganye last year
included defacing St Martin's church, a short walk from Mr Abel's
bar-disco.
"They came into our compound firing guns in the air, forcing everyone
to flee during prayers," said Emmanuel Matthias, 38, the parish
priest. "When they had gone, we found they had put a motorbike on the
altar and set fire to it, as well as taking all the clothes from the
vestry and burning them. These people have no respect for religion of
any kind, and no fear of God – that is the only way they can enter a
place of worship and destroy it. It has not deterred our Christian
community from coming to church, but they do now live in fear."
Parish priest Emmanuel Matthias (TOM SAATER FOR THE TELEGRAPH)
By a quirk of fate, Adamawa is also home to one of the most prominent
institutions of Western education in sub-Saharan Africa – the American
University of Nigeria. Founded in 2005 by Atiku Abubakar, a Muslim
former vice-president who is himself US-educated, it has a vast campus
on the outskirts of the state capital, Yola, and is dedicated to
precisely the kind of open, critical thinking that Boko Haram opposes.
For that reason, it has a 400-strong team of security guards.
"Adamawa has a history of being a place of harmony, where people of
different religious backgrounds have lived for a long time," said
Margee Ensign, the university's president. "No one wants that to
change."
In the past two years, the university has run a peace initiative,
training locals in mediation techniques and looking after refugees
from further north, who get little government aid. But while calm has
so far prevailed, the fear remains that Boko Haram is trying to
provoke Christian-Muslim bloodshed, bouts of which have cost thousands
of lives elsewhere in Nigeria over the decades. Memories of Rwanda run
deep.
It is with that scenario in mind that British and US experts arrived
in Abuja yesterday to assist the Nigerian government, which has
traditionally been reluctant to accept Western military help. Although
the priority is to rescue the missing girls, the Foreign Office
confirmed that the UK team will consider "longer-term
counter-terrorism solutions to prevent such attacks in future and
defeat Boko Haram". As Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan, put it
last week: "I believe that the kidnap of these girls will be the
beginning of the end of terror in Nigeria."
Yet the team of British counter-terrorism experts could be in for a
long stay. For while the decision to enlist military aid might one day
culminate in Shekau being hit by a US drone missile, it may also act
as a magnet for other jihadists from black Africa, such as Somalia's
al-Shabab.
Meanwhile, schools across the region live in fear of being the next to
get a visit from Boko Haram – another challenge for an education
system that has more than its fair share of problems.
Habu Umara is a teacher at the Yolde-Kohi primary school outside Yola,
where this week 50 young pupils were learning maths in a shack with
barely any seats and half the roof falling down. "Some of my pupils'
parents have said that if the abducted girls don't get rescued, they
will take their own girls out of school," he said. "They are waiting
for the news."
So, too, is the rest of Nigeria. And now the wider world as well.
http://www.google.ca/gwt/x?gl=CA&hl=en-CA&u=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/nigeria/10819625/Nigeria-a-nation-in-fear-of-becoming-the-next-Rwanda.html&source=s&q=Nigeria:+is+it+the+next+Rwanda%3F
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