Tag: boko haram

A report by the Associated Press (AP) shows that Boko Haram members are hoisting black flags in some villages in the North to assert their authority.   

Boko Haram militants are taking over villages in northeastern Nigeria, killing and terrorising civilians and political leaders, witnesses say, as the Islamic fighters make a comeback from a year-long military offensive aimed at crushing them.

Nigeria’s military has insisted that the big influx of troops and a year-old state of emergency in three states that gives them the power to detain suspects, take over buildings and lock down any area has the extremists on the run. But while Boko Haram has in large part been pushed out of cities in the northeast, they have been seizing villages with thatched-roof huts in the semi-arid region where they once held sway, boldly staking their claim by hoisting their black flags with white Arabic lettering.

Nglamuda Ibrahim, a local government official, says the militants hoisted their flags in Ashigashiya, which borders Cameroon, several weeks ago without interference from the security forces.

Muhammed Gavva, a member of one of the vigilante groups formed last year, named another dozen villages that also fell to Boko Haram, also close to the Cameroonian border, with no action taken by Nigerian security forces. He said one road to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state where the military joint task force has its headquarters, is so dangerous that even soldiers don’t dare to travel it.

“We have long informed the military officials about this. They are aware but we don’t know what they are doing about that,” Gavva said. The seized villages are near Gwoza, a regional political centre whose emir was killed in a Boko Haram ambush on his convoy last week.

Borno Gov. Kashim Shettima travelled on Saturday to Gwoza to pay his respects to the fallen traditional leader and was quoted as saying it was a terrifying ride.

“If I say I was not petrified travelling through that … road to Gwoza I would be lying because that road had been designated a no-go area for about two months now due to the incessant attacks and killings that occur there,” the governor was quoted as saying by Information Nigeria, a website. A local journalist who was in the convoy that was escorted by 150 soldiers counted at least 16 towns and villages that were deserted along the 135 kilometre (85 mile) route, according to the local media report.

Shettima earlier told The Associated Press that he was having the accounts of Boko Haram seizing villages investigated and that he couldn’t confirm them.

Gavva said the Islamic rebels exert iron control over the villages.

“They are in charge there. You cannot do anything on your own without their permission. Even if the villagers want to go and till their farmlands, they had to first contact them for permission,” said Gavva. The group doesn’t allow young men to leave their homes, he said.

Civilians frustrated by the military’s apparent inability to combat Boko Haram have formed vigilante groups like Gavva’s. They detain Boko Haram suspects and hand them over to the authorities. The move was supported and encouraged by the authorities. Hundreds of detainees have died in military custody, Amnesty International found in its investigations.

Defence headquarters spokesman Chris Olukolade in the capital Abuja didn’t answer calls to his mobile phone and didn’t reply to an email seeking comment on the village takeovers. The joint task force officers in Maiduguri said they are not authorized to speak to the press.

Since May, the extremists have waged a two-pronged offensive, widening their theatre of operation beyond their home bases in the northeast with bombings in three cities that killed about 250 people while also carrying out near daily attacks on northeast villages, killing 20 people one day, 50 another. On April 15, they grabbed the world’s attention when they kidnapped more than 300 girls from a school from the town of Chibok, in Borno. Chibok community leader Pogu Bitrus says 57 girls escaped by themselves, leaving an estimated 272 still held captive.

Boko Haram started off as a moderate religious sect nicknamed after the shouted refrain of its leader – “Western education is sinful” – who preached that Western influences have corrupted Nigerian society and caused corruption that impoverishes people in the oil-rich nation. Boko Haram seeks to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on Africa’s most populous nation, which is almost evenly divided between the Muslim north and the Christian south.

Thousands of people have been killed in the 5-year-old insurgency, more than 2,000 so far just this year, and an estimated 750,000 Nigerians have been driven from their homes.

One of last polio holdouts,  Nigeria seen to be ‘in best position’ ever to stop the disease’s spread is miles from achieving set target because of challenges posed by Boko Haram insurgency.  

Nigeria is closer than ever before to stopping transmission of the paralysing childhood disease of polio, but world health experts suggest that the Boko Haram insurgency in the north could jeopardise the eradication effort in one of the last countries where the disease prevails.

Medical anthropologist Elisha Renne, of the University of Michigan, say there’s no way to stop the spread of polio without addressing the unrest wrought by Boko Haram, the militant Islamist sect infamous for its kidnapping of more than 200 girls in April.

“The problems are intertwined,” said  Renne, author of The Politics of Polio in Northern Nigeria. “The solution to one is going to contribute to the solution of the other.”

The headquarters of Boko Haram lies in the northern Borno state, the same area where poliovirus transmission continues to frustrate international efforts to wipe out polio.

For the past 26 years, a global campaign has waged war on polio, seeking to make it the second disease in history to be eradicated.

Polio remains endemic in only three countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. But the World Health Organization recently declared a public health emergency for polio after nearly triple the number of cases appeared in the first few months of this year compared to last.

In Nigeria, however, cases have dropped this year to a tenth of what the country recorded by this time last year.

“Collectively, we are in the best position and situation with respect to finally interrupting all poliovirus transmission in Nigeria than we ever have been in history,” said Stephen Cochi, senior adviser on immunization to the director at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Boko Haram’s heartland: Polio central

To date, three cases of polio have been reported in the West African nation. The same period last year saw 22 cases. Worldwide, the case count this year stands at 82, with the majority in Pakistan.

However, the next few months will be critical. The high season for poliovirus transmission in Nigeria lasts from May until August.

The crippling disease continues to thrive in northern Nigeria, in the heartland of Boko Haram, a group that’s plagued the country with violent attacks since 2009.

Boko Haram is believed to be responsible for thousands of deaths in northeastern Nigeria, particularly in the last year or so.

In recent months, the militant group ignited two deadly bombs in the capital of Abuja, killed dozens of security personnel in an attack on a Nigerian military base and massacred dozens of schoolboys.

But it was the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in the northern Borno town of Chibok that’s riveted the world and spurred several Western nations to send intelligence experts to help Nigeria find them. Earlier this week, the Nigerian military said they had located the girls, but won’t attempt a dangerous rescue at this time.

The unrest in Boko Haram’s stronghold in the northeast has also made it difficult to reach the children for vaccinations. Renne notes that Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is forbidden,” has also been opposed to Western-sponsored polio vaccination efforts.

In response the vaccination campaign has resorted to so-called “hit-and-runs,” sending workers guarded by security officers into insecure areas to quickly administer vaccines. Mobile teams are also stationed at transit points along borders of insecure regions to vaccinate those travelling in and out.

Part of the reason it’s hard to vaccinate children in the north – and the reason why Boko Haram has flourished – is the deep and worsening poverty in the largely Muslim region.

Polio vaccination teams in Nigeria have little access to swaths of the north due to insecurity, allowing the disease to continue to threaten the population. (Courtesy of Global Polio Eradication Initiative)

Though Nigeria is one of the world’s biggest oil producers, more than 60 per cent live in poverty. A high portion live in the north.

Many lack basic necessities like water and electricity. Renne says that leads some communities to question government spending on such things as polio vaccines.

In some instances, campaign organizers have drilled boreholes for communities to access water, a way to convince them to allow vaccinations, Renne says.

The insecurity also makes it hard to confirm the true number of polio cases, though Cochi says locals in some areas still manage to communicate with the polio eradication teams.

Cochi says the government-declared state of emergencies in three northern states – Adamawa, Borno and Yobe – has helped immunization efforts, giving teams access to areas when the military goes in.

In March 2013, there were more than 19,000 settlements in Borno state that were inaccessible, but this March, it was down to about 1,900, a reduction of 85 per cent.

“I think that’s been part of the reason why the case count has dropped dramatically even since last year,” said Cochi.

But Renne warns that military action to both contain ongoing violence and suppress opposition to the polio eradication campaign could backfire.

In an upcoming paper to be published in the Africa journal later this year, Renne argues that threatening non-compliant parents with arrest and conducting house-to-house sweeps might breed sympathy for Islamic insurgents.

 

Polio’s ‘dark years’

 

The last decade has been difficult for the Nigerian polio eradication effort.

In 2003-2004, several northern states stopped vaccinating over fears about the safety of the polio vaccine. An influential Muslim leader spread fear that the vaccine was sterilizing children as a population control measure and was contaminated with HIV, says Cochi.

“Those were kind of the dark years of the polio eradication story in Nigeria,” said Cochi, who sits on Nigeria’s expert review committee on polio eradication, and has been visiting the country since 1999.

Cases jumped to a peak of 1,122 in 2006. For a few years, the number of recorded cases ranged from 300-800.

Last February, gunmen killed nine female polio vaccinators at health centres in northern Nigeria’s Kano state, causing a temporary stop to vaccinations.

However, Cochi says efforts to eradicate polio in Nigeria have transformed in the last two years, with improved quality and accountability. In 2012, 122 polio cases were reported and last year, it was down to 53.

But the CDC adviser says he’s worried about distractions that might derail efforts to control polio in Nigeria. The insurgency in the north is one concern, says Cochi, but he suggests a less-discussed issue may pose an equal risk: Nigeria’s upcoming elections.

Nigeria’s presidential and legislative elections are expected to take place early next year.

Not only does political attention get diverted during heated and sometimes deadly election campaigns, there are also concerns about polio eradication campaign funds getting diverted into political campaigns.

 

‘Enough is enough’

 

Oyewale Tomori, chair of Nigeria’s expert review committee on polio eradication, says it happens every election.

“We’re scared but we’ve handled it before,” he said.

Tomori says that the larger issue remains that the government doesn’t seem fully committed to the task of polio eradication.

He points to the monumental achievement by India earlier this year when it attained polio-free status, a result of what Tomori describes as sheer determination.

The second most populous country in the world mobilized massive vaccination teams, used Bollywood and cricket celebrities in its polio eradication campaign and tapped in to community leaders to bolster support and counter fear of vaccines.

By comparison, Tomori laments Nigeria’s short attention span. “It’s very distracted by so many activities that are going on,” he said.

Even if the country attains a year with zero cases, he fears the government would become complacent, thus never reaching the three years necessary to become certified polio-free by the World Health Organization.

“We’ve had enough of this embarrassment,” said Tomori. “We need to make up our mind and say enough is enough.”

 

 

• Source: CBC News

 

 

A futile debate about Islamism takes focus away from the assault of religious extremism on girls’ education, writes AlJazeera

The terrible kidnapping of the 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, a Nigerian armed group, has evoked disgust and condemnation from people all over the world.

The incident happened more than a month and a half ago, yet nothing has happened to help these girls except for a Twitter hashtag campaign and the reported arrival of a British spyplane in Nigeria to help the Nigerian Army in the search.

While human rights activists and other informed commentators recognise the political roots of the conflict between Boko Haram, the Nigerian government and its innocent citizens, others, most notably Islamophobic online pundits, have wasted their time using the Boko Haram disaster to further their agenda of defaming Islam by quoting Quranic verses out of context to prove that Islam condones the shameful practice of sex slavery.

Instead of recognising that the right of girls to go to school is under global assault, they look at what life was like in seventh century Arabia and crow that Sharia or Islamic law promotes keeping girls and women uneducated and imprisoned by their evil Muslim overlords (read: fathers, husbands, brothers, sons). Educated Muslims have fought back against the blame game with their own responses, including Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, who made a public statement that Boko Haram had clearly “never read the Quran”, for if they had, they would understand that their actions are a violation against everything it teaches.

All of this rhetoric serves only to direct justifiable anger and ire in the wrong direction. It is a distraction from the reality that “Islamist” movements use the most powerful tool in their arsenal – not physical weapons, but the firm belief that their fight is sanctioned by God – to provide justification for their illegal, violent and deplorable actions.

Not only do they direct this tool inwards to their own psychological delusions (witness the Boko Haram leader declaring in a videotaped statement that God had told him to “sell women”) but they direct this tool outwards, to the rest of the world watching them, in order to intimidate and silence everyone around them. What we see in these afflicted areas is the enactment of psychological warfare by Islamists on people’s sensibilities, playing on their fears and vulnerabilities as well as their genuine love for their religion.Western observers and pundits who react to this provocation on the same level are just playing the opposite end of the game: They are taking the claims of Boko Haram and other extremist groups and reacting as if they are actually true, and shared by every Muslim in the universe.

They do this to suit their own agendas outwardly and inwardly, to justify their own hatred of Islam and their labelling of Muslims as “the other”.Boko Haram in BalochistanHarming young girls who want an education and are willing to risk their lives in doing so has resonance for those of us in Pakistan who see similar threats being made against young schoolgirls in restive areas of the country.

Everyone knows the story of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 for speaking up about education for girls, but even more recently, an extremist group called Tanzeem-ul-Islami-ul-Furqan has been making threats against educating girls in the Panjgur district of Balochistan.