IF eyes are windows to the soul, little Ibrahim’s eyes are giant panes. At age 11, the scales of innocence fell from his eyes, as the moth’s wings melt in the fire.
Ibrahim suffered a rude jolt in January 2015 when the rampaging hordes of the Boko Haram (BH) terrorist sect invaded his home in Baga, on the shore of the Lake Chad, in Maiduguri, Borno State.
The insurgents sacked his home and like thousands of kids, Ibrahim got separated from his family. In a frantic bid to stay alive, the 11-year-old boarded a boat sailing to Chad whereas his family members fled by road.
His parents were eventually hacked to death by BH insurgents, thus rendering him yet another orphan of the lingering terrorism and humanitarian crisis wracking Nigeria’s northeast.
Through his ordeal, Ibrahim keels through each day, bemused, like a child forced by tragedy to become a man. For the minor, innocence chokes amid the fumes of his ruined childhood.
Ibrahim feels his loss like a burn, deep to the bones: the loss of his father’s approving smile at his completion of a task; the loss of his mother’s embrace and the warmth of her fuss through torrential rainfall and sandstorms impales his peace like the shank-end of a sharp spear.
All he is left with are memories of their love. But memories are not enough to assuage the pain of their demise and absence in his life.
Months after he fled Baga to live with 4, 999 fellow refugees at the Dar es Salaam refugee camp in Chad, Ibrahim has returned to Maiduguri.
Having being declared missing by his only surviving relative, his aged grandmother, Ibrahim returned to endure a tearful reunion with the septuagenarian. As the aircraft bearing him touched down in Maiduguri, Ibrahim stumbled out with eight other kids into Borno’s heat and searing realities of their destabilised worlds.
Families have been split. Dear ones may have been lost but they enjoyed the reprieve of reunion with loved ones. As Ibrahim reunited with his older relative, words failed them. Grandma and grandson broke into tears, their bodies and eyelids convulsing with echoes of their buried narratives.
Few paces away, four- year-old Bintu struggled to make sense of the piercing wail and the floodgate of tears let loose on her fragile frame by her half-sister, Aisha. She was just too young to properly remember her half-sister Aisha; and even though neither of them know where their mother is, Aisha is simply grateful to be reunited with her missing sibling.
For the reunited families, being together again is a huge relief. The uncertainty imposed by their disordered lives, however, implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) together with the Nigerian Red Cross reunited Ibrahim, Bintu and seven others, who had been displaced by the armed conflict in northeast Nigeria to Chad, explained Serena Tarabbia, Restoring Family Links Delegate of the ICRC .
She said: “We have reunited them with their families, their parents, their siblings, their grandparents, here in Nigeria.”
And so for Ibrahim and peers, family life could begin again. But thousands more remain separated by conflict, alone in refugee camps and other places.
In about a decade of chaos, almost 22,000 people have been registered missing with the ICRC. Many of them are children and for their affected families, the work of identification, tracing, and reunification must go on.
‘They said they were taking us to a better place’
THE process is, however, no ordinary walk in the park as desperate mothers and fathers hope for good news about their loved ones. Falmata Amodu, resident of the Gubio Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camp, is one such parent. Having lost her 10-year-old son, Alkali, nine years ago, when her village was attacked by Boko Haram, she pines for his return.
“I couldn’t sleep. I could hardly eat any food. I found it difficult to mingle with people, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. Every night when we go to sleep, I think about him. My eyes stay open until daybreak. My only hope is for my son to be found, that’s all I want,” she said.
The ICRC is working hard to try to find the missing, and, where possible, unite separated families. But, ICRC President Peter Maurer warns, that the 22,000 cases the already known may only be the beginning.
“Huge populations have been displaced, and therefore huge populations are missing. Their relatives, their fathers, mothers, sons, families at large; 22,000 cases opened at the ICRC are just the tip of the iceberg, most likely, of what we are going to see in the future still here in Nigeria as the conflict unfolds,” he said.
Armed conflict in northeast Nigeria and the Lake Chad region has displaced an estimated two million people. Many of the displaced are children, who have been declared missing and are completely alone.
The fate of these minors currently constitutes great worry to their relatives, government and humanitarian agencies, at the backdrop of a burgeoning human trafficking trade that has gradually found its way into Nigeria’s conflict regions, of the northeast.
A global and local syndicate make determined forays into the northeast via avoidable cracks in the country’s security network. Displaced minors bear the brunt of this human error.
Radia Abdullah, for instance, fled her home in Baga after watching BH insurgents hack her parents and grandparents to death in their living room. She made it “through the bush” in the company of neighbours to Maiduguri, where she sought refuge at the Dalori IDP camp.
She was 13 years old at the period.
Two months into her arrival on the camp, however, Abdullah was approached by camp officials, who promised her prospects of a better life outside the camp.
Already weary and worn by the hardship of life on the camp, the 13- year-old bought into their colourful yarn of instant luxury and economic security in faraway Calabar, Rivers State.
“They said they were taking us to a better place,” she said.
Unknown to her, she was being set up for prostitution. Contrary to the promises by the camp officials, the 13-year-old was sold to a local madame who forced her to “remove her hijab” and “sleep with customers” for money in a makeshift room at the back of her car wash and run-down bar in Calabar.
The teenager was eventually rescued by a “customer” who “fell in love with her” and paid her thoroughfare back to Maiduguri.
Now 15, Abdullah earns her livelihood by doing menial tasks in a canteen, around Post Office, in the Borno capital. She saves a fraction of her meagre earnings to purchase and sell sweets to neighbourhood kids and on IDP camps.
Unlike Abdullah, Hafiza, couldn’t escape through the “bush” while Boko Haram ransacked her family compound in Baga. Consequently, she was abducted by the insurgents, who made her watch the execution of her father and grandfather, before whisking her away.
Two years into her abduction, Hafiza escaped from her captors in the wake of a Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) onslaught against the terrorist sect.
She made it to the Muna IDP camp. However, she was forced to leave due to shortage of water and essential provisions.
“I had to beg for food. Life was very hard. Everywhere I went people tried to sleep with me. Eventually, I had to date a camp official in order to get some food rations. When his wife discovered, she attacked me in the camp. I had to run for my life,” said the teenager.
Subsequently, she made it back to Maiduguri. There, she slept in motor parks and unofficial camps. Three weeks after she relocated to Borno, Hafiza was approached by a middle-aged woman, called Khadija, who was reportedly visiting her cousin and coordinator at the Dalori IDP camp.
“She asked if I wanted to go to Dubai and I didn’t hesitate before saying ‘Yes.’ She promised to get me a job as a shop attendant with a jeweller. I saw her cousin, who assured me that I would be in safe hands if I went with her. Before we left Maiduguri, she gave me N5, 000 pocket money and bought me beautiful bangles and abayas. She said there was more from where that came from,” said Hafiza.
Excitedly, the teenager departed with the lady to Nassarawa for an onward journey to Dubai. Unknown to her, she had sold herself into slavery for a paltry N5, 000, two abayas and counterfeit jewellery.
On arrival in Nassarawa, Hafiza’s supposed benefactor became hostile to her. “Her demeanour changed totally. She collected the N5, 000 from me as we alighted from the vehicle at the park. She said she wanted to keep it safe for me. When we got to our destination, I realised that it was a brothel. I had sold myself into prostitution,” she said.
For 15 months, the teenager served the wild tastes of different classes of men, from taxi drivers, students, menial workers to park urchins, until she summoned the courage to flee from her captor.
“I fled with the help of an older colleague at the brothel. She is from the east. Her name is Nancy. She advised me not to dress nice or take anything with me on that day in order not to arouse suspicion. I fled on a Sunday evening while my madam attended to her boyfriend in her sitting room. Nancy had arranged with one of her boyfriends, a cab driver, to smuggle me out of the brothel to Bauchi.
“I had the choice to relocate to Lagos or Abuja but I came back to Maiduguri because I wish to find my mother and sister,” said the teenager.
Conflict and the trafficking market
A clandestine trade in under-age girls thrives across Borno’s IDP camps and the street corners, where displaced kids, mostly girls, are abducted or lured into sexual slavery. “People come there in the evening for recruiting, I can say, taking young girls, going away with them. I see it as they are going there for sexual exploitation,” said Mitika Ali, the zonal commander for the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
According to Ali, many female residents of the camps are at risk of being sold into slavery by human traffickers prowling the camps. Further investigations revealed that child trafficking is a flourishing business across IDP camps in the northeast. The racket flourishes in divisions of smaller subunits which may specialise in a particular task or sequence of the operation comprising recruitment, provision of shelter, false documents, transportation of victims to and from their workplace, roster exploitation, or rotation of victims to different destinations.
Then there is a management unit which maintains a vertical structure of supervision and control over the subunits. While the complexity and number of specific tasks differ from one trafficking organisation to the next, trafficking enterprises have been characterised by a number of specific roles that individuals take on within the organisation to provide specific services. These roles include but are not limited to the investors, who put forward funding for the operation, and oversee the entire operation.
These people are unlikely to be known by the everyday employees of the operation, as they are sheltered by an organisational pyramid structure that protects their anonymity; they may be separate from the organisation. There are the first level recruiters cum human traffickers, who seek out potential victims across IDP camps. They often target unregistered IDPs and unattended minors. A lower level of recruiters, however, comprises displaced persons who act as middlemen between the buyer and the seller. The displaced person cum middleman identifies likely targets among children orphaned by the crisis and those who have been separated from their parents. He or she negotiates the terms of transaction with the first level recruiter and trafficker.
The middleman may be members of the culture and the community from which the trafficked children are drawn. They liaise with the first level recruiters, who come from distant places like Lagos, Rivers, Abuja, Nassarawa, Akwa Ibom, Imo, Anambra and Kaduna, to scout for victims. The Nation findings revealed that the price for a four or five-year-old child often ranges between N20, 000 and N150, 000. The price could be set higher or lower depending on the desperation and bargaining skills of the negotiators. After negotiations, the middleman approaches the camp official in charge, who collects the money and approves the release of the kids.
The child trafficker subsequently deals out the child as a domestic servant to an interested family or bonded slave to a brothel madame. From Maiduguri to Niger Republic AISHA and Halima present a sad case that perfectly illustrates the fate of displaced kids in the theatre of war. The 15-year-olds were lured to bonded slavery in Italy by a group of women, who approached them one morning while they fetched firewood near their IDP camp in Madinatu.
The teenagers had just escaped captivity by Boko Haram and they could not resist the lure of the luxurious life bewitchingly marketed to them by the traffickers. The traffickers promised to get them lucrative jobs as hairdressers in Italy, revealed Philip Obaji Jnr, a human rights educator, and the founder of Up Against Trafficking, a non-governmental organisation. But rather than fulfill their promise to the teenagers, Aisha and Halima were taken to the central Nigerien city of Agadez, to a “connection house,” where they were instructed to wait until the smugglers were ready to continue their journey through north Africa for the Mediterranean crossing.
Their arrival had coincided with a government crackdown on smugglers, and they found themselves moved from one house to another to escape arrest. When finally they were driven from the city towards the southern Libyan town of Sebha, their trafficker spotted a police convoy patrolling the route through the desert. Worried he would be apprehended, he ordered the girls to get out of the car and drove away, said Obaji.
While sub-Saharan migrants are particularly vulnerable to trafficking by armed groups, displaced persons and minors fleeing Boko Haram’s terrorism have been rescued by government and international groups, as they attempted passage in return for debt bondage, forced labour in construction or on farms, and prostitution. Traffickers also prey on IDPs selling them into servitude across state boundaries, thus facilitating the blooming of a local trade in trafficked persons.
Evidence for the nexus is strongest along these routes, since migration routes are controlled by militant groups who operate in the largely anarchic regions of the Sahel. Boko Haram insurgents have employed their captives as suicide bombers, sex slaves and domestic servants. Terrorists benefit from victims of human trafficking in different ways. Direct sale of victims appears to be the most lucrative.
For instance, Boko Haram has been involved in the abduction, trafficking and enslavement of children and women. Hundreds of women and children have been abducted since the group’s insurgency started. But Boko Haram’s most wellknown abduction occurred in April 2014, when 276 female students were taken away from their dormitory at the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State.
The abduction triggered a global campaign #BringBackOurGirls. A few months after the Chibok girls were abducted, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, said he would sell them. “I am the one who captured all those girls and I will sell all of them,” he said in an online video in which he justified human slavery.
“Slavery is allowed in my religion and I shall capture people and make them slaves,” he said to the chagrin of Muslims within and outside Nigeria, who refute his claims, arguing that they have no basis in Islamic tenets and practice. Idris Abdulhakeem, a Muslim cleric and scholar, argued that, “Shekau is grossly misled and engaged in acts contrary to Islam’s peaceful and humane traditions of worship and citizenship of humanity.”
Going forward… In response to continued reports of sexual exploitation of IDPs in the Northeast, NAPTIP partnered with an international organisation to create and implement a screening and sensitisation campaign to identify sex trafficking victims. They visited at least 14 camps in Maiduguri area in the process. Every day, people go missing in conflict in the northeast. Given the magnitude of the phenomenon and the intergenerational impact that unsolved cases have on families and communities, the ICRC highlighted the gravity of the situation disclosing recently, that, about 22, 000 persons have been registered as missing by its personnel during a decade of conflict in the northeast.
The Geneva-based humanitarian institution said the figure is the highest number of missing persons registered with the ICRC in any country. “The figures could be higher given the absence of a dependable missing person’s register and security network across IDP camps in the northeast,” stated a camp official at a displaced persons camp in Maiduguri. “Every parent’s worst nightmare is not knowing where their child is. This is the tragic reality for thousands of Nigerian parents, leaving them with the anguish of a constant search.
People have the right to know the fate of their loved ones, and more needs to be done to prevent families from being separated in the first place,” said ICRC President, Maurer, at the end of his five-day visit to Nigeria. There is no gainsaying that families are the greatest casualty of the protracted conflict in the northeast. Mustapha Garba, for instance, over his separation from his 14-year-old daughter.
It is four years since she went missing but the 53-year-old is hopeful of reunion with her, following reports that she was seen alive in neighbouring Chad four months ago. Like Garba, Falmata Amodu nurses hope of reunion with her missing son, Alkali. “What troubles me is that I haven’t heard whether he is dead or alive. I just don’t know.
Whenever I cook food for his siblings, I think about him,” she said, stressing that her husband died pining for their missing son’s return. She said: “For the three years that we stayed in Maiduguri, my husband was very distressed and would repeatedly have nightmares. He would call the name of our abducted son, ‘Alkali, Alkali, Alkali’ all the time. Eventually he died from the trauma.” Words cannot capture the anguish of parents like Garba and Amodu. For them, every new day begins with visions of reunion with their lost wards.
To reunite the separated families, the ICRC works with the Nigeria Red Cross and other NGOs in the northeast to trace the missing persons across large swathes of the region. They will distribute photographs and bellow their names, while going door-todoor across camps and communities. At the backdrop of these efforts, concerned parents would utter a silent prayer, hoping desperately that their wards survived the grisly cocktail of gunshots, sexual slavery and bomb blasts.