Leader: 100 girls don't want to leave captors
Nigeria’s government is negotiating the release of another 83 of the Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction 21/2 years ago, but more than 100 others appear unwilling to leave their Boko Haram Islamic extremist captors, a community leader said Tuesday.
The unwilling girls may have been radicalized by Boko Haram or are ashamed to return home because they were forced to marry extremists and have babies, said Chairman Pogu Bitrus of the Chibok Development Association.
Bitrus said the 21 Chi- bok girls freed last week in the first negotiated release between Nigeria’s govern- ment and Boko Haram should be educated abroad, because they will probably face stigma in Nigeria.
The girls and their parents were reunited Sunday and are expected to meet with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Bitrus said.
Buhari said Monday that his government is prepared to talk with Boko Haram as long as the extremists agree to involve organizations like the International Commit- tee of the Red Cross, which was an intermediary in last week’s release.
Some 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a school in northeastern Chibok in April 2014. Dozens escaped early on and at least half a dozen have died in captiv- ity, according to the newly freed girls, Bitrus said.
All those who escaped on their own have left Chibok because, even though they were held only a few hours, they were labeled “Boko Haram wives” and taunted, he said. At least 20 of the girls are being educated in the United States.
“We would prefer that they are taken away from the community and this country because the stigmatization is going to affect them for the rest of their lives,” Bitrus said. “Even someone believed to have been abused by Boko Haram would be seen in a bad light.”
All Nigerian institutions and the freed girls’ communities and families must “stand strong” to “protect them from stigma, ostraciza- tion and rejection,” the U.N. special rapporteurs on the sale of children, on slavery and on the right to health said in a statement Tuesday.
One Chibok girl, Amina Ali Nkeki, escaped in May. Chibok Parents’ Association Chairman Yakubu Nkeki said the young woman has been reunited with her freed classmates, all of whom are being treated by doctors, psychol- ogists and trauma counsel- ors at a hospital in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, run by the Department of State Secu- rity, Nigeria’s secret service.
Human rights advocates and the Bring Back Our Girls Movement have been asking if the girl is a government detainee and have demanded she be allowed to go home, as she has requested.
The freed girls have told their parents they were separated into two groups early on in their captivity, when Boko Haram commanders gave them the choice of joining the extremists and embracing Islam, or becoming their slaves, Bitrus said.
The girls freed and those whose release is being negotiated, numbering 104, are believed to be in the group that rejected Islam and Boko Haram, he explained. The freed girls said they never saw the other girls again.
Previous negotiators in talks that failed also had corroborated that more than 100 of the girls did not want to return to their parents, Bitrus said.
Chibok is a conservative Christian enclave in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria, where many parents are involved in translating the Bible into local languages and belong to the Nigerian branch of the Elgin, Ill.-based Church of the Brethren.