Hope fading in Nigeria for kidnapped girls
As world turns to other crises, students no closer to being freed
As the weeks stretch into months since her 18-yearold daughter Hauwa was kidnapped with 275 other schoolgirls by Islamist militants in the Nigerian town of Chibok, Rahila Musa Bitrus fasts and prays for her safe return.
“I haven’t given up, but it’s obvious that the government needs to step up their rescue operation so that our girls can be returned to us,” Bitrus, 41, said by phone from Chibok. “It’s so painful and sad.”
Hope for the secondary schoolgirls’ freedom is fading. While Nigeria’s military said in May it knows where they are and last month arrested a Boko Haram cell leader involved in their abduction, the U.S., which is aiding the rescue effort with surveillance aircraft, said their location remains unknown.
Boko Haram, the Islamist group that abducted the girls, regularly attacks the Chibok area in the northeastern state of Borno. Last month, it killed 30 people in attacks on churches and has shown no sign of tempering its fiveyear campaign to impose Islamic law on Africa’s biggest oil producer. Vigilant guards at a school in the northeastern city of Gombe arrested a suicide bomber Tuesday when he tried to drive in with a bus laden with bombs while students were writing their examinations, police said.
“The more time passes, the less hopeful the situation appears,” said Manji Cheto, vice-president at Londonbased corporate advisory company Teneo Intelligence. “Hostage negotiations in the region have never been easy, especially in cases where the demand from the kidnappers is not simply for monetary gains.”
The U.S., which rushed advisers and drones to aid the rescue effort after the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls used by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama went viral, has reduced surveillance flights. Department of Defense spokesman John Kirby said June 27 that other countries were taking on a bigger share of the search efforts.
“We don’t have any better idea today than we did before about where these girls are,” Kirby said.
The world may be losing interest in their fate, their attention grabbed by new crises such as the advance of Islamist militants in Iraq and the crisis between Russia and Ukraine, said Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, the New Yorkbased managing director at risk consultancy DaMina Advisors LLP.
“With (ISIL) and Ukraine on the global agenda, the Chibok girls, like the Malaysian plane, may be soon forgotten,” he said.
The abduction drew international condemnation that intensified after Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, threatened in video messages to sell the schoolgirls in “markets,” marry them off and hold them until the Nigerian government freed imprisoned members of his group.
President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration has faced domestic and international criticism over its handling of the April 14 kidnapping. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo said Jonathan, who waited almost three weeks before speaking publicly about the abductions, didn’t act fast enough to free them and that the girls may never be returned.
“My silence has been necessary to avoid compromising the details of our investigation,” Jonathan wrote in a June 26 column in the Washington Post. “My government and our security and intelligence services have spared no resources, have not stopped and will not stop until the girls are returned home and the thugs who took them are brought to justice.”
Troops are closer than ever to achieving that target after “infiltrating the ranks of the terrorists” and gaining “information that will eventually lead to the rescue of the girls and the ultimate defeat of Boko Haram,” Mike Omeri, a spokesman for the government said Tuesday.