NIGHTMARE LIVES ON FOR WOMEN FREED FROM BOKO HARAM.
FREED FROM RAPE CAMPS, THEY ARE NOW SHUNNED
For months, t hey were kept in tiny thatched huts in the middle of the forest, waiting with dread each evening for their rapists to return. During the almost intolerable violence, the young women’s minds drifted to escape or death. The victims were as young as eight years old.
At t he heart of Boko Haram’s self- proclaimed caliphate in northeastern Nigeria was a savage campaign of rape and sexual slavery. Thousands of girls and women were held against their will, subject to forced marriages and relentless indoctrination. Many of those who resisted were shot.
Now, many of the women are suddenly free — rescued in a series of Nigerian military operations over the past year that dislodged the extremist Islamist group from most of the territory it controlled. But there have been few joyous family reunions for the victims.
Most of the surviving women no l onger have homes. Their cities were burned to the ground. The military has deposited them in displacement camps or abandoned buildings, where they are monitored by armed men suspicious of their loyalties. They are still labelled “Boko Haram wives.”
Few could have imagined such an outcome two years ago, when 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram and the world responded with the Bring Back Our Girls campaign. But now they are shunned.
For seven months, Hamsatu, now 25, and Halima, 15, were among Boko Haram’s sex slaves, raped almost every day by the same unit of fighters in the remote Sambisa Forest. Now, they live in a narrow, white tent in a displacement camp. The women spoke on the condition their full names were not used.
When Halima leaves the tent to get food for the two of them, the other people living in the camp scowl at her or move away. “You’re the one who was married to Boko Haram,” one older woman spat at her.
“We can’t trust any of them,” one guard said.
Authorities say there are good reasons for their wariness. Last year, 39 of 89 Boko Haram suicide bombings were carried out by women. No one knows why some women who were captured and abused became killers.
For survivors trying to move on from a horrific chapter of their lives, there is now a new agony. “There is no trust here,” said Hamsatu, crouching in her tent and wearing the same flowery dress she had on when she was kidnapped 18 months ago. In her arms, she held the baby of her captor.
It was September 2014 when Boko Haram fighters took over Hamsatu and Halima’s home city of Bama, near the Cameroonian border. Many of the 350,000 residents fled. But the fighters immediately killed the male civilians who couldn’t escape.
Hamsatu and Halima say they were among a group of 25 women forced to travel to the Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram had set up camps for its sex slaves. Hamsatu said one fighter, whose name she never learned, entered her hut at the camp and said a prayer. Now they were married, he told her.
From then on, different men would come into her hut each evening, in addition to the one who called himself her “husband,” Hamsatu said. Sometimes they screamed at her for not praying enough.
When the Nigerian military came, it hardly felt to the women like a rescue operation. Soldiers burned the huts while women were still inside and shot wildly at everyone, they said. Several women were killed or disappeared during the operation. Halima is now raising a three- year- old orphan whose mother vanished.
The women were searched for weapons. After months of being held by terrorists, the women realized they were now suspects.