Buhari vows to search for missing girls
NIGERIA’S president-elect Muhammadu Buhari, who beat Goodluck Jonathan in an election two weeks ago and has vowed to squash Boko Haram, said yesterday the 200 kidnapped girls’ whereabouts were unknown but that he would try to locate them.
“As much as I wish to I cannot promise that we can find them. But I say to every parent, family member and friend of the children that my government will do everything in its power to bring them home.”
His assurance came in the wake of an Amnesty International report yesterday which revealed that Boko Haram Islamic militants had kidnapped at least 2 000 girls and women since the start of last year, turning them into cooks, sex slaves and fighters, and sometimes killing those who refused to comply.
The human rights group’s 90-page report, based on interviews with witnesses and escaped abductees, came a year after the group seized more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok, a community deep inside an area of northeastern Nigeria the fighters claimed as their caliphate.
The kidnapping, and a video showing the captured girls dressed in dark hijabs soon afterwards, provoked international outrage. But the majority are still missing despite Western pledges to help track them down and a Chadian attempt to broker their release.
Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, claims the girls have been “married off” to his fighters.
Amnesty’s report said that Boko Haram, meaning in Hausa “Western education is sinful”, routinely rounded up women and girls after taking control of a town and held them in houses or prisons.
A 19-year-old woman told Amnesty how she had been abducted at a wedding in September 2014 alongside the bride and the bride’s sister and then held at a training camp in Madagali alongside hundreds of female fighters.
“I was among the girls trained to shoot. I was also trained how to use bombs and how to attack a village,” said the woman, who was gangraped several times by the guerrillas and wished to remain anonymous. She told Amnesty some of those who refused to covert to Islam or to fight were dumped in a mass grave.
Many men who refuse to join Boko Haram’s ranks have also been killed. Two young men told researchers that at least 100 were executed in one day in December when the armed group took over Madagali. They survived because the killers’ knives had become too blunt to slit more throats.
“These appalling executions, the sexual violence, the recruitment of child soldiers, these are war crimes and crimes against humanity and they need to be investigated (by the Nigerian authorities),” Daniel Eyre, author of the report, said.
Boko Haram is thought to have killed thousands of people in its sixyear insurgency. But Nigerian troops alongside neighbouring armies from Chad, Cameroon and Niger have won back vast parts of territory from them in recent weeks.
UN Special Representative for West Africa Mohamed Ibn Chambas said some abducted girls might have been taken by fighters into the Sambisa Forest, a vast former game reserve where some of the group are thought to be regrouping. – Reuters