Nigerian army ‘forced abortions on jihadist escapees’
Many of the victims had been abducted and raped by Boko Haram militants
THE Nigerian military has allegedly terminated at least 10,000 pregnancies as part of a secret abortion campaign targeting women and girls in the north-east of the country, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Boko Haram militants.
Dozens of witnesses have said that pregnant women and girls who escaped Islamist groups and went into the custody of the Nigerian military were beaten and either drugged into compliance or injected with abortion drugs without their consent.
Many of the victims of the alleged illegal and systematic programme had been victims of Boko Haram, a powerful jihadist group that has kidnapped thousands of girls and women to be slaves or jihadi wives.
Soldiers who were involved said that the unborn children were believed to be “predestined” to be insurgents like their fathers, so the government had to “destroy [the] insurgent fighters before they could be born”.
The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant. Some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed.
One victim called Fati, now in her early 20s, said she was captured by the jihadists and repeatedly raped for a year. She was four months pregnant when Nigerian soldiers eventually rescued her. “I felt the happiest I ever had in my life,” she said.
But about a week later, she was led to a dim cockroach filled room at a military barracks in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. Uniformed men gave her and five other women mysterious injections and pills.
After about four hours, she felt a searing pain in her stomach and black blood seeped out of her.
After the women washed the blood down a squat toilet, she said, they were warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.”
The abortions were mainly carried out without consent and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witnesses.
Military leaders yesterday denied the programme had ever existed and have said that reporters were part of a foreign effort to undermine Nigeria’s fight against the insurgents. Lucky Irabor, the chief of the defence staff, told reporters in the capital Abuja that the army “will not investigate what you know is not true”.
But the administration of Atiku Abubakar, the opposition presidential candidate, vowed that if he won next year’s election he would launch an inquiry.
Forced abortions may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to legal experts.
Britain has had close military ties with Nigeria for decades. In 2016, the Government said about 300 UK troops were involved in training Nigerian soldiers to fight Boko Haram. However, The Daily Telegraph understands that the training programmes were hamstrung by Nigerian generals who saw the UK deployment as an annoyance. It is understood that British troops spent most of 2017 in their Nigerian barracks.
“The Nigerians didn’t want people. They wanted predator drones and were a little contemptuous of our people,” a source with knowledge of the deployment said.
Alice Kearns, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “It is the responsibility of UK authorities to ensure that their support of the Nigerian military does not aid human rights abuses and we expect the Government to take these allegations seriously.”
Chris Smith, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, said that the credible reports “shock the conscience” and that sanctions should be used against those responsible.
The investigation is based on interviews with 33 women and girls, and accounts collected from healthcare workers, security personnel, military documents and civilian hospital records.
Although the full scope of deaths from the nearly decade-long programme could not be determined, four soldiers and two security officers said they witnessed women die from abortions.
Bintu Ibrahim, one of the victims, said: “[One woman] was crying, yelling, rolling around, and at long last she stopped rolling and shouting. She became so weak and traumatised, and then she stopped breathing. They just dug a hole, and they put sand over it and buried her.”