Amnesty International: No One To Trust, Nowhere To Turn In Nigeria

Amnesty International has been documenting and highlighting human rights abuses perpetrated by both Boko Haram and government security forces in northeast Nigeria for some time – those abuses were a key theme of a trip I made to Nigeria in 2012. But this latest research has uncovered incontrovertible evidence – including video footage – of extrajudicial executions and other serious violations by the Nigerian military and Boko Haram, on a truly horrifying scale.

Some of the video footage, images and testimonies collated have now been verified and an edited version of some of it will be released today. Graphic evidence of multiple war crimes is not easy to watch. But for President Goodluck Jonathan, his government ministers and military commanders it should be compulsory viewing. They should watch not despite it being hard to watch – they should watch because it is so hard to watch.

The footage includes deeply disturbing images of what appear to be members of the Nigerian armed forces and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a state-sponsored militia, executing detainees. One of the videos shows 16 young men seated in a line. One by one they are called forward and forced to lie down in front of a pit where their throats are slit and their bodies dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave.

The footage shows five young men killed in this way. The fate of the others is not captured on film but eyewitness accounts confirmed that nine of them had their throats cut while the others were shot dead.

These were among the over 600 extrajudicial executions that had taken place in and around Maiduguri on March 14 after the Nigerian military went on a rampage following Boko Haram’s attack on the military detention centre in Giwa Barracks earlier that day.

Other footage, taken in late July 2013, shows a mass arbitrary arrest of alleged Boko Haram members by the Nigerian military and CJTF – a common operation known as a “screening”. Arriving in the town of Bama in the morning, the security forces rounded all the men up in the central market, forcing them to strip. About 300 of them were released, up to 35 were accused of being Boko Haram members and ordered to lie down. Footage shows them being beaten with sticks and machetes before being loaded onto a military vehicle. They were taken away to the local military barracks and on July 29 they were all brought to their communities and shot dead, their corpses dumped around the town.

This was not the first time that the population of Bama had been “screened”, nor is it just the military who inflicts such abuses on the inhabitants. Over the years, Boko Haram has launched a series of deadly attacks against Bama, apparently in retaliation for what the armed group deems to be the locals’ cooperation with the Nigerian military.

Amnesty International has unearthed footage of the aftermath of Boko Haram’s most deadly assault on the town in which they killed nearly 100 people over the course of several hours on February 19. The video shows scores of corpses wrapped for burial.

Thus, the people of Bama are caught between the ruthless attacks by Boko Haram and the routine serious violations by the Nigerian security forces. That experience is mirrored in towns and villages across Borno state. It is little wonder that so many have fled or are living in a state of constant fear.

As the bloody insurgency waged by Boko Haram since 2009 has intensified, so, too, has the brutality of the Nigerian government’s response. Rural communities caught in the middle are terrorised by Boko Haram, on the one hand, and by the very military whose duty it is to protect them, on the other.

More than 4,000 Nigerians, the majority of them civilians, have been killed by both sides in this year alone. This includes the 600 people extrajudicially executed by the Nigerian military in Maiduguri in March. Last month, the town of Damboa fell to Boko Haram and in a separate incident in Kaduna state, 12 people appear to have been killed while in custody by the Nigerian military after being arrested during an apparently peaceful protest in which 21 other protesters were also killed after the military opened fire on them.

The gruesome footage from northeastern Nigeria is deeply troubling. More disturbing still is that these incidents of murderous brutality are only the tip of a larger iceberg. Our research suggests that the extrajudicial executions are part of a pattern of human rights violations by the Nigerian military and its civilian “helpers”, the CJTF.

As today’s revelations make clear, an immediate, impartial, independent, and thorough investigation is urgently needed to look into these serious and systematic violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in northeastern Nigeria.

The Nigerian government must publicly condemn such crimes and ensure an end to the human rights violations being carried out by the Nigerian military, including arbitrary arrests, incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions. Above all, we must not see the simple denial of responsibility that we have seen far too often before.

“When two elephants fight, it is the grass that is trampled,” says an old African proverb. Nowhere is that truer than in northeastern Nigeria today. The people there have no one they can trust and they have nowhere they can turn. In the words of another proverb, “They have nothing left but their eyes to cry with.”

This Op-ed was originally published in Al-Jazeera

#BringBackOurGirls: 276 Schoolgirls Abducted in Nigeria, Threatened to be Sold into Slavery and Forced into Marriage

By Leann D. Stanick, J.D.

The international community has wearily awaited authorization to intervene as Nigerian families have been begging the government to recover 276 schoolgirls who were kidnapped from their school and hid in an undisclosed location in the forest. Threats of selling the girls, aged between 16 and 18, into slavery, forced marriages, and rape have outraged human rights activists worldwide.

On April 14, 276 the students were kidnapped in Chibok by a terrorist organization known as Boko Haram. Boko Haram, which translates to “Western education is sin”, states that its aim is to impose strict enforcement of the Sharia law across Africa.

A member of Boko Haram stated in a video obtained by Agence-France Presse:

“I abducted your girls. I will sell them in the market, by Allah. [. . .] There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell. He commands me to sell. I will sell women. I sell women.” 

After the initial abduction, at least 8 more girls were kidnapped from a nearby village and 150 people were killed—some burned alive—in an attack on Gamboru Ngala, causing rising international pressures to find the missing girls.

International Intervention

Former prime minister and current United Nations’ special advisor on girls’ education, Gordon Brown, launched a fundraising and awareness campaign, stating:

“We cannot stop terrorism overnight, but we can make sure that its perpetrators are aware that murdering and abducting schoolchildren is a heinous crime that the international authorities are determined to punish.” 

Initially, foreign aid was mostly uninvited. As one representative put it: "If countries can help us by way of arming our people through modern surveillance equipment, for defence and all that, it will be most welcome. [But] what the Boko Haram is doing is not a formal kind of fight but a guerrilla kind of fight, and it is only the local people that will tell you how to fight it." However, after almost a month has passed without any signs of rescue, it seems that the Nigerian government is now more willing to concede to outside assistance. Efforts to retrieve the girls have been frivolous due to suspected leaks in the chain of command, which is evidenced by rescue plans being repeatedly ambushed.

Only after the Boko Haram attacked the village hosting troops that were searching for the girls did President Goodluck Jonathan accept U.S., British, and Chinese offers to aid in finding the girls. The United States offers law enforcement and military consultation, in conjunction with a joint coordination cell at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja aimed at providing intelligence, investigations, and hostage negotiation expertise. Great Britain is sending a team of experts. Satellite and intelligence services are also to be provided by China to assist in the search. 

International Cooperation in Countering Attacks on Human Rights 

The Boko Haram has been terrorizing Nigeria for years and is responsible for bombings, murders, attacks, and countless human rights violations. It is unfortunate that it took such a deplorable act as kidnapping 267 schoolgirls during their final exams to convince the Nigerian government to put down its shield of state sovereignty. At this point, it is no longer about government control, or a lack thereof. It is about violence against women, forced marriage, rape, human trafficking, modern-day slavery, kidnapping, mass murder, and other related crimes against humanity. 

With the advent of social media and other forms of technology spreading the news of the missing girls faster than ever, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls has gone viral. Since the news stories developed so quickly, why is international governmental communication, cooperation, and interdependence still a seemingly slow-moving wheel? For the sake of international human rights and the girls themselves, the aid of three major superpowers ought to effect change in combating the Boko Haram immediately. 

Recent Updates

A Boko Haram leader recently stated on a second video that the girls would be released if imprisoned members of Boko Haram are freed. Approximately 100 of the kidnapped girls were seen in the video released again by Agence France-Presse. The Nigerian government continues to explore negotiation options. 

The United States is providing aerial surveillance, China and France are helping with search efforts, and Israel plans to send a team of counterterrorism experts.

Sources: CNN, The Guardian, USA Today

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Leann D. Stanick graduated from Florida Coastal School of Law having earned an International & Comparative Law Certificate, and recently passed the New York and New Jersey state bar exams. She completed an internship at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the Caribbean Law Clinic, and study abroad programs in Rwanda, South Africa, and the Cayman Islands. She is a new member of the ABA Section of International Law, International Human Rights Committee. 

Bring Back Our Girls!

Dozens of heavily armed terrorists rolled into the sleepy little town one night in a convoy of trucks, buses and vans. They made their way to the girls’ boarding school. The high school girls, asleep in their dormitory, awoke to gunfire. The attackers stormed the school, set it on fire, and, residents said, then herded several hundred terrified girls into the vehicles — and drove off and vanished.

That was April 15 in northern Nigeria. The girls were kidnapped by an extremist Muslim group called Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language means “Western education is a sin.”

These girls, ages 15 to 18 and Christians and Muslims alike, knew the risks of seeking an education, and schools in the area had closed in March for fear of terror attacks. But this school had reopened so that the girls — the stars of their families and villages — could take their final exams. They were expected to move on to become teachers, doctors, lawyers.

Instead, they reportedly are being auctioned off for $12 each to become “wives” of militants. About 50 girls escaped, but the police say that 276 are still missing — and the Nigerian government has done next to nothing to recover the girls.

“We are now asking for world power countries to intervene,” the desperate father of a missing 18-year-old girl, Ayesha, told me by phone. He said that the parents had given up on Nigerian government officials — “they are just saying lies” — and pleaded for international pressure on Nigeria to rescue the girls.

The parents pursued the kidnappers, carrying bows and arrows to confront militants armed with AK-47s, but finally had to turn back. The father, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said that the parents are now praying to God for the United States and United Nations to help get their daughters back.

While there has been a major international search for the missing people on Malaysian flight MH370, and nonstop news coverage, there has been no meaningful search for the even greater number of missing schoolgirls.

Read more of Nicholas Kristof's article here.