Three weeks ago Islamist militants descended on Baga, a town in Nigeria’s northeast Borno state, and set about destroying property and killing civilians. Satellite photos show that several thousand buildings were burned down as the town was “almost wiped off the map in the space of four days,” according to Amnesty International’s Nigeria researcher Daniel Eyre. Initial estimates suggested that as many as 2,000 people had been killed. After complaining of a “smear campaign” local authorities eventually placed the number of casualties at under 200, but conceded that the raid had been one of Boko Haram’s most successful acts of terror in years.
Boko Haram briefly made international headlines last April when it abducted 300 girls in a dawn raid on the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School in Borno state. Fifty-three of the Chibok students managed to escape but the remainder appear to have either been smuggled out of Nigeria into neighbouring Chad or forced to marry their captors. Despite widespread local and international outrage, President Jonathan Goodluck has proved singularly incapable of containing the insurgency. In fact his government’s repressive treatment of suspected collaborators has eroded local support and undermined the electorate’s confidence in the army’s ability to deal with the crisis.
Nigeria has never developed an appropriate strategy for the Boko Haram insurgency. Two years ago, human rights monitors reported that hundreds of people had died while being detained by Nigeria’s military Joint Task Force (JTF) during mass roundups and interrogations of suspected Boko Haram sympathisers. At the most notorious of these detention centres — Giwa military barracks in Borno State and Sector Alpha (nicknamed ‘Guantanamo’) in Yobe State, security forces were accused of dumping mutilated and emaciated corpses on an almost daily basis. (Amnesty estimated that at least 950 people died in detention.) Former detainees told of severe beatings and torture and described horrifying scenes of death caused by starvation and inhumane overcrowding in the detention centres. (Harrowing video evidence of this mistreatment was broadcast last year in a PBS documentary.)
Understandably, some local communities have responded to this dire situation with homegrown security measures. In Baga, local vigilantes faced off against their attackers but were quickly dispatched by Boko Haram’s heavily armed fighters. Nigerian soldiers offered more resistance but abandoned their weapons after nine hours of fighting and disappeared into the bush. Their retreat reinforced local fears that the army cannot face Boko Haram on equal terms. The Guardian correspondent reports that “Nigerian soldiers are cowardly … woefully under-equipped, under-trained and far too demotivated to tackle the well-armed Boko Haram fighters.”
The army’s unreadiness is mainly due to corruption which has allowed senior officers to misappropriate much of the military’s annual US$6B budget. This looting has occurred even though the insurgency is a well-recognised crisis. Last year alone Boko Haram related violence claimed more than 25 Nigerian lives a day. During the last few months the group has cut a swathe of terror through north-eastern Nigeria, mixing child soldiers and suicide bombers in with its regular troops on a rampage that has claimed hundreds perhaps even thousands of lives. Its self-described “caliphate” now extends over nearly 20,000 square miles of territory, giving it direct oversight of 1.7 million civilians — another 1.5 million Nigerians have been internally displaced by its progress.
It hardly needs saying that far too little international attention has been paid to this appalling situation. With national elections just a few months away, northern Nigeria’s deteriorating security looks set to favour the lacklustre candidacy of Muhammadu Buhari, a conservative Muslim from northern Nigeria known for his autocratic tendencies and a rare reputation for incorruptibility. In the meantime, millions of ordinary Nigerians will remain trapped between a brutal insurgency and the corrupt and repressive military that is meant to offer protection. Tragically, most of the international community will watch from the sidelines while these people wait in terror to see whether their towns will suffer a similar fate.
