AFP
Abuja, APRIL 14
Nigeria’s president-elect Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday cautioned he could not make promises on the return of 219 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram, as the country marked the first anniversary of their abduction. The comments by Buhari, who takes office on May 29, stand in contrast to outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan, who has repeatedly said the girls will be found, and the military, which said last year it knew where the teenagers were being held.
Events were taking place in Nigeria and around the world to mark the first anniversary of the abduction, which Amnesty International said was one of 38 since the beginning of last year that had seen at least 2,000 women taken by the militants.
The UN and African rights groups also called for an end to the targeting of boys and girls in the conflict, which has left at least 15,000 dead and some 1.5 million people homeless, 800,000 of them children.
Buhari said there was a need for “honesty” in his new government’s approach to the girls’ abduction, with nothing seen or heard from the students since last May when they appeared in a Boko Haram video. “We do not know if the Chibok girls can be rescued. Their whereabouts remain unknown. As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them,” he said in a statement.
“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.”
- Commemoration -
The focus of the one-year commemoration was on Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, where a vigil demanding the girls’ immediate release has been held almost every day since they were kidnapped.
In New York, the #BringBackOurGirls campaign said the Empire State Building would be lit in its colours of red and purple, to symbolise an end to violence against women.
Prayers, candlelit vigils and marches have been held or are planned but no event was planned in Chibok itself.
Chibok elder Enoch Mark, whose daughter and niece are among the captives, said the town was still in “perpetual fear” of Boko Haram, despite the presence of troops.
“The last one year has been a period of sadness, emotional torment and hardship. It has been one year of mourning. We are a bereaved community that has lost 219 daughters,” he told AFP.
He added: “Our hope in finding our girls is now in Buhari. We hope we will soon see our girls if they are alive or at least their corpses if they are dead.
“I personally know what Buhari did as brigade commander for the northeast in 1975. We all know how in 1984 he crushed the violent Maitatsine sect, which is similar to Boko Haram”.
Boko Haram fighters stormed the Government Secondary School in Chibok on the evening of April 14 last year, seizing 276 girls who were preparing for end-of-year exams. Fifty-seven escaped soon afterwards.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has since said the remainder have all converted to Islam and been “married off”.
The mass abduction brought the brutality of the Islamist insurgency unprecedented worldwide attention and prompted a viral social media campaign demanding their immediate release.
Nigeria’s government was criticised for its initial response to the crisis and was forced into accepting foreign help in the rescue effort after a groundswell of global outrage.
In a new report published on Tuesday, Amnesty quoted a senior military officer as saying the girls were being held at different Boko Haram camps, including in Cameroon and possibly Chad.
Testimony gathered by Amnesty from women and girls who escaped the militants said they were subject to forced labour and marriage, as well as rape.
#BringBackOurGirls organisers thanked supporters across the world, from ordinary men, women and children to public figures such as US First Lady Michelle Obama and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.
The girls have become “the symbol for the defence of the dignity and sanctity of human life, of the girl child, women, for all those oppressed, repressed, disadvantaged, hurting, unsafe,” they said.
Malala, who was shot and nearly killed by the Pakistani Taliban for advocating girls’ education, on Monday published an open letter to the Chibok girls, describing them as “my brave sisters”.
The 17-year-old criticised Nigerian and world leaders for not doing enough to help secure their release and called the girls “my heroes”.
Twenty-one of the 57 girls who escaped are currently studying at the American University of Nigeria.
Boko Haram has kidnapped at least 2,000 women and girls since the beginning of last year, Amnesty International said today, a year on from the mass abduction of 219 Nigerian schoolgirls.
The kidnapping of the teenagers from Chibok, in the northeastern state of Borno, on April 14 last year brought unprecedented world attention to the brutality of the insurgency.
But the human rights group said it had documented 38 cases of abduction by the Islamists, based on testimony of dozens of eyewitnesses as well as women and girls who eventually escaped.
“It is difficult to estimate how many people have been abducted by Boko Haram,” Amnesty said in the report, “’Our job is to shoot, slaughter and kill’: Boko Haram’s reign of terror”.
“The number of women and girls is likely to be higher than 2,000.”
On the Chibok girls, Amnesty quoted a senior military source as saying they had been split into three or four groups and held at different Boko Haram camps.
Some were in its Sambisa Forest stronghold in Borno state, others around Lake Chad, in the Gorsi mountains in Cameroon while about 70 girls were thought to be in Chad.
Nigeria’s military has previously said it knows where the girls are but ruled out a rescue operation as too dangerous.
The 219 teenagers have not been seen since Boko Haram released a video message in May last year, showing about 100 of the girls in Muslim dress and reciting verses of the Koran.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau has said all of the teenagers had converted to Islam and been “married off”.
Amnesty reports provides fresh testimony to Boko Haram’s use of mass kidnapping, cataloguing the frequent abduction of young women and girls, as well as the forced conscription of men and boys.
Women and girls interviewed recounted being held in atrocious conditions, including in overcrowded prisons, being forced to cook and clean for as well as marry Islamist fighters.
One human rights activist who interviewed more than 80 abducted women and girls after their escape said in 23 cases, they had been raped either before arrival at camps or after forced marriage.
One 19-year-old woman who was abducted in September 2014 said: “I was raped several times when I was in the camp. Sometimes five of them. Sometimes three, sometimes six.
“It went on for all the time I was there. It always happened in the night... Some were even my classmates from my village.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said 2014 was marked by harrowing accounts of rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage being used by extremists including the Islamic State group and Boko Haram.
In a report released yesterday, the UN chief expressed “grave concern” over sexual violence perpetrated by armed groups, including those promoting extremist ideologies in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Libya and Yemen.
“The confluence of crises wrought by violent extremism has revealed a shocking trend of sexual violence employed as a tactic of terror by radical groups,” Ban said.
The secretary-general said efforts “to degrade or destroy” the Islamic State group, Boko Haram, al-Shabab, Ansar Dine and al-Qaida affiliates “are an essential part of the fight against conflict-related sexual violence.”
The report focuses on 19 countries engulfed in conflict or trying to recover from fighting where sexual violence including rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and forced pregnancy occurs, mainly against women and girls but also against boys and men. It lists 45 groups in Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Congo, Iraq, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria as well as Boko Haram in Nigeria that are “credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for patterns of rape” in conflict 13 of them for the first time.
The report said “one of the most alarming episodes of 2014” was the April 14 abduction of 276 secondary students by Boko Haram from a school in the northern Nigerian town of Chibok.
Issued a day before the first anniversary of the girls’ abduction, the report said Boko Haram often forces women and girls it seizes into marriages that entail repeated rapes.
“Forced marriage, enslavement and the ‘sale’ of kidnapped women and girls are central to Boko Haram’s modus operandi and ideology,” it said. “Abducted girls who refuse marriage or sexual contact within marriage have faced violence and death threats.”
Since mid-2014, the report said, “there has been a significant increase in the number of reported cases of sexual violence perpetrated by terrorist groups,” especially the Islamic State group which “uses sexual violence to spread terror, persecute ethnic and religious minorities and suppress communities that oppose its ideology.”
The report singled out that group’s abduction of hundreds of Yazidi women and girls in Iraq, some of whom were taken into Syria and “sold” in markets to be used as sex slaves. It said “three cases of forced abortion perpetrated because of the ethnicity of the victim were documented by the government” of Iraq.
