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Boko Haram:two Years On By Muhammed Haruna - Politics - Nairaland

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Boko Haram:two Years On By Muhammed Haruna by Ddaji(m): 12:45pm On Jun 22, 2011
Since the shocking bombing of Louis Edet House, the headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), Abuja, by the now much dreaded Boko Haram Islamic sect, the issue of terrorism has become the pre-occupation of just about every Nigerian. The big question, of course, is how to deal with it.

There are many people who think the solution is to go after the sect’s members with a sledgehammer, regardless of the rights and wrongs of their motives. Such people obviously believe that any attempt to discuss the roots of their terrorism is an attempt to justify it.

They couldn’t be more mistaken. This, I believe, is the big lesson of the failure of the attempt by the authorities to crush the sect two years ago. Apparently what the military counterinsurgency merely succeeded in doing was to drive the sect underground temporarily, only to resurface in a more monstrous form.

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the attempt to crush the sect I said as much in the piece dated August 4, 2010, whose edited version I’ve decided to reproduce below because it looks to me that the authorities still have not learnt the right lesson about their failure. This is simply that you can only solve a crime – which is what the actions of Boko Haram are – by being as hard on its source as you are on the crime itself.

From all indications, especially from President Goodluck Jonathan’s statement that he regarded the bombing as a personal attack, which itself is a far cry from his attempt at exonerating the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) from the even more horrendous 50th Independence Anniversary bombing close to Eagle Square, Abuja, it seems two years after the first Boko Haram insurgency what is being contemplated as solution is merely more of the same arbitrary use of power in the name of security.

Obviously the sect’s wholesale rejection of modernity and of the West is unreasonable and untenable. Their methods of bombings and killings are even worse. But its attacks on the police, except for their audacity of going right into the police headquarters, are no more criminal than previous attacks on security forces by ethnic militias like MEND and Afenifere.

At any rate, the fact is that there is no problem on earth that genuine dialogue cannot solve. On the other hand, repression as the opposite of dialogue has never solved any society’s problems.

However, the question, as the President of the Kaduna State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Reverend Sam Kujiyat, asked the other day, is “Who are they that you want to go and dialogue with?”

It is a valid question but it is not a difficult one to answer in spite of the fact that the sect’s top leadership was eliminated through extrajudicial killings two years ago. Obviously the vacuum it left has since been filled. There is a chance, no matter how slim, that if the outcome of the panel that looked into those killings are published the new leadership would come out in the open, change its attitude of disdain for the authorities and accept the offer for dialogue that had been made by at least the authorities in Borno State, the sect’s home base.

Boko Haram: One year on

Penultimate Tuesday saw the presentation of a 188-page book titled The Paradox of Boko Haram by Abdulkareem Babangida Mohammed, a Kano-based television journalist and media consultant. The presentation at Bolingo Hotel, Abuja, coincided more or less with the first anniversary of the uprising by Boko Haram, the Muslim sect which has denounced Western education as evil.

The uprising started in Bauchi, capital of Bauchi State on July 26, 2009 and within four days spread to the neighbouring states of Borno, Yobe and Kano. Failure of the police to put down the uprising led to the order by late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, then on his way out to Brazil, to the army to crush it. The army did but in the process anywhere between 800 and 1000 lives, mostly innocent civilians, were reportedly killed.

Among those reportedly killed were the sect’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed Yusuf, his deputy, Sheikh Abubakar Shekau, his father in law, Ba’a Fugu Mohammed, and the sect’s chief financier, Buji Foi, a former commissioner of religious affairs in Governor Ali Modu Sherrif’s Borno State Government.

All four, it soon transpired, were victims of extra-judicial killings by the security forces. At first the police claimed Yusuf was killed in a shoot-out attempting to escape capture. The army promptly put the lie to this claim when it released a transcript of its interrogation of the man which showed it handed him over to the police in a one piece and in handcuffs.

Within days of the end of the uprising, a 40-second video clip also surfaced which showed Foi, dressed in a long white gown with both hands and legs in chains, being taken out of a white Toyota Hilux pick-up van by an unidentified policeman. Seconds after he was left to walk away from the van alone gun shots rent the air with voices shouting “kill him” , “ba an bada oda ba?” in Hausa, meaning haven’t orders been given (to kill him?)

Fugu Mohammed seemed to have suffered a similar fate to Foi’s. According to his children he reported himself to a police station following the crushing of the uprising when he heard he was wanted by the police. He never returned home alive.

Recriminations soon followed these revelations. President Yar’adua, on his return from his trip to Brazil early August, promised to order an investigation into the alleged extra-judicial killings. More than six months later there was no investigation. Or if there was one the public was not told.

Last February Al-Jazeera, the English channel of the Doha, Qatar, based global television station, aired a shocking footage in its news bulletin which showed the security services going on an arbitrary house-to-house-search-and-arrest of presumably Boko Haram followers and then lining them up and shooting them in the back.

In the course of this monstrous killings one voice was heard saying “Shoot him in the chest not the head, I want his hat.” Other voices were heard shouting “No mercy, No mercy.” It was a mark of the impunity with which the security forces indulged in the killings that the officers who appeared to be in charge of the operation did not bother to hide their name tags on their chests.

Expressions of outrage in and out of the country soon followed Al-Jazeera’s story. An apparently very outraged Attorney-General of the Federation, Chief Adetokunbo Kayode, screamed blue murder and gave marching orders to the Inspector-General of the Police to investigate the killings.

“The Federal Government of Nigeria,” he said, “unequivocally condemns all extra-judicial executions and all other unlawful killing.” This was in early March.

About six months on not one word has been heard from the authorities about this blatant act of cold-blooded murder.

Perhaps Mohammed, the author of The Paradox of Boko Haram, chose to present his book penultimate Tuesday, the 1st anniversary of the sect’s bloody uprising, as a reminder to the authorities that the world still awaits their reaction to their heavy-handed handling of a rebellion. From the look of things it would be a miracle if the world ever gets the answer.

All the same the author’s effort in chronicling the rise and fall (?) of the sect - early last month the “dead” second-in-command of the sect, Imam Abubakar Shekau, emerged in a video claiming he has assumed its command and would continue from where Yusuf left off - cannot be in vain, if only because it contains lessons on the central paradox of why a sect which shows no qualms in using the fruits of Western civilization – cars, CDs, cassettes,, mobile phones, etc, would condemn it as an unmitigated evil.

It should be obvious to the authorities, that if they wish to stop the re-emergence of the likes of Boko Haram they must, like the author of our book in question says, evolve and implement policies that end the poverty and ignorance which breeds recruits for such dubious sects.

More specifically they must end the terrible extra-judicial killings that has often characterized government’s handling of the kind of extreme opposition to mainstream values which sects like Boko Haram represent if only because arbitrary killings merely drive such sects underground instead of ending their appeal to the poor and ignorant.

The Federal Government of Nigeria owe Nigerians and the world an explanation on why one year after the leaders of Boko Haram and hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in the name of ending an ostensibly religious uprising no arrests have been made, never mind any one being tried.

SOURCE:dailytrust.com
Re: Boko Haram:two Years On By Muhammed Haruna by Jeel: 12:54pm On Jun 22, 2011
Boko haram will soon disintegrate

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