[size=14pt]Massacre in Nigeria Spurs Outcry Over Military Tactics[/size]
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: April 29, 2013
New York Times

A gruesome assault that left scores of Nigerian villagers dead has been blamed by survivors on revenge-seeking soldiers and has brought withering criticism at home and abroad.


Houses were burned in what Nigerian authorities said was heavy
fighting between security forces and Islamist militants in Baga,
a fishing town on the shores of Lake Chad, last week.


MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — Days later, the survivors’ faces tensed at the memory of the grim evening: soldiers dousing thatched-roof homes with gasoline, setting them on fire and shooting residents when they tried to flee. As the village rose up in smoke, one said, a soldier threw a child back into the flames.

Even by the scorched-earth standards of the Nigerian military’s campaign against Islamist insurgents stalking the nation’s north, what happened on the muddy shores of Lake Chad this month appears exceptional.

The village, Baga, found itself in the cross hairs of Nigerian soldiers enraged by the killing of one of their own, said survivors who fled here to the state capital, 100 miles south. Their home had paid a heavy price: as many as 200 civilians, maybe more, were killed during the military’s rampage, according to refugees, senior relief workers, civilian officials and human rights organizations.

The apparent size of the civilian death toll — staunchly denied by Nigerian military officials, some of whom blame the insurgent group, Boko Haram, for the carnage — has prompted an unusual uproar. Though heavy civilian casualties are routine in the military’s confrontation with Boko Haram, with dozens dying in poor neighborhoods since 2010 as the army searches for “suspects,” Nigeria’s politicians usually have little to say about it. Past massacres of civilians in retaliation for soldier deaths have passed largely with impunity.

This time, there have been calls in Nigeria’s national assembly for an investigation and the government has come under withering criticism at home and abroad. The military has said it has begun its own inquiry, and some longstanding observers of the country’s heavy-handed fight against Islamist militants say a tipping point may have been reached.

“This is coming at a time when we have had similar situations” elsewhere, said Kole Shettima, chairman of the Center for Democracy and Development in the capital, Abuja. “People are tired of the excuses the military is giving and that’s why they are demanding an investigation. This time it’s different. There is a crisis of legitimacy in the military.”

But in a country where corruption abounds and accountability is rare, others wondered whether it would truly become a watershed moment — or get brushed aside as an unfortunate side effect of fighting a dangerous insurgency.

“This Baga is just on a bigger scale, but they have been doing this for ages,” the governor of the state, Kashim Shettima, one of the first officials to reach Baga afterward, said of the military. “They’ve not adhered to the rules of engagement,” said Mr. Shettima, who is not related to the democracy advocate. “When you burn down shops and massacre civilians, you are pushing them to join the camp of Boko Haram.”

Yet, he continued, “We are in a Catch-22 situation.” Boko Haram is a deadly insurgent force that needs to be confronted, the governor said, but not by a military that terrorizes its own people. “We need them to carry out their duties in a civilized manner.”

Some Baga residents who did not perish in the flames drowned while attempting to escape into Lake Chad, refugees here in the state capital said. Others were attacked by hippopotamuses in the shallow waters, officials said. Soldiers shot people as they ran from the burning houses, refugees said.

“Many dead, many dead,” said Mohammed Muhammed, 40, a taxi driver from Baga. “People running into the flames, I saw that. If they didn’t run into the flames, the army will shoot them.” As flames enveloped the houses — “they used petroleum,” he said of the soldiers — he fled into the surrounding desert scrub.

“If you come out” from the flaming houses “they will shoot you,” he said. “Please sir, charge them in the international court!” he shouted.

Isa Kukulala, 26, a lanky bus driver who had left Baga that morning, gave a similar account: “They poured petrol on the properties. At the same time, they are shooting sporadically, inside the fire. They took a small child from his mother and threw him inside the fire. This is what I have witnessed.”

Hundreds of residents fled into the bush, where they lived for days in harsh conditions, and are only now trickling back into the town. “The aged people, the people that couldn’t run, most of those people were burned,” said Antony Emmanuel, a fish buyer. “Small children, their parents left them, they were burned.”

Borno State officials have said hundreds of houses were destroyed in the blaze.


Burned houses and ashes were left in the wake of heavy
fighting between security forces and Islamist militants in Baga.

The army has effectively blocked journalists from getting to Baga — it is in a zone where Boko Haram exercises partial control — and it kept out relief agencies until the middle of last week. Cellphone service has been cut off. In a brief statement a week after the episode, Brig. Gen. Austin Edokpaye, the commander of the multinational joint task force — Nigeria shares intelligence with neighboring countries, though its soldiers generally do the shooting — said one soldier was killed “while 30 Boko Haram terrorists lost their lives” and “unfortunately six civilians” were killed. Ten “other civilians were injured in the cross-fire,” he said.

Nigeria’s director of defense information, Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade, angrily rejected the accounts of residents and others. He said that “the burning, the killing is done by Boko Haram, not by the soldiers. Anybody blaming the soldiers must be a sympathizer with Boko Haram.” He said that “Boko Haram was using the houses to shoot out at soldiers.”

But the picture given by civilian officials in relief agencies and state government, along with the one presented by refugees, was very different, with the vast majority of deaths attributed to the military.

“More than 200 dead, this is what people in the town confirmed,” said a senior relief official who asked not to be identified out of fear of retribution by the military. “Actually, my boys told me the number is far higher than the 200 reported,” the relief official said.

A senior official under the governor, Mr. Shettima, who is not affiliated with the governing party, said: “The soldiers went on a rampage. Because, you know, that’s what soldiers do in Nigeria. It’s really crazy here.”

General Olukolade responded angrily to such assertions, saying, “The politicians intend to create a haven for Boko Haram around our state.”

In the accounts of refugees and officials, the killings started after a few gunmen, likely to be Boko Haram members, engaged a detachment from Baga’s military post in a firefight on the evening of April 16.

“Two people came, they said they were Jama’atu,” said Mohammed Bella Sani, a fisherman from Baga, using Boko Haram’s name for itself. Boko Haram has a heavy presence in that area of fluid national borders, officials say, and has even chased away all government presence, including officials and police officers, from many rural districts.

In Baga, the soldiers went for reinforcements after one among them was killed, residents said. “A team of soldiers came back shouting, and they started firing indiscriminately,” Mr. Sani said.

“They set my neighbor’s house on fire, and people started running back to save the neighbor,” said Mallam Ali, a bus driver. And the soldiers began shooting into the crowd, he said.

“They were firing from the armored vehicles,” said Alhadji Adamua, a clothing seller at Baga’s market. “I saw them putting fire on people’s houses. They are the security of the state. They have no right to kill anybody. They are supposed to protect the people.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/world/africa/outcry-over-military-tactics-after-massacre-in-nigeria.html?hp&_r=0

visualizing the atrocities is painful. it would seem from the account that the multinational force had the whole village perimeter under siege. if that were true, then they had upper hand and could have done a forced eviction of the residents followed by a sort / clearance inspection.

the outcome we currently have is not favorable and will energize a nationalistic response from northerners.

by the way, where is Chief of Army Staff Ihejirika, how come he has not uttered a word?

Mmmm.....what do i to say ?.
...****oh I'm so clueless****
.....Kill them all o jare, both the
"shield" and the shield-ed. The north
can go ablaze, bombed into oblivion,
and hay+wire. It's none of my
business. I'm only a southerner.

Are these things houses?

stjudas: Mmmm.....what do i to say ?.
...****oh I'm so clueless****
.....Kill them all o jare, both the
"shield" and the shield-ed. The north
can go ablaze, bombed into oblivion,
and hay+wire. It's none of my
business. I'm only a southerner.

Judas, huh? Appropo.

I want a united Naijiriya, but not one where citizens are massacred down like rabid dogs.

[size=14pt]Bodies Pour In as Nigeria Hunts for Islamists[/size]
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: May 7, 2013
New York Times


The hospital morgue in Maiduguri, Nigeria, where large numbers of bodies have been brought.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — A fresh load of battered corpses arrived, 29 of them in a routine delivery by the Nigerian military to the hospital morgue here.

Unexpectedly, three bodies started moving.

“They were not properly shot,” recalled a security official here. “I had to call the J.T.F.” — the military’s joint task force — “and they gunned them down.”

It was a rare oversight. Large numbers of bodies, sometimes more than 60 in a day, are being brought by the Nigerian military to the state hospital, according to government, health and security officials, hospital workers and human rights groups — the product of the military’s brutal war against radical Islamists rooted in this northern city.

The corpses were those of young men arrested in neighborhood sweeps by the military and taken to a barracks nearby. Accused, often on flimsy or no evidence, of being members or supporters of Boko Haram — the Islamist militant group waging a bloody insurgency against the Nigerian state — the detainees are beaten, starved, shot and even suffocated to death, say the officials, employees and witnesses.

Then, soldiers bring the bodies to the hospital and dump them at the morgue, officials and workers say. The flood is so consistent that the small morgue at the edge of the hospital grounds often has no room, with corpses flung by the military in the sand around it. Residents say they sometimes have to flee the neighborhood because of the fierce smell of rotting flesh.

From the outset of the battle between Boko Haram and the military, a dirty war on both sides that has cost nearly 4,000 lives since erupting in this city in 2009, security forces have been accused of extrajudicial killings and broad, often indiscriminate roundups of suspects and sympathizers in residential areas.

The military’s harsh tactics, which it flatly denies, have reduced militant attacks in this insurgent stronghold, but at huge cost and with likely repercussions, officials and rights advocates contend.

No one doubts that Boko Haram, which has claimed responsibility for assassinations and bombings that have killed officials and civilians alike, is thoroughly enmeshed in the local populace, making the job of extricating the group extremely difficult. But as with other abuses, the bodies piling up at the morgue — where it is often impossible to distinguish combatants from the innocent — have turned many residents against the military, driving some toward the insurgency, officials say.

Even the state’s governor, who acknowledged that he must tread a careful line not to offend the Nigerian military, expressed disquiet at the tactics. “A lot of lives are lost on a daily basis due to the inhumane conditions” at the barracks, known as Giwa, said the governor, Kashim Shettima. “They do deposit bodies on a daily basis.”

Moreover, the bodies come in even when there have been no bombings, sectarian clashes or battles between the military and the insurgents, making it unlikely that the dead were killed in combat, terrorist attacks or similar circumstances.

“Mostly they bring the corpses from Giwa Barracks, the J.T.F.,” said one hospital worker. Most of the young men died “from beating, bullets, maltreatment,” he added. “You can hardly see a corpse here from sickness. Sometimes it is up to 120 corpses they bring.”

His colleague at the hospital, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said: “Every day. An average of 14 to 15 bodies a day. They accumulate. Some are swollen. Almost all are emaciated. Some they bring in with their handcuffs still on.”

On a recent blazingly hot Saturday, a convoy of two armored cars and an ambulance barreled into the sandy grounds of the sprawling state hospital, sirens wailing. Wary Nigerian Army machine gunners flanked the ambulance, and the attendants wore face masks against the odor in the 109-degree heat. It was not the only convoy that day, said rights advocates who observed the scene.

“The numbers can be outrageous; they bring them in an ambulance, two or three ambulances, loaded,” the security official said. “Most of them are tortured.”

Overwhelmed morgue attendants sometimes simply flee their post, the official said.

“They just throw the corpses on the ground,” said Dr. Mohammed Ghuluze, the hospital’s medical director. “Yesterday they came in and just threw five corpses on the ground.”

A top health official said, “Sometimes it’s 20, 30 a day.”

Sagir Musa, a spokesman for the military’s joint task force, acknowledged detentions at the barracks, saying that “many confirmed commanders of Boko Haram have been arrested, and many of their camps have been destroyed,” actions that he said aided the “restoration of law and order.”

But he rejected accusations of widespread killing or torture.

“One cannot rule out the possibility of one, two dying periodically in detention,” he said. But “to say five, no.”

Mr. Musa continued: “There cannot be multiple corpses. We don’t torture people. There is no way we can torture. We don’t even have the equipment to torture somebody in detention.”

One local official described a mass burial of 174 young men at the cemetery recently, with bodies dumped in hastily dug graves. He said the military would simply put “30-40 people inside an armored car. Then they lock the car. It’s suffocation. It’s not good, not good.”

At the back of the hospital, behind a high wall that separates the morgue from a narrow alley of shops, the smell of decomposing flesh was unmistakable. “It’s terrible, 100 percent terrible; the neighbors can’t stay,” said Alhaji Bashir, a satellite equipment vendor on the alley. “You can’t sit outside. In my shop, I bring perfume. Sometimes they bring 80 corpses a day from Giwa. They even throw the corpses under the trees.”

One retired civil servant said he had not seen his two sons, 36 and 34, since Dec. 11, when soldiers entered their house at 3 a.m. and arrested them. They were health care workers, he said, accused of treating wounded Boko Haram members.

Other detainees passed word to him that the younger son was already dead, he said. He hoped the older son was still alive, but, like most others, he had no access to the barracks, where hundreds are estimated to be detained at a time.

Suleman Mohammed, 28, a clothing seller, said he was rounded up in January with six others after a neighborhood school was set on fire by Boko Haram. He said he was taken to Giwa barracks.

“They hung me for two days,” Mr. Mohammed recounted, saying he was handcuffed to a pillar, beaten with a truncheon and given one cup of water a day. “They will insist you are a member of Boko Haram, nothing more and nothing less.”

He said he saw many people die at the barracks: “In Giwa, not less than 30 people die every day — starvation, heart attacks. At times, in a single room, 10 people died because of starvation.” He added: “Some go mad. They shout, ‘Water, water.’ ”

Boko Haram has shown few signs of giving up — militants suspected of belonging to the group attacked a northern town on Tuesday, killing scores, Reuters reported. The military has not shown signs of relenting either, officials said. There has been “a very high increase in the number of corpses,” said one of the state’s top health officials. “It was not this bad” several years ago, the official said. “In the last year, it has become so bad. It has escalated.”

Mr. Mohammed, the clothing seller, said, “I never thought I would see the outside world again.” But he was released, he said, when a neighborhood policeman intervened to say that he was not a Boko Haram member.

As for the military, “I don’t fear them as before,” he said. “I have undergone the pain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/world/africa/body-count-soars-as-nigerian-military-hunts-islamists.html?hp&_r=0