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New Kidnapping Reported in Nigeria as U.S. Offers Help New Kidnapping Reported in Nigeria as U.S. Offers Help
(about 2 hours later)
ABUJA, Nigeria — Armed extremists in northern Nigeria have carried out another brazen kidnapping of young girls, the United Nations Children’s Fund and a local official said on Tuesday, adding to the international uproar over the abduction of more than 200 girls seized from a school in the same part of the country last month. ABUJA, Nigeria — A second kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria’s northeast by Islamist militants put new pressure on the country’s troubled government, which had been hoping to showcase its emergence as Africa’s largest economy this week but instead has been forced to confront its failure to contain a growing insurgency in its north.
Details of the additional kidnapping came as the Obama administration announced that it had offered to help Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, find and prosecute those responsible for the April mass abduction, which has traumatized Nigeria and garnered attention worldwide. Men suspected of being fighters from the radical group Boko Haram kidnapped 11 more girls in Nigeria’s northeast, local officials said Tuesday, an intensification of its campaign against female education and the Nigerian government since the abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls three weeks ago.
Jay Carney, a White House spokesman, told reporters in Washington that military personnel and experts in hostage negotiations were included as part of an assessment team that was offered to Mr. Jonathan in a telephone call with Secretary of State John Kerry. The spectacle of red-shirted protesters in the streets of the capital, angry at the government for its tepid response to the crisis, put President Goodluck Jonathan under an uncomfortable spotlight as executives from across the world arrived in private jets to attend the Africa meeting of the World Economic Forum, the continent’s answer to Davos.
In addition, the State Department issued an updated warning to American citizens, admonishing them to avoid nonessential travel to parts of northern Nigeria “due to the risk of kidnappings, robberies and other armed attacks.” Authorities here — and particularly the military, itself implicated in numerous massacres of civilians — appear to be floundering in their response to a crisis that social media have transformed into a cause célèbre. The new kidnappings underlined the inability of the Nigerian government to protect civilians from the growing insurgency. Not a single girl has been rescued so far.
Unicef said that the second kidnapping involved at least eight girls who were seized in their homes in Borno State to prevent them from attending school. It called the latest abduction “an outrage and a worsening nightmare for the girls themselves, and for the families of the more than 200 girls who have been stolen from their communities in the last several weeks.” In a sign of deepening global concern, on Tuesday the United States offered to provide a team of experts, including military and law enforcement officers, along with hostage negotiators and psychologists, to assist the Nigerians in recovering the girls, an offer that the government here accepted. American officials said “military resources” would not be included, but President Obama weighed in, vowing to “do everything we can.”
Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for west and central Africa, said in a telephone interview that the information was obtained from the agency’s contacts for the area, which has been riven for years by attacks on villages and schools by the Islamist group Boko Haram. The leader of the group, Abubakar Shekau, has claimed responsibility for the mass abduction last month in a newly released video in which he vowed to sell the girls like slaves. A viral social media campaign, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, has brought new infamy to Boko Haram, which has been operating in Nigeria for more than a decade. The group’s goal, never clearly enunciated, is to radically undermine the secular Nigerian state.
“The situation in northeast Nigeria has been difficult for a long time,” Mr. Fontaine said. The mass anger and global outcry caused by the abductions is important, he said, because it shows that “at some point people say enough is enough.” But never in a five-year campaign of bombings, civilian massacres and assaults on state schools have the attacks so shaken the government. The heightening concerns have led to daily antigovernment protests, which continued Tuesday with a demonstration outside defense headquarters here. In a sign of the government’s nervousness, several of the protest leaders were briefly arrested Monday.
Hamba Tada, a local official in Gwoza, another town in the area, offered further confirmation and additional details of the latest kidnapping, although his account differed in some respects. In the latest kidnappings, more girls were taken from their homes late Sunday in the villages of Warabe and Wala, said Hamba Tada, an official in the area. Heavily armed militants descended from surrounding hills, stealing grain and livestock belonging to villagers, forcing the girls ages 12 to 15 into an 18-seater bus, and warning locals not to warn the authorities.
Mr. Tada said 11 girls, 12 to 15 years old, had been abducted from two villages, Warabe and Wala, on Sunday night by members of Boko Haram. He said the kidnappers, armed with AK-47 rifles, had not shot anyone but seized grain and livestock from the villagers “while the abducted girls were hurled into an 18-seater bus before they fled.” Another local official confirmed the new abductions, though the area’s top police official, Lawan Tanko denied they had taken place. “By our record it’s not true,” he said in an interview from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
“The gunmen only warned the villagers against alerting any security personnel on the abduction of girls,” Mr. Tada said. “They promised to deal with anyone that violates their order.” In Abuja, limousines ferrying business-suited delegates to the World Economic Forum are flooding the capital and filling its luxury hotels, but public discussion and newspaper headlines here are dominated by little else but the kidnappings. On Monday, a video surfaced in which the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, claimed responsibility for the abduction of the nearly 300 girls taken on April 15 and threatened to sell them into slavery in a rambling and vituperative diatribe.
The accounts contradicted the police commissioner in Borno State, Lawan Tanko, who denied there had been any new abductions. The video has sharpened the sense of urgency about finding the girls quickly, and has added to the deepening embarrassment of the Nigerian government, even as it tries to present a progressive new face at the forum.
The news came as top human rights figures added their voices on Tuesday to the anger over the first mass abduction on April 14. Unicef has reported that the second kidnappings involved at least eight girls who were seized in their homes in Borno to prevent them from attending school. It called the latest abduction “an outrage and a worsening nightmare for the girls themselves, and for the families of the more than 200 girls who have been stolen from their communities in the last several weeks.”
Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, said through a spokesman that Boko Haram would be held accountable for the kidnappings. Manuel Fontaine, Unicef’s regional director for West and Central Africa, said in a telephone interview that the information was obtained from the agency’s contacts for the area, which has been rived for years by attacks from Boko Haram.
“We warn the perpetrators that there is an absolute prohibition against slavery and sexual slavery in international law,” Ms. Pillay’s spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters at a news briefing. “That means anyone responsible can be arrested, charged, prosecuted and jailed at any time in the future. So just because they think they are safe now, they won’t necessarily be in two years, five years or 10 years’ time.” In the past, Boko Haram has frequently targeted schools, which it sees as symbols of the secular government’s overreach. Male students have been slaughtered, while the female students have been let go after admonitions to return to their families, abandon their studies and get married. The latest kidnappings appear to represent a hardening of the militants’ line, though not a wholesale departure from it.
Cristina Finch, managing director of Amnesty International USA’s identity and discrimination unit, which focuses on women’s human rights, said the abductions reflected what she called “yet another example of the ways in which violence against girls and women affects every aspect of their lives.” “This has been going on. It’s been a common practice. They come and attack a place and seize girls. They just have been doing this,” said Pogu Bitrus, a local official in the town where the schoolgirls were taken, Chibok.
The mass kidnappings ignited a rare antigovernment protest movement and embarrassed the government of President Jonathan, which has so far been unable to rescue the teenage girls. They were abducted from their school in a remote corner of northeastern Nigeria by armed and uniformed men, loaded into trucks and driven into a dense forest at night. By some counts, 276 remain missing. The military, which has responded brutally to Boko Haram’s campaign, itself engaging in large-scale atrocities against civilians, has so far proved incapable of finding any of the kidnapped girls, some of whom may already have been taken across the border to Cameroon, in a remote, hilly and wild corner of West Africa. The number of missing schoolgirls has been revised by officials more than once, while some escaped shortly after the abduction.
By late Tuesday, following Mr. Kerry’s call to Mr. Jonathan, planners at the Pentagon and at the military’s Africa Command in Germany were hastily beginning to prepare contingencies in case the administration decides to send military aid to help Nigeria rescue the kidnapped girls. It is unusual for the military establishment here, usually fiercely protective of its sovereignty, to accept offers of outside help as it has apparently done in this case.
Reconnaissance planes and other sensors, transport aircraft, and military personnel specializing in hostage-negotiation tactics, are among the types of assistance that the Pentagon could offer, a Defense Department official said. The latest kidnappings, not yet acknowledged by the government, differed somewhat from the wholesale abduction three weeks ago of girls from the school where they were taking their exams. Then, the militants disguised themselves as soldiers.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, said there had been no formal requests for such assistance yet from the Nigerian government, and that the immediate focus was assembling the American assessment team to meet with Nigerian officials to determine how the United States could best help. In this case they simply came down from the surrounding hills, brandishing their guns in the darkness.
In the video message claiming responsibility for the first abductions, the Boko Haram leader threatened to “sell them in the market,” adding that he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves.” “They descended from hill top of Gava, Hwa’a and Chikedeh with several AK-47 rifles hanging over their shoulders,” said Mr. Tada, the local official.
“We would marry them out at the age of 9,” he said. “We would marry them out at the age of 12.” “They evacuated some of our grains, and carried away livestock into a pickup van. The girls were hurled into an 18-seater bus before they fled,” he added.
President Obama and other world leaders have condemned the mass abductions in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria’s president, Mr. Jonathan, has struggled over how to battle Boko Haram, which has terrorized parts of Nigeria for years.
Denunciations of the Boko Haram abductions also came from a pre-eminent Islamic theological institute in Egypt, Al-Azhar, which said on Tuesday that the abduction “completely contradicts the teaching of Islam and its tolerant principles.”
The actress Angelina Jolie, who is the special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency, said at an appearance in Paris that Boko Haram’s actions were “unthinkable cruelty and evil.”