Boko Haram Abducted Nigerian Girls One Year Ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/15/world/africa/nigeria-boko-haram-chibok-kidnapped-girls.html

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DAKAR, Senegal — A year to the day after they were kidnapped by Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok remain missing, with no sign that the current government is any closer to finding them.

But signaling a new realism on a tragedy that focused worldwide attention on Boko Haram for the first time after years of killings by the group, Nigeria’s president-elect, Muhammadu Buhari, this week forcefully separated himself from the muddied approach of the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan.

“As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them: to do so would be to offer unfounded hope,” he said on Tuesday in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times.

In contrast, Mr. Jonathan and his subordinates repeatedly declared over the last year that the girls would soon be rescued, that they had been located and even, on one occasion, that they had already been rescued.

Each declaration turned out to be false, with aides even suggesting that evidence of their abduction had been trumped up.

Pointedly, Mr. Buhari said his approach to the crisis “must begin with honesty as to whether the Chibok girls can be rescued.”

Mr. Buhari, a onetime military ruler who defeated Mr. Jonathan in a historic election last month, has pledged to rout Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorism group that has already suffered significant military reversals in recent months. Its fighters have lost towns and territory that it had swept across in previous months, thanks to separate efforts by Nigerian forces and troops from neighboring countries, particularly Chad, as well as the use of South African mercenaries.

But on the rescue of the girls, Mr. Buhari was circumspect.

“Currently their whereabouts remain unknown,” he said. “We do not know the state of their health or welfare, or whether they are even still together or alive.”

The girls were taken late on the night of April 14, 2014, from their state school in the heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency, igniting fears among local officials that the girls would be used as slaves by the group if they were not rescued immediately.

Perhaps as many as 50 of the girls subsequently escaped. The majority remain missing, forced into “marriage” by their captors, forced to cook and do chores for them, or killed by them.

Previous atrocities by the group or by its Nigerian Army adversaries had often gone unnoticed outside Nigeria. But this one caught the imagination of the news media around the world, as well as commentators who had previously ignored Boko Haram’s depredations, setting off a global social media campaign.

Still, it was hardly the only time such kidnappings had occurred.

In a report this week, Amnesty International asserted that “at least 2,000 women and girls” had been abducted by Boko Haram since the beginning of 2014. Last fall, Human Rights Watch arrived at a far lower figure — about 500 such abductions since the start of the insurgency in 2009.

The new Amnesty report also pointed out that some of the abducted girls had been “trained to fight” for the group.

For over a year, witnesses have reported numerous suicide bombings carried out by women in the northeast.

The Chibok girls’ abduction started a rare social protest movement in Nigeria, galvanizing opposition to the Jonathan administration and calling global attention to his army’s failure to stem the Islamists.