Apr, 29 2014
BRING BACK OUR GIRLS
Ramaa Mosley shares one young woman’s story of escape (via translation):
Sleeping in my small dormitory bunk, dreaming cheery adolescent dreams, I think I feel hands grabbing me but I’m sure I’m still dreaming…The pull becomes a tug and I start wondering if my sweet dream is turning into a nightmare of sorts as the hands are very strong and in fact, real! I jump up startled to find a vicious looking man holding me down. Screaming as loud as my shrill adolescent voice could carry, I kick hard, trying to bite the man’s hands, but he slaps me, very hard, making my own blood run in my mouth. Right now, it begins to dawn on me that I’m indeed in very bad hands! Around me, a lot is going on, many mean looking fiercer looking guns are barking orders at us, more girls are screaming, while a few have passed out. My God! Where did all these menacing looking men come from?! Where are my friends? Where is the house mistress? Did the security men not hear our screams?
***
These men are many, going from dormitory to dormitory and tying girls together. Scenes from D’jango come to mind as they lead all of us out…not one of us is left behind…their friends positioned outside make sure of that. Scattered thoughts run through my mind, and I can’t keep any for long, as it begins to appear to me that we have been captured by the dreaded Boko Haram men! Of late, young school girls have been their prized abductees. Many of the girls captured from a neighboring school have never been found! Kai! I briefly recall all the blood-curdling stories we have heard about them! Another shrill shriek erupts from my insides, before I pass out.
For the second time that night, I am rudely awakened, this time, by the rough jostling of metal against my skin, and I discover that we are in a lorry — all of my classmates. The lorry is packed full of dozens of us, virtually all the girls from school had been taken. Everyone is crying hard, weeping, for the unknown fate that awaits us…or is it the known fate we’d rather not imagine?.. that we would end up becoming sex slaves, satisfying the urges of these bestial men?..that we might end up chopped, and added in the ritualistic sacrifices these monsters make to whatever god they believe in, or hacked to just make a statement and pass a message to our government?..
Our government? Did I just say that? Do we have any, really? ‘Government’ is one of my best subjects in school and I remember being taught the duties and rights of citizens and governments. One of them, if I remember clearly is the government’s duty to protect its citizens, and I also believe I have a fundamental right to life…Where is my government in all of this madness?! Maybe they’re coming for us! I try to believe that they would come for us, soon…
But at the same time, I remember my cousin two villages away, shot to death for absolutely no reason by these same evil men. That incidence was never reported, let alone getting a mention from our president in his speech at a function the next day…I think it was a political function, yes indeed it was! It was a function to formally declare his intentions to run for office in the upcoming elections. Obviously, he has more pressing issues on his hands than caring about saving a few dozen under-age girls that couldn’t even vote!
I remember myself, and, kai! Allah kiyaye! God forbid! Definitely not me! It’s not my portion to be wasted! Anger welled up within me from some place I don’t know… Not I, Julia, whom all the boys in my yard feared. I am the only girl in my whole extended family to have gone this far in school, and I still have dreams of more.
My father (oh I love him so much!) had coached me to be bold and courageous in all situations. I remember him saying that cowards die many times before their death. He said I would become a lawyer, advocating women’s rights. It was in order to be well prepared for my school leaving exams that I was back in school for the compulsory extension program. And now this! Would I just sit here, and allow my life and dreams be cut short by some animals? No! Never! As I sit confused, and scared, I feel the lorry slowing down, kind of, and the voices of our captors come to my ears.
I feel a serious sense of dread, thinking we’ve got to our destination. But from what I hear, it seems the lorry has developed a fault. It has now stopped. The men were bending down to try and fix the fault, talking surprisingly in apprehensive tones. It is at this point that I get up, crouching, saying a short prayer and summing up all the courage I would ever have, I motion to some of my friends to follow. There were low hanging branches of the Neem tree above us. Without looking back, I led as we latched on to some of these branches. Trembling, I silently thanked God for the miserable hostel food that kept us practically weightless, so we were easily supported. All the while muttering prayers that we would not be seen, I shudder to imagine what would become of us if that happened!
We stayed on our trees and watched with heavy hearts as reinforcements came for them, and sadly, they departed, still with our friends. Too terrified to move, we stayed the rest of the night on the trees. We had short naps and took turns watching through the night. Miraculously, they didn’t come back for us!
As the next day broke, we jumped down, dazed, thirsty and bruised, we began our wandering journey back to the town. One weary step after the other we trudged on in the dangerous forests. Barely back in town, a team of local rescuers caught sight of us and we crumbled into their arms, safe at last!
At some point, I hear reports that my friends have eventually been rescued by our indomitable army, praise God! Maybe I should have had more faith in them, and waited, after all, then, I won’t be in this much pain…Two days later, I find it’s only a ruse! What?! The army was only taking credit for my own return, our own return! My friends are still ‘there’ apparently! Why? Why do they have to do that? Its bad enough we had to find our way back, but did they have to raise peoples’ hopes? Why is everyone so insincere? Why is my country this way? Hmm… More so, why do people make themselves believe this is a ‘northern’ problem? It looks more like a national problem to me…
Well, why do I think this way? I’m only 16 after all, I guess I should just be happy for life… I should ask father how I’m going to eventually take the examinations. I’m still going to become that lawyer after all…maybe then, I could change things…
Allah Nagode.
UPDATE excerpt from AllAfrica.com as of 4/29/2014 posted by Turaki A. Hassan, Ibrahim Kabiru Sule and Ronald Mutum:
On whether military authorities were informed about the movements of the girls, (Dr. Pogu) Bitrus said: “The military was alerted on Tuesday about two weeks ago when some villagers saw many of the girls being transported in trucks, some with even their school uniforms. The villagers tried calling the senator representing the zone but they couldn’t get him so they went to Bama barracks where they reported the matter.” At the Bama barracks they were told that they must put it in writing, that that is the military tradition. At that time if the military had intervened they would have stopped them from reaching their destination.
“And the fact that for nearly two weeks we have been talking about this and nothing is being done, then there are questions we have to ask. Nobody did anything.”
Bitrus sobbed as he spoke to our reporter yesterday.
“What is happening with the Nigerian nation? I think we demand some answers. Today it is happening to these unfortunate girls from Chibok, tomorrow it may be somewhere else and that is why all Nigerians must rally around us on this,” he said.
“If these captors are trying to achieve a political point, I think the best thing is for us to try to make sure that they don’t succeed but from all indications they are succeeding due to inaction of government. It is helping these people in achieving their objectives.”
Earlier yesterday, Bitrus spoke to the BBC Hausa radio saying, “Parents of these girls have been angry that despite the existence of government, there has not been concrete effort from government on the matter.
“Female parents have been crying day and night, because nobody knows what government is doing about the whole issue. All that we read in the papers is that Nigerian Army have done this or that.”
When contacted over claims that the military was informed of the movement of the schoolgirls, the Director of Defense Information, Major General Chris Olukolade, told the Daily Trust: “The concern and anxiety from all quarters is quite understandable. Please be assured that, as much as the forces may not disclose details of action being taken to secure the freedom of the girls, every information received on the subject is duly analyzed and acted upon as necessary.
“No information is being ignored in the concerted effort to ensure the safety and freedom of the girls. Just pray for the successful outcome of all efforts please.”
Four students walk in Chibok following their escape from Boko Haram. Photograph by Haruna Umar/AP.
***UPDATE from The New Yorker as of 4/30/2014 posted by Alexis Okeowo:
“I thought it was the end of my life,” Deborah Sanya told me by phone on Monday from Chibok, a tiny town of farmers in northeastern Nigeria. “There were many, many of them.” Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, kidnapped Sanya and at least two hundred of her classmates from a girls’ secondary school in Chibok more than two weeks ago. Sanya, along with two friends, escaped. So did forty others. The rest have vanished, and their families have not heard any word of them since.
Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns around Chibok, in the state of Borno, had been shuttered. Boko Haram attacks at other schools—like a recent massacre of fifty-nine schoolboys in neighboring Yobe state—had prompted the mass closure. But local education officials decided to briefly reopen the Chibok school for exams. On the night of the abduction, militants showed up at the boarding school dressed in Nigerian military uniforms. They told the girls that they were there to take them to safety. “They said, ‘Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to you,’ ” Sanya told me. The men took food and other supplies from the school and then set the building on fire. They herded the girls into trucks and onto motorcycles. At first, the girls, while alarmed and nervous, believed that they were in safe hands. When the men started shooting their guns into the air and shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Sanya told me, she realized that the men were not who they said they were. She started begging God for help; she watched several girls jump out of the truck that they were in.
It was noon when her group reached the terrorists’ camp. She had been taken not far from Chibok, a couple of remote villages away in the bush. The militants forced her classmates to cook; Sanya couldn’t eat. Two hours later, she pulled two friends close and told them that they should run. One of them hesitated, and said that they should wait to escape at night. Sanya insisted, and they fled behind some trees. The guards spotted them and called out for them to return, but the girls kept running. They reached a village late at night, slept at a friendly stranger’s home, and, the next day, called their families.
Sanya could not tell me more after that. She is not well. Her cousins and her close friends are still missing, and she is trying to understand how she is alive and back home. All she can do now, she said, is pray and fast, then pray and fast again.
The day after the abduction, the Nigerian military claimed that it had rescued nearly all of the girls. A day later, the military retracted its claim; it had not actually rescued any of the girls. And the number that the government said was missing, just over a hundred, was less than half the number that parents and school officials counted: according to their tally, two hundred and thirty-four girls were taken.
In the wake of the military’s failure, parents banded together and raised money to send several of their number into the forest to search for the girls. The group came across villagers who persuaded the parents to turn back. They told the parents that they had seen the girls nearby, but the insurgents were too well armed. Many of the parents had just bows and arrows.
***
The circumstances of the kidnapping, and the military’s deception, especially, have exposed a deeply troubling aspect of Nigeria’s leadership: when it comes to Boko Haram, the government cannot be trusted. Children have been killed, along with their families, in numerous Boko Haram bombings and massacres over the past five years. (More than fifteen hundred people have been killed so far this year.) State schools and remote villages in the north have borne the brunt of Boko Haram’s violence this year. The group is believed to be at least partly waging a campaign against secular values. The kidnapped girls were both Christian and Muslim; their only offense, it seems, was attending school.
Last June, I visited Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and the birthplace of Boko Haram, to report on the insurgency and the Nigerian government’s counteroffensive, a security operation that placed three northeastern states, including Borno and Yobe, under a state of emergency as troops launched attacks on terrorist hideouts and camps. The military cut phone lines and Internet access, and, while residents were glad for the intervention, there was a sense of living in the dark. Gunshots, a bomb blast: was it Boko Haram or a military attack? Were the hundreds of men disappeared by the military actually terrorists—even the young boys? And was the government, as it claimed, really winning the war?
The military has restored phone lines in Borno. But the sole airline that flew to Maiduguri cancelled the route at the end of last year. The road to Chibok is so hazardous that Borno’s governor visited the town with a heavy military escort. Much of the northeast is now physically isolated. What is happening there that we cannot see?
Nigerians in the rest of the country had, until recently, been able to ignore the deaths. The general mood has been one of weary apathy—from a government waging a heavy-handed crackdown on northerners to civilians far removed from the chaos. That mood may finally change.
***
Sanya’s father, a primary-school teacher named Ishaya Sanya, is struggling with conflicting emotions: gratitude that his daughter has returned to him; guilt that the daughters of his siblings, friends, and neighbors are still somewhere in the bush; and an angry frustration that there seemed to be no effort to rescue the girls.
“We don’t know where they are up until now, and we have not heard anything from the government,” he told me. “Every house in Chibok has been affected by the kidnapping.” The only information that the families had been able to gather about the kidnapped girls, he went on, was from the girls who had escaped.
He remembers the exact time that Deborah appeared in front of him after her escape—4:30P.M.—and how he felt: “very happy.” But his despair soon returned. “Our area has been affected very seriously,” he told me. Parents had fallen physically ill, and some were “going mad.”
The military’s current plans are unclear; the Chibok parents hope that it is acting swiftly and cautiously. There is worry, too, that a rescue operation could result in the deaths of many of the girls; this happened during a previous attempted rescue, of two Western engineers kidnapped by Boko Haram. Last week, a military spokesman, Brigadier-General Chris Olukolade, said only that the search for the girls had “intensified.”
In the meantime, as in so many other ways in Nigeria, each community has to fend for itself. For a while after the abduction, girls trickled back into town—some rolled off trucks, some snuck away while fetching water. That trickle has stopped. “Nobody rescued them,” a government official in Chibok said of the girls who made it back. “I want you to stress this point. Nobody rescued them. They escaped on their accord. This is painful.”
A pastor in Chibok whose daughter is missing told me that he set out with friends on the morning after the abduction to find the girls. “I was forced to come home empty-handed,” he told me by phone. “I just don’t know what the federal government is doing about it. And there is no security here that will defend us. You have to do what you can do to escape for your life.”
I asked the pastor about rumors that Boko Haram has taken the girls outside of Nigeria’s borders, into Cameroon and Chad, and forcibly married them. He paused, and then said, “How will I be happy? How will I be happy?”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/04/nigerias-stolen-girls.html
>via: http://blkcowrie.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/bringbackourgirls/