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What do Boko Haram want?
There is much talk here in Nigeria of the world’s muted response to the latest outrage by the Boko Haram Islamic insurgents who sacked the entire town of Baga in the beleaguered north-east while any number of heads of state gathered in Paris to mourn the deaths of 17 French citizens. Double standards? Perhaps. But if so, what should we say about the silence of President Goodluck Jonathan in the face of the wholesale slaughter of his citizens – 2000 according to initial reports; 150 according to the government – even as his French counterpart was to be seen everywhere exhorting his people to stand firm? Nine months ago, when Boko Haram abducted more than 200 schoolgirls, it took the president nearly three weeks to acknowledge that anything had happened.
Nobody knows what Boko Haram want and perhaps they don’t know themselves. We only know what they don’t want, most famously ‘Western’ education. When they first upped the ante in late 2010, eight years after they announced themselves, they targeted churches, police stations and army barracks, along with the UN building in Abuja. This made sense of sorts but in 2013 they started killing Muslims in the north. Since they began their ‘armed struggle’, Boko Haram have killed around 5000 people and displaced 300,000, but these figures are guesswork; nobody really knows. Last week they killed 19 people in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, where the surviving Baga residents had fled, using a bomb strapped to a 10-year-old girl which they detonated by remote control.
As I wrote last year, there are many who believe that Boko Haram is the armed wing of the northern Muslim political establishment, smarting from the accidental ascendancy of Jonathan, a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south. Last June, the Northern Elders Forum issued a communiqué which begins by asserting that the north laments the ‘dangerous trend’ by the Jonathan administration ‘aimed at weakening the determination of the North to reclaim its traditional position of providing leadership for the Nigerian polity’. After taking a swipe at the traitors among them who have fallen for Jonathan’s divide and rule tactics, it reiterates the long-held belief that the North has a divine right to rule (‘it is the almighty that has destined it so’) as the only way to keep the country ‘stable and secure’.
Nigeria is now unstable and insecure and Jonathan’s authority has suffered badly as a result, although in this as in so much else he didn’t need much help. After corruption, insecurity is voters’ main concern as we approach next month’s elections. Defeating Jonathan at the polls ought to be easy enough, except that his only challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, is – or was – a Boko Haram sympathiser. He is also a retired general and former military head of state. In May 2013, he compared Boko Haram with Niger Delta militants in the 1990s:
...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/15/adewale-maja-pearce/what-do-boko-haram-want/
Nobody knows what Boko Haram want and perhaps they don’t know themselves. We only know what they don’t want, most famously ‘Western’ education. When they first upped the ante in late 2010, eight years after they announced themselves, they targeted churches, police stations and army barracks, along with the UN building in Abuja. This made sense of sorts but in 2013 they started killing Muslims in the north. Since they began their ‘armed struggle’, Boko Haram have killed around 5000 people and displaced 300,000, but these figures are guesswork; nobody really knows. Last week they killed 19 people in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, where the surviving Baga residents had fled, using a bomb strapped to a 10-year-old girl which they detonated by remote control.
As I wrote last year, there are many who believe that Boko Haram is the armed wing of the northern Muslim political establishment, smarting from the accidental ascendancy of Jonathan, a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta in the south. Last June, the Northern Elders Forum issued a communiqué which begins by asserting that the north laments the ‘dangerous trend’ by the Jonathan administration ‘aimed at weakening the determination of the North to reclaim its traditional position of providing leadership for the Nigerian polity’. After taking a swipe at the traitors among them who have fallen for Jonathan’s divide and rule tactics, it reiterates the long-held belief that the North has a divine right to rule (‘it is the almighty that has destined it so’) as the only way to keep the country ‘stable and secure’.
Nigeria is now unstable and insecure and Jonathan’s authority has suffered badly as a result, although in this as in so much else he didn’t need much help. After corruption, insecurity is voters’ main concern as we approach next month’s elections. Defeating Jonathan at the polls ought to be easy enough, except that his only challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, is – or was – a Boko Haram sympathiser. He is also a retired general and former military head of state. In May 2013, he compared Boko Haram with Niger Delta militants in the 1990s:
...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/15/adewale-maja-pearce/what-do-boko-haram-want/
23 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Haven't seen you in a while. I hope you're doing well. 
...the hands and arms of children and abducted other boys to be child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/charles-taylor-liberias-former-president-finally-faces-punishment-for-his-horrific-war-crimes-8845092.html
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/082299sierra-leone.html
There is no ideological justification for such horrific behavior. None. Whether they acknowledge it or not, and no matter the name they give him, the god they worship is one of death and slaughter.
Boko Haram is composed of criminals, and they need to be hunted down and brought to justice. It should not be considered too late for the girls stolen away by them; they too should be traced and rescued, along with any children they may have borne due to their slave-marriages.
