ANDREW HARROD: BOKO HARAM’S VIOLENCE…THE WEST STRUGGLES TO “UNDERSTAND”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boko-haram-violence-explodes-the-west-struggles-to-understand?f=puball
(Washington, DC) Nigeria’s jihadist group Boko Haram was recently featured in several Washington, DC, briefings, including a presentation by a Nigerian teenager who was the lone survivor of a family massacred by Boko Haram. These briefings highlighted significant challenges in combating Boko Haram’s brutal terror campaign.
Fifteen-year old Deborah Peters appeared at a May 13 Hudson Institute panel to discuss a December 22, 2011, Boko Haram attack on her home near Chibok in Nigeria’s Borno state. Peters saw Boko Haram assailants, one of whom she knew, shoot her pastor father. Targeted after rebuilding his church which had been burnt down by Boko Haram the previous November, the pastor suffered martyrdom after refusing to recant his Christian faith. The terrorists then killed her brother as well, and left the young girl lying between the bodies.
The girl’s mother, described by Nigerian human rights activist Emmanuel Ogebe as a Muslim convert in “one of those strange love stories that doesn’t end very well,” was not in the house at the time. Nonetheless, she cannot return home as Boko Haram would kill her as an apostate. Another pastor who helped bring Deborah Peters to the United States was himself a victim of a May 2013 Boko Haram attack.
Boko Haram has perpetrated “massive genocides” of Christian Nigerians in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria in order to establish a Muslim rule, with Taliban-style stadium beheadings in the “old-fashioned way,” Ogebe noted. The terror group marked Christian dwellings for subsequent nocturnal attacks and had an “MO” of close range “shoot to kill” headshots. While sporadic killings of Christians are “normal in northern Nigeria,” such as when Muslims blame Christians for an eclipse, Boko Haram presents “persecution on steroids.” Boko Haram attacks, for example, have “virtually de-Christianized” Nigeria’s Yobe state, Ogebe wrote online, leaving hardly 80 pastors where once over 1,000 churches existed, a percentage loss greater “than the decimation of Christians in Iraq.”
Twice denied an American visa for insufficient family ties (“You can’t make this stuff up,” Ogebe observed), Deborah Peters had a low profile once in the United States. Ogebe and his colleagues “tactically decided not to put her in a public space” because “we could not sacrifice the mental health of this young child” suffering from trauma. International outcry over Boko Haram’s April 14 kidnapping of hundreds of mostly Christian girls, however, some of whom Peters had “literally…played with” moved her to “put a face to this travesty,” in Ogebe’s words.
The April 14 attack marked Boko Haram’s transition away from “gentlemen terrorists,” Ogebe noted. Boko Haram in the past had often spared women, children (in an exception, Boko Haram feared that Peters brother would grow up to be a pastor like his father), and the elderly – in what Ogebe had described online as a “religious gendercide.” Boko Haram had now moved to “gender-based targeting of women,” though, after the men had left various regions to avoid death. Girl captives who had escaped Boko Haram horrifyingly related how their captors had forced them upon pain of death to convert to Islam and marry Boko Haram supporters.
Recent Nigerian military response to Boko Haram attacks was “woefully inadequate,” according to a May 15 situation report following a Nigeria visit by Ogebe and others on behalf of the Christian human rights organization Jubilee Campaign (JC). America’s “overstretched and understaffed” security cooperation was also “inadequate.”
Ogebe at Hudson, meanwhile, described Nigerian refugees in a UN camp in Cameroon who had not eaten for 49 days, noting that unofficial camps in Nigeria’s eastern neighbor were even worse. Another analyst worried that these camps are “sitting ducks” for cross-border Boko Haram attacks, a “setup for Rwanda all over again.” Yet the “UN is spending scandalous sums of money,” according to the situation report, “reinventing the wheel” by documenting human rights abuses already reported by groups like JC.
In contrast, Boko Haram “is becoming tactically more superior” than government forces, noted Ogebe at Hudson, pointing to an existing Boko Haram arms superiority. With “amazing support” from global jihadist groups, Boko Haram “is light years ahead of everyone in the game,” another analyst observed, already training, for example, in drone avoidance. The Chibok kidnapping attack, for example, was a “very tactically well-organized attack” along with a December 2013 attack on an air base in Borno’s capital of Maiduguri. A recent Boko Haram attack on a bridge between Borno and Cameroon also appeared to Ogebe at Hudson as a well-considered “preemptive strike action” against future French deployments from the latter.
Boko Haram “is way more resilient” than State Department assessments, Ogebe concluded. After Chibok, Boko Haram has become “energized by the media attention they are getting,” something that will incite repeat kidnappings. Boko Haram faces a “make or break time,” according to Ogebe; if not defeated now, the organization will grow.
Along with material resources, a “change of language” would be necessary in defeating Boko Haram. American officials in the State Department and elsewhere “should stop waffling” over Boko Haram’s character “properly framed in the lens of jihad.” “Muslims are some of the most contented human beings that I have ever met,” the Christian northern Nigerian native Ogebe observed, given their religious fatalism. He thus rejected theories that Boko Haram derived support from Muslim grievances in a region of poverty and poor governance. “You can’t call it flu if it’s Ebola,” Ogebe said, drawing an analogy that it’s necessary to understand Boko Haram in order to devise strategies to defeat it, in the same way that it’s necessary to properly diagnose a disease in order to treat it.
Boko Haram is “obviously an ideologically based, religiously extremist” group, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) Vice Chair Zuhdi Jasser concurred earlier on May 13 at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Boko Haram manifested “Islamic supremacism,” an “issue that is not unique to Nigeria.” Jasser cited as evidence Boko Haram’s very name bestowed by Hausa-speakers in northern Nigeria meaning “Western education is sin.” Jasser could have additionally cited Boko Haram’s official Arabic name, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, meaning “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.”
“We need to increase our recognition of the importance of religion in the violence” in Nigeria, Jasser concluded. Surveys in a Nigeria “divided pretty evenly” between Christians and Muslims showed 76% and 91% of these respective believers considering religion as their most important identity factor before other affiliations such as tribe. Thus “what may not start out as religious, always ends up as religious” in Nigeria. “That lens needs to be one of the lenses…used,” commented Jasser while noting that the U.S.-Nigeria Binational Commission makes no reference to religion in its mandate.
“What is really needed are serious and candid dialogues” among Nigerian Muslims concerning Boko Haram ideology, Jasser determined. Rather than Nigeria’s Muslim community being monolithic, Muslim leaders have indeed condemned Boko Haram, “many at risk to their own lives” and “Muslims are becoming very, very frustrated” with Boko Haram violence. Boko Haram members “are not winning the ideological battle, so they go to the violence instead.”
Nigeria’s government also “takes some significant responsibility” for the country’s “appalling level of violence.” A “long time culture of corruption,” often conceded by Nigerian officials themselves, has hindered the response of one of Africa’s wealthiest states to religious freedom violations such as those of Boko Haram. Because “rule of law has failed them,” twelve Muslim-majority northern Nigerian states have implemented sharia and “for all practical purposes are not using state law.” A “cycle of religious violence” could also result from negligent, sometimes partisan government security services leading to vigilantism. Jasser cited in particular Nigeria’s lack of community policing given the country’s federal police that frequently redeployed across regions. Considering these deficiencies, Nigeria had become a USCIRF Country of Particular Concern, designating the world’s worst religious freedom violators.
“Malignant forces” and “demagoguery,” though, existed on “both sides” of Nigeria’s Christian-Muslim divide, Jasser warned in what might be criticized as an equation of victim with perpetrator. Often “Christian leaders…portray Islam as a violent religion” threatening a takeover in Nigeria, a sentiment perhaps not surprising given events in Nigeria, its African neighborhood, and beyond. “Worrying statements” from Christians grouping all Nigerian Muslims as Boko Haram followers and extremists have made Muslims “weary of Christian perceptions of Islam.”
In particular, the Christian Association of Nigeria‘s “verbiology” on Islam needed change. CAN officials and Ogebe, however, have in the past stressed precisely how restrained Nigerian Christians, worried about civil war, have remained in confronting Boko Haram. CAN officials have also noted Boko Haram targeting of their Muslim opponents.
Yet a “fertile soil” for solving religious conflict appeared to Jasser in Nigeria given its religious diversity, with Jasser approving in particular the Interfaith Mediation Centre in Kaduna. Furthermore, in Nigeria the “solution to the corruption will come through faith” in the form of ecumenical political activism. Nigeria’s multiple interrelated problems demanded that “you engage the religious equation.”
Andrew E. Harrod is a freelance researcher and writer who holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a JD from George Washington University Law School. He is admitted to the Virginia State Bar. He has published over 150 articles concerning various political and religious topics at the American Thinker, Daily Caller, FrontPage Magazine, Faith Freedom International, Gatestone Institute, Institute on Religion and Democracy, Mercatornet, and World, among others. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project, an organization combating the misuse of human rights law against Western societies. He can be followed on twitter at @AEHarrod.
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