Minabere Ibelema
The
photos are grim. Dead bodies — all men to the extent one can determine —
arranged like sardines on the ground. According to reports being
circulated internationally by Amnesty International and the Associated Press, they are casualties of the Nigerian military’s campaign against the Boko Haram.
What is disturbing about the reports,
however, is not that the terrorists are taking considerable casualties.
It is that too high a proportion of the dead are civilians who are
presumed to be Boko Haram combatants.
Exactly how Amnesty International and the Associated Press
could tell who is truly a civilian is not clear. After all, Boko Haram
is a shadowy group, whose members reside even with Nigerian government
officials.
Even then the allegation that the
Nigerian military are not being sufficiently discriminating has a ring
of credibility. For evidence, I can go back to the grim days of the
civil war and draw from the experience of my two older brothers.
They were arrested early in the civil
war, following federal troops’ amphibious takeover of Bonny.Both in
their late teens, they were presumed to be Biafran soldiers, which they
weren’t.
They had no incriminating evidence on
them: no military gadgets or paraphernalia, no smell of gunpowder. The
only “evidence” is that they had shoe marks on their ankles, the logic
being that only soldiers wore shoes.
And for that they were brutally
pummelled with rifle butts to the head and all over. It took the
intervention of chiefs who testified as to their identity to get them
released after several days of detention.
The older of the two brothers, who apparently got the worse of the battery, never fully recovered in physical and mental acuity.
Unlike the BokoHaram insurgency, the
civil war was a conventional war that openly pitched two armies. If two
innocent young men could be mistaken for rebel soldiers in that context,
how much more in the context of BokoHaram’s terrorist warfare?
It could be argued that Nigerian
soldiers today are much more enlightened. But a war is a war, and it
tends to bring out the worst in those who fight it.
This is even more so when soldiers have
to deal with a group that is as shadowy, lethal and brutal as
BokoHaram.They have repeatedly massacred worshippers and schoolchildren
and inflicted significant casualty on the military themselves.
Whenever any group metes out that scope
of violence, the understandable tendency is to hit them hard even if
that means considerable collateral damage and casualties. That’s why the
United States continues to rain down missiles from drones wherever
terrorist groups are known to operate.
Whether they are Pakistani villages or
Afghan or Yemen enclaves, if they have al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives,
the drones would hit them. In most of such attacks, civilians —
including the wives and children of the targeted terrorists — are
killed.Protests by the governments of these countries and human rights
groups have hardly deterred the U.S. military.
Yet, besides the moral issue of killing
innocent people, civilian casualties have repercussions. They place the
violence of the military at par with the violence of the terrorists. And
they create resentment against the military and government and turn
vengeful survivors into terrorists themselves.
In effect, the most lethal means of
stopping terrorist groups may ultimately aid them. On the one hand, this
is a dilemma for which there is no ready solution. On the other hand,
it is a dilemma that can’t be ignored.
After years of opting to err on the side
of a maximum military solution, the United States has lately begun to
reconsider. The drones still drop their lethal ware, but not as
frequently. Apparently, the policy now is to wait for the most opportune
moments in order to save innocent lives.
President Barack Obama, of course, has
his particular reasons for the aggressive pursuit of terrorists. With
opponents who treat his national healthcare plan as if it were a nuclear
bomb hurtling toward the United States, Obama knows too well that any
major attack on the United States would get his political foes claiming
that he is too weak a president to protect them.
President Goodluck Jonathan, as well as
the Nigerian military, faces a similar dilemma. Every instance of a Boko
Haram attack brings hollering anew about his weakness and the
military’s ineffectualness.
Even the very human rights groups who
have castigated the Nigerian military for indiscriminate killings in the
war againstBoko Haram also criticise them for not doing enough to
contain the group.
After Nigeria was elected to the United
Nations Security Council, for instance, Philippe Bolopion, the director
of the U.N.’s Human Rights Watch, criticised Nigeria’s human rights
record. Nigeria “should lead by example and end chronic impunity for
abuses by its security forces as well as protect civilians from Boko
Haram’s horrific violence.”
Bolopion didn’t say what more the
Nigerian government should do to protect civilians from Boko Haram.
Perhaps, it should place a platoon of soldiers with armoured tanks at
every school, church, offices and all places people gather. But then
that would raise another set of human rights problems, wouldn’t it?
When confronted with a dilemma or an
intractable problem, the Ibani, of Rivers State, are wont to say that
there is no shortcut to crossing an ocean. It is a saying that is sadly
applicable to the challenge of dealing with Boko Haram.
Another equally applicable Ibani saying
(this time in the native language) is, “O kelekelemengi ye, wanama be
kuabe.” Translation: it is by cautiously approaching an animal that one
has the best chance of apprehending it.
It’s quite significant in this regard
that civilians in the North are beginning to rise up against Boko Haram.
A few days after the Associated Press’s and Amnesty International’s reports on Nigeria’s military atrocities, the New York Times carried the headline, “Vigilantes Defeat Boko Haram in its Nigerian Base.”
“Boko Haram has been pushed out of
Maiduguri largely because of the efforts of a network of youthful
informer-vigilantes fed up with the routine violence and ideology of the
insurgents they grew up with,” the Times reported last Monday.
The Times is, perhaps, unduly
optimistic in the headline. But if Boko Haram is ever going to be
contained, the revulsion of the grassroots in the group’s areas of
operation is critical.
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