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Boko Haram:
lesson from abroad – and from here at home
By Mohammed Haruna
Newsdiaryonline
Tue July19,2011
About seven years ago when then president,
Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, declared a state of emergency in
Plateau State, virtually all the country’s Lagos dominated
commentariat, the press in particular, severely criticised him.
Today the same commentariat has been urging President Goodluck
Jonathan to declare a state of emergency in Borno State where an
insurrection by Boko Haram, the seemingly anti-modern and anti
Western Islamic sect based in Maiduguri, the state capital, has
led to a breakdown of public order and public safety.
Obasanjo declared the state of emergency on
May 18, 2004. Two days later
The Guardian led the
attack on him. Obasanjo’s action, the newspaper said, was a
“retrogressive slip and a major setback for democracy.” The
following day Thisday
said the declaration may have been inevitable but the
president’s suspension of the state’s government was
“unconstitutional.”
Vanguard
(May 24)
called the president’s action “a dangerous precedent” and
accused him of re-writing the 1999 Constitution.
PUNCH of the same day
was somewhat harsher. By the declaration, it said, “democracy
has been abridged in Plateau State in favour of arbitrary rule.”
Not to be left behind were civil rights
organization and activists like the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi
(SAN) and Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) and even conservative lawyers
like the late Chief Rotimi (The Law) Williams who all said
Obasanjo’s action was proof positive that a leopard cannot
change its stripe; that regardless of swapping his military
uniform for mufti in 1999, the man’s character remained
essentially dictatorial.
Predictably when Obasanjo ordered the
military operation against insurgents in Odi, in Bayelsa State
(?), and in Zaki-Biam in Benue State the same commentariat rose
up as one to condemn the general for gross violation of human
rights.
As recently as February this year the
Nigerian Tribune in
effect came out in support of a demonstration by women in
Plateau State calling for the withdrawal of the army from the
state over their allegations that the soldiers had taken sides
in the violent crises between so-called settlers and the
indigenes of the state. The authorities, the newspaper said in
its editorial of February 8 this year, were right to have
listened to the women by redeploying the implicated soldiers.
“The women,” it said, “have won a victory after a fashion...The
protest against the conduct of some members of the STF (Special
Task Force) did not begin with the women. The army authorities
should have acted sooner and it may not have come to the
wholesale replacement of the troops.”
In that same editorial the
Tribune categorically
declared that soldiers are simply incapable of solving problems
of breakdown of law and order in society. “Soldiers and other
security agent, even if they are professionally neutral,” it
said, “cannot bring lasting piece to Plateau State. The people
of the state must begin an honest search for peace.”
Now the same newspaper, and of course, the
preponderance of the
same commentariat that had condemned the declaration of
emergency in Plateau State and were even more vehement in their
condemnation of the army massacres in Odi and Zaki-Biam has
turned round almost to the last to support the army’s scorched
earth policy in Maiduguri.
The difference, to use the words of
Tribune exactly one
week ago today and barely five months after it more or less
excoriated the army for misbehaving in Plateau State, is that “Boko
Haram is different from the now retired (Are they really?) Niger
Delta militants. Members of the sect espouse anarchism. They
have the mentality men of the stone age and scorn modernity.”
Therefore, argued the newspaper, the only way
to deal with the sect is to give its members the “Tamil Tiger
treatment.” “The North,” it said in an apparent attempt to
scapegoat the Northern elite through a patently gross distortion
of the facts on the ground, “is not the only place where many
people are uneducated or poor, but it is only in the North that
some young men periodically go on rampage...The Tamil Tigers,
whose cause was not without merit, were destroyed. Boko Haram,
if it does not stop its campaign of bloody terror, should be
given the same treatment.”
(Apparently
Tribune had forgotten
so soon how right there in its backyard gangs of thugs in the
guise of motor touts have regularly fought for supremacy that
has led to deaths of innocent bystanders the latest round of
which only last month led to the murder of the president of the
country’s medical students’ association and several others whose
only misfortune was that they were waiting to board commercial
vehicles at some Ibadan motor parks to travel to their
destinations.)
Tribune’s
words would obviously resonate well with those in authority.
Certainly they do with the National Security Adviser, General
Owoye Azazi, a former Chief of Defence Staff. “Soldiers deployed
in any part of the country,” he said last week, “must behave
responsibly at all times. Unfortunately when you are the target
of a bomb attack, there is the possibility that you react in a
manner not approved by the people. There is need for cooperation
from all sides; the military, the people and everybody.”
He said this in reaction to calls by Borno
Elders and Leaders of Thought (BELT) for the withdrawal of the
army because its members said soldiers “have been burning
houses, killing innocent people, looting private property,
harassing innocent passersby and even burning down cars and
raping young girls.”
The soldiers, he said, would not be
withdrawn.
Any dispassionate person cannot agree more
with the general. If you withdraw the army when the police have
proved incapable of putting down the insurrection, anarchy will
be the result.
Trouble is, the general does not seem to
think there is anything wrong with the army’s scorched earth
strategy of dealing with the Boko Haram insurrection. This is
clearly borne out by his incredulous remark which suggested Boko
Haram introduced terrorism into the country.
“Terrorism,” he said, “is a new phenomenon in
Nigeria. It’s a new threat and there are new initiatives to deal
with the situation.” Obviously for him the actions all these
past years of such ethnic militias like the Movement for the
Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), where he comes from, and the
actions of the Odua Peoples Congress and the Bakassi Boys, etc,
in killing civilians, police and soldiers, were not acts of
terrorism. Clearly this is a stretch.
Read in between the line, the general’s words
were a not-so-subtle rebuke of BELT. However, if he was somewhat
discrete in his choice of words, the true feelings of those in
authority were betrayed, first, by the remarks of the Joint Task
Force in Maiduguri, Major-General Jack Okechukwu Nwagbo who
dismissed BELT’s allegations as “lies” and the “handiwork of
sponsors, sympathisers and members of the (Boko Haram) sect
aimed at discrediting the task Force so as to have a field day
to operate.”
Second, there were the remarks of the
Director of Army Public Relations, Brigadier-General Raphael
Isa, in an interview in The Nation of July 14 in which he
squarely blamed the elders for the (mis)conduct of the army.
“Where were the so-called elders,” he said, “when the whole
place was becoming unbearable because of these people (Boko
Haram)?”
True, withdrawing the army from Maiduguri
would not solve the crisis of Boko Haram. But neither would the
army’s scotched earth strategy. All it will succeed in doing is
alienate the general population as the authorities are already
acknowledging.
PUNCH (July 14), which has joined the
bandwagon of those calling for a military crackdown on Boko
Haram as the only solution, says it is the fear of reappraisals
from its members which is discouraging people from cooperating
with the authorities. This, to me, amounts to blaming the victim
for his travail of being caught between the devil and the deep
sea.
Those who advocate a military crackdown on
Boko Haram as the only solution to its menace even if it means
so much killing and maiming of innocent
clearly ignore the basic
fact that the end cannot, certainly should not,
justify the means. Odi
and Zaki-Biam cannot be wrong only because the motives of the
ethnic militias in those areas were different from those of Boko
Haram.
To condemn Odi and Zaki-Biam but condone or,
worse, advocate a scorched earth strategy in Maiduguri simply
because Boko Haram is “stone-age” is not only to say the end
justifies the means, something for which all reasonable people
have condemned Boko Haram. It is also to ignore the lesson of
history, including the very recent one of America’s so-called
war on terror which has only succeeded in making the world less
secure than it was before “9/11.”
Anyone who doubts this should read a special
report in The Economist
of August 20, 2005 entitled “Anarchists and Jihadists.” He
should also read the
Vanity Fair of January 2007 about the regrets of the
neo-conservative architects of the American invasion of Iraq.
The lesson of both, contrary to
Tribune’s advocacy of
the Tamil Tigerization of Boko Haram, is that repression, such
as we saw in Benue and the Delta, and we are now witnessing in
Maiduguri, has never solved anyone’s problems.
Re: As Ngozi returns to Finance
ministry -By Mohammed Haruna
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