Boko Haram Threat Not Just About Girls and School (all children)
World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: May 08, 2014 22:16 IST
Abuja, Nigeria: With international attention focused on Nigeria and the plight of more than 200 girls abducted by Boko Haram, Margee Ensign is keen to stress one thing: it's not just girls at risk from the militants. "It's children," said Ensign, the president of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), based in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, which is one of three in northeast Nigeria worst affected by the five-year insurgency. "Girls have been kidnapped. It's horrible," she told AFP, but added: "Hundreds of boys have been killed. It's a huge part of the story."
The abduction of women and girls was a tactic employed by Boko Haram even before the group snatched 276 schoolgirls in the remote town of Chibok in Borno state on April 14 and threatened to sell them as slaves. Last year, Human Rights Watch published a report based on interviews with women who said they had been abducted and forced to marry militant fighters before managing to escape. Eleven girls were also abducted last weekend in Borno state, the epicentre of the increasingly deadly violence that has claimed more than 1,500 lives this year alone.
But boys are also frequent targets, most recently in February, when heavily armed gunmen stormed the dormitories of a boarding school in Yobe, slaughtering scores of students as they slept. The abduction has led some to fear that Nigeria and its Muslim-majority north is on the brink of a Taliban-style crackdown on education for girls.
But Ensign disagreed, arguing that from her experience working in the insurgency-hit area, most people recognised the importance of education - and the "Western" curriculum to which Boko Haram so vehemently objects. "We're up in the northeast, we're in one of the poorest parts of Nigeria and we're in a state of emergency and there are girls being educated," she said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Africa in Nigeria's capital, Abuja.
Read more: http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/boko-haram-threat-not-just-about-girls-and-school-520721
A picture from Maine-Soroa, eastern Niger, shows Nigerian people gathered under a tent at a camp for refugees who fled the fighting between the Nigerian army and the Islamist rebels of Boko Haram.