PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Boko Haram: One Year On

Penultimate Tuesday saw the presentation of an188-page book titled The Paradox of Boko Haram by Abdulkareem Babangida Mohammed, a Kano based television journalist and media consultant. The presentation at Bolingo Hotel, Abuja, coincided more or less with the first anniversary of the uprising by Boko Haram, the Muslim sect which has denounced Western education as evil.

The uprising started in Bauchi, capital of Bauchi State on July 26, 2009 and within four days spread to the neighbouring states of Borno, Yobe and Kano. Failure of the police to put down the uprising led to the order by late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, then on his way out to Brazil, to the army to crush it. The army did but in the process anywhere between 800 and 1000 lives, mostly innocent civilians, were reportedly killed.

Among those reportedly killed were the sect’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed Yusuf, his deputy, Sheikh Abubakar Shekau, his father in law, Ba’a Fugu Mohammed, and the sect’s chief financier, Buji Foi, a former commissioner of religious affairs in Governor Ali Modu Sherrif’s Borno State Government.

All four, it soon transpired, were victims of extra-judicial killings by the security forces. At first the police claimed Yusuf was killed in a shoot-out attempting to escape capture. The army promptly put the lie to this claim when it released a transcript of its interrogation of the man which showed it handed him over to the police in a one piece and in handcuffs.

Within days of the end of the uprising, a 40-second video clip also surfaced which showed Foi, dressed in a long white gown with both hands and legs in chains, being taken out of a white Toyota Hilux pick-up van by an unidentified policeman. Seconds after he was left to walk away from the van alone gun shots rent the air with voices shouting “kill him” , “ba an bada oda ba?” in Hausa, meaning haven’t orders been given (to kill him?)

Fugu Mohammed seemed to have suffered a similar fate to Foi’s. According to his children he reported himself to a police station following the crushing of the uprising when he heard he was wanted by the police. He never returned home alive.

Recriminations soon followed these revelations. President Yar’adua, on his return from his trip to Brazil early August, promised to order an investigation into the alleged extra-judicial killings. More than six months later there was no investigation. Or if there was one the public was not told.

Last February al-Jazeera, the English channel of the Doha, Qatar, based global television station, aired a shocking footage in its news bulletin which showed the security services going on an arbitrary house-to-house-search-and-arrest of presumably Boko Haram followers and then lining them up and shooting them in the back.

In the course of this monstrous killings one voice was heard saying “Shoot him in the chest not the head...I want his hat.” Other voices were heard shouting “No mercy, No mercy.” It was a mark of the impunity with which the security forces indulged in the killings that the officers who appeared to be in charge of the operation did not bother to hide their name tags on their chests.

Expressions of outrage in and out of the country soon followed al-Jazzera’s story. An apparently very outraged Attorney-General of the Federation, Chief Adetokunbo Kayode, screamed blue murder and gave marching orders to the Inspector-General of the Police to investigate the killings.

“The Federal Government of Nigeria,” he said, “unequivocally condemns all extra-judicial executions and all other unlawful killing.” This was in early March.

About six months on not one word has been heard from the authorities about this blatant act of cold-blooded murder.

Perhaps Mohammed, the author of The Paradox of Boko Haram, chose to present his book penultimate Tuesday, the 1^st anniversary of the sect’s bloody uprising, as a reminder to the authorities that the world still awaits their reaction to their heavy-handed handling of a rebellion. From the look of things it would be a miracle if the world ever gets the answer.

All the same the author’s effort in chronicling the rise and fall (?) of the sect - early last month the “dead” second-in-command of the sect, Imam Abubakar Shekau, emerged in a video claiming he has assumed its command and would continue from where Yusuf left off - cannot be in vain, if only because it contains lessons on the central paradox of why a sect which shows no qualms in using the fruits of Western civilization – cars, cds, cassettes,, mobile phones, etc, would condemn it as an unmitigated evil.

One simple answer to the many paradoxes of the sect is that its leaders merely sought to exploit the gullibility of the ill-informed and poor masses of their society to gain wealth and fame. Another, albeit a seemingly contradictory answer which Boko Haram would obviously subscribe to, is that a distinction can be made between the universal values, such as knowledge, which the West represents and the many terrible uses like the so-called war on terror to which the values are put.

Whatever the right answer it is obvious that the many paradoxes of Boko Haram and of similar sects which exist even in the West can never be resolved in a world governed by what Robert D Krane described in his 1993 essay, Civilizations in Crisis: Confrontation or Peaceful Engagement, as the “threat mentality” instead of the “opportunity mentality.” In other words a mentality which promotes the idea that conflict between the West and the rest of the world or between those who have different beliefs or speak different languages is simply inevitable.

It is not. Conflicts become inevitable only when one side, whether it is at the individual, local, national or global level, tries to get more than its fair share of the good things of life. This inevitably leads to the use of fear-mongering to gain support.

Coming down to earth from this abstract theorizing it should be obvious to the authorities that if they wish to stop the re-emergence of the likes of Boko Haram they must, like the author of our book in question says, evolve and implement policies that end the poverty and ignorance which breeds recruits for such dubious sects.

More specifically they must end the terrible extra-judicial killings that has often characterized government’s handling of the kind of extreme opposition to mainstream values which sects like Boko Haram represent if only because arbitrary killings merely drive such sects underground instead of ending their appeal to the poor and ignorant.

But even if government’s heavy-handedness does not drive such sects underground it is simply not right that anyone, no matter how disagreeable his beliefs seem in the eyes of the authorities, should be summarily executed, as the leadership of Boko Haraam was, without due process.

The Federal Government of Nigeria owe Nigerians and the world an explanation on why one year after the leaders of Boko Haram and hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in the name of ending an ostensibly religious uprising no arrests have been made, never mind any one being tried.