PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Boko Haram: Lesson From Abroad – And From Here At Home

ndajika@yahoo.com

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.