Responsibility To Protect

"Security and defence is mainly provided by the local vigilante and the police while the soldiers in Chibok sit by and watch villagers being helplessly massacred in their homes, farms and in places of worship."
Kibaku Area Development Association, Nigeria

While Nigerian security forces and federal officials deny reports of a June 22 mass abduction from three villages in northeastern Nigeria, a Chibok official verified that over 60 women and girls escaped their captivity at the hands of Boko Haram last week. He sent a representative to meet some of the escapees and their families at a Lassa hospital.

Civil patrol leader Abbas Gava in the Borno capital Maiduguri, was informed 63 women and girls escaped when their captors left them as they busied themselves attacking a military barracks and police headquarters in Damboa.

Members of civil society groups shout slogans to protest the abduction of Chibok school girls during a rally pressing for the girls' release in Abuja on May 6, 2014, ahead of World Economic Forum. (Credit: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images)

The women spoke of climbing over a wall on Thursday night and into Friday morning to begin desperately rushing away from their state of captivity. Dogs began barking, awakening the militants who guarded them, and who then began shooting at them. They feared that a number of the women and girls attempting to escape along with them were recaptured.

The Islamist Boko Haram extremists are preying on Nigerians living far from the capital, their welfare completely ignored by the government of President Goodluck Jonathan. This is an oil-wealthy African country with a military that is on the evidence ill trained and badly equipped, unwilling to face the jihadis, and a government that appears to ignore the insurgency that has been raging over the past five years in its north.

Escape: Sixty more of Nigeria's kidnapped schoolgirls (pictured in May) have reportedly fled their captors

The Islamists demand the establishment of an Islamic state. They maraud through the geography attacking one town after another. The townfolk have had to resort to vigilante action in hopes of defending themselves, knowing that the government has no interest in doing so. Even when it is known beforehand that Boko Haram plans an action against a town, there is little recourse in reaction from government troops; they simply do not respond to urgent requests for defense.

In the past four years 3,600 Nigerians have been slaughtered. Over two thousand have died this year alone in the Islamist uprising. When they abducted over 300 schoolgirls in April from a school in Chibok, international attention and alarm was drawn to the country, with help offered to the government from countries abroad to try to track down the girls' whereabouts.

Some of the girls managed to escape on their own, leaving 219 still in captivity.

Their release has been offered by the Boko Haram leadership in exchange for the release of their fighters imprisoned for their crimes, but President Jonathan has no interest in negotiating their release for the surrender of the girls back to their grieving families. Several of the girls have died since their capture. Others were threatened by Boko Haram's leadership to be sent into slavery.

The Kibaku Area Development Association, representing the villages that have been taken over by Boko Haram, where villagers have been slaughtered and from where thousands of desperately fearful villagers have fled, has demanded help from the United Nations.

Nigerian women in Kenya protest the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls. Photo: EPA

There doesn't appear to have arisen from sensitive compassionate groups in civil society in the West, a broad movement to begin a boycott/divestment campaign, to hit Nigeria where it would most hurt, by depriving its government and social elite of income from the sale of their vast oil reserves in an effort to persuade the government that it has a duty to all its citizens to protect them from harm.