Missing plane, missing girls

24 May, 2014 - 23:05 0 Views
Missing plane, missing girls

The Sunday Mail

BBoko Haram is a determined terrorist organisation and the Nigerian authorities are rightly cautious. The group could respond to the involvement of foreign forces by doing the unthinkable and slaughtering the girls. Meanwhile, where is Africa?

Latest media reports state that the United States has deployed 80 military personnel to Chad, a neighbour of troubled Nigeria, to help in the hunt for the nearly 200 school girls abducted by the Islamist group Boko Haram, or Nigerian Talibans as they want to call themselves.

“These personnel will support the operation of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft for missions over northern Nigeria and the surrounding area,” President Barak Obama told Congress. Meanwhile, the United Nations Security Council on Thursday imposed sanctions on Boko Haram, blacklisting it as an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organisation. It is unclear what impact the terrorist designation will have in practical terms.

The African Union on the other hand has not taken any co-ordinated position on the abductions and the search for the girls, which now has drawn in the US, the UK, France and China, among others. Africa’s lethargy is worrisome, especially in a nightmarish situation where these poor girls are in the hands of bandits who have demonstrated time and again that they are capable of the worst barbarity imaginable, and Africa’s own declared position to provide “African solutions to African problems”.

The failure to even convene a summit on this issue puts into question the commitment to local solutions. And that gives countries like the US, which we know have other motives beyond the misfortunes of these girls for coming to Nigeria, a veneer of moral high ground to intervene. But we know that American intervention in any country has never been known to bring lasting peace. We can scan the horizon from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Latin America to the DRC. Wherever they set their foot, they leave a trail of disaster and more deaths than they purport to want to prevent. Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo are modern-day classic illustrations.

Lest we forget, the same nations which have turned Nigeria into a warren in search of the unfortunate girls are desperate for a success story after the embarrassing failure to locate the Malaysian plane carrying 239 people which just vanished into thin air. Therein lurks the danger of impetuous action. These guys might just do the unthinkable to spite the US, given that their declared mission is to fight Western education and values in general. Which to a certain extent explains Nigeria’s initial hesitancy to allow these countries to come in.

These unfortunate developments came on the eve of celebrations to mark Africa Day today, casting a dark shadow over the aspirations for full sovereignty, peace, prosperity and development following many years of settler colonial rule. This year’s theme “Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” was propitious and sought to underscore the need to pull the continent out of the cycle of poverty and civil strife.

But already the continent has more than enough on its plate. Somalia has stopped being talked about in terms of summits. Add to that the grisly killings in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, the endless bloodletting in the DRC which has claimed more than 6 million lives so far and the Western-engineered twin disasters in Egypt and Libya. It does not help matters that the AU doesn’t have a standing army and depends on Western funding for all its operations. It is a crippled institution.

Which raises very critical questions as to whether Western investment can ever be considered a suitable vehicle for African development in the long term. After years of collaboration with former colonial powers, how come not a single African country is able to balance its books without foreign aid, except perhaps Libya before the plague?

These are important questions because they explain why Africa cannot fund AU programmes through membership subscriptions. Libya under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi used to fund some of them, and was at some point hinting at circumventing the US dollar. And given the road infrastructure between most states and their levels of military capability, it is hard to imagine what the AU could realistically have done to help Nigeria.

Yet Nigeria itself has not been as indecisive as it is often portrayed to be. There are accounts which show that the military has employed a scorched earth policy in its operations in the northern parts of the country. Muslim youths have been rounded up and killed on suspicion of being supporters of Boko Haram. Women and girls have been abused as has become almost routine in most war situations.

The challenge, as in most such operations, is to determine the size and extent of the military deployment to subdue a terrorist insurgency without overstepping the bounds of safety for the civilian population.

Boko Haram initially responded by escalating attacks on Government institutions, including barracks and police stations. This has now spread to bombing civilians in crowded places, leaving hundreds of people dead and others injured. The abduction of the school girls in Chibok town was the final outrage which highlighted to the international community the extent of the crisis in Nigeria.

But Britain and the United States in particular know that this is not a stroll in the park. It was easier to topple Sadam Hussein than it was to restore peace, let alone democracy in Iraq. When the countries first invaded Iraq in 2003, the war was forecast to last no more than a few months. That turned into years of tears, sweat and bloodshed. The bombings continue daily to this day. The same is the case in Afghanistan where the Americans had an easy job getting the Taliban out of power.

It was a victory that brought no peace with it. That is the prospect we are probably faced with in Nigeria. But even more depressing is the fear that the war on terror which was given the world by one George W. Bush has bred more terrorists than the world has ever seen. In the beginning Africa appeared to be out of the loop. Not any more, what with the close ties between Boko Haram and al Shabaab in East Africa, with its base in war-shattered Somalia.

The US would do well to make a distinction between Boko Haram and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation which was able to win a popular election before it was summarily banned and subsequently declared a terrorist organisation by the military. They were therefore easy to round up in the streets and put in a cage. More than 650 Muslim Brotherhood members have since been sentenced to death for belonging to the now outlawed organisation.

Boko Haram is fully armed, is in the wild and controls swathes of the country. They reportedly get part of the funding for their operations from Saudi Arabia. Some reports say they also get money from state governors in northern Nigeria as protection fees. The world must prepare for the long haul, and a very unpredictable outcome in the current search for the abducted school girls.

It is a sad development which has been grabbed with open arms by the US which has been keen to strengthen its Africom base on the continent. For Africa the Boko Haram incident is a huge step backward, away from a determined drive to reduce dependency on Europe and the United States. As Obama said to Congress, the 80-strong military continent sent to Chad would remain until it “is no longer required”. No longer required by who is the question.

It makes nonsense of all the talk about an African renaissance.

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