Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 100 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Borno State.
The government closed all schools in Borno three weeks ago because of frequent attacks in which hundreds of students have been killed in the past year. The girls who were kidnapped had been recalled so they could write their final exams.
The extremists have been using abducted students as cooks, sex slaves and porters.
Boko Haram has been on a rampage this week, blamed for four attacks in three days that started with an explosion at a busy bus station during the Monday morning rush hour in Abuja, the capital, which killed at least 75 people.
Two attacks in northeastern villages killed 20 people Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
People from Chibok are searching the Sambisa Forest for them.
Education is forbidden, but mass murder and kidnapping for enslavement and rape – those are not forbidden. Funny kind of god Boko Haram has.
Do you know of any connection between Boko Haram and Kony (as in Kony 2012)?
Isn’t having sex with a woman you aren’t officially married to adultery, and isn’t adultery punishable by death? So…why is this continuing? It seems someone needs to police the police, so to speak…
Except then they’d just slaughter all the rape victims because Islam. Nice religion, that.
Never mind.
Boko Haram is a Muslim organization, while Joseph Kony is a deluded Christian warrior prophet. That doesn’t preclude cooperation, of course, but any collusion would likely just be a temporary alliance of convenience. There’s also the fact that there are hundreds of kilometres of savanna and desert between their respective spheres of influence.
It does sound like BH has been taking lessons from Kony’s playbook, though.
Thank you. There are so many things going on in the world today that it’s impossible to keep up.
I appreciate the Cliffs Notes version immensely.
Those few sentences were an *extremely* condensed simplification of two distinct religious terrorist movements, and I am far from an expert on either. I recommend not taking anything I say about them at face value. I’ll provide a slightly more in-depth precis now that I’ve refreshed myself with brief scans of the English Wikipedia articles on each.
Boko Haram is a recently-formed Islamic rebel group, mainly active in northern Nigeria. Its official Arabic name translates to “the Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad”, though the shorter ‘Boko Haram’ comes from its nickname in the local Hausa language, which translates to ‘(Western) Books are sinful/forbidden.’ The group seeks to establish a ‘pure’ Islamic state, modeled on (or in fact re-establishing) the mythical Caliphate. They’ve butchered upwards of ten thousand people in Nigeria, including children and Christians.
Joseph Kony is a man, the founder and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, originally active in northern Uganda. The origins of the group date back to 1987, a year after the Nigerian government was taken over by a powerful militia bent on some kind of ethnic cleansing of northern Ugandan people, since those had been the peoples favoured by British rule for about a hundred years. (Similar tensions led to the Rwandan genocide in the 90’s). The rebel group’s organising principles evolved into establishing a theocracy based on an amalgam of Christian and animist beliefs. It is unclear whether Kony believes himself a David Koresh- or Jim Jones-style prophet, but he has destroyed the lives of thousands of children by turning them into soldiers and slaves.
So while the two groups share horrible methods and their stated goals are somewhat parallel, their members are far more likely to kill one another for mumbling the wrong magic words than to ally to any kind of common purpose. But they do demonstrate the depths of human depravity and the effects that colonialism can have on whole continents.
“Boko Haraam, Sex Slavery Halal” – the new, more accurate name for violent sickos who kill schoolchildren when they aren’t raping and enslaving them.
I notice that you haven’t yet mentioned a single white man with an army of gun-toting, atavistic sexual predators, YOU COLONIALIST WHITE SUPREMACIST CISHET DUDEBRO TURDGALLEONS. Were you too busy SORTING YOUR FEDORA COLLECTION to talk about David Koresh?
#representationmatters
Female privilege. They murder the boys, you know.
/sarcasm
And the US does nothing about it. We spend trillions elsewhere, but this slaughter? No one cares enough to even talk about it. Its sick. I guess no one cares because there is nothing we can rob them of, that we aren’t already stealing. By “we”, I mean Western corporations, not the average American. We often lack the power or the will, to make any difference.
Thanks, Seth. I’m more familiar with the Rwanda situation, having studied French Colonialism in college the first time. Colonialism was unimaginably destructive to the colonized – how many generations will it take to work out the damage done? CAN the damage be repaired or recovered from?? The US continues to meddle and provoke, pursuant to its hidden imperialist agenda (see Nigeria).
‘(Western) Books are sinful/forbidden.’
Cardinal Wolsey, way back in the late 15th Century, just a few decades after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, stated, “If we do not destroy this dangerous invention (the printing press) it will one day destroy us.” Funny how that sentiment keeps recurring, century after century. When will people realize that, if their religion cannot survive unless people are forcibly kept completely ignorant, their religion does not deserve to survive?
Seth, I don’t think it was a Nigerian coup in this particular case. There’s Chad, CAR, and Congo/South Sudan between it and Uganda. It was a coup by (south-ish?) Ugandan Museveni, I think. Idi Amin came before that, so Museveni was actually a good guy to begin with. He’s still Pres, what’s more. /*blank stare*/ Anyway, plenty of atrocities to go around.
But, they were women, right?
So, not like, really real in real life people?
Gah…even snark is getting too close to reality these days. =(
quixote: Yes, you’re right. The LRA was formed by northern Ugandans in response to the coup by more-southern Ugandans, which I meant to express but didn’t very clearly. As I said, I’m no expert. Thanks for the clarification.