Indus Falcon
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Islamic militants warn they will sell captive Nigerian schoolgirls into sex slavery after internatio
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KingMamba
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he-man
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Dheet insaan. No I have never worked in pizza hut never had too thank you come again.
koi na yaar...........its all fine,i was just teasing u.
u started she-man,,,so i had to do something in return
KingMamba
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koi na yaar...........its all fine,i was just teasing u.
u started she-man,,,so i had to do something in return
I know.
Dubious
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Did I miss something
Established_1965
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This is what happens when people are jobless.
I think what informant wants to say is "Get a room, kids!".
Ceylal
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Kidnappings in Nigeria
A clueless government
The incompetence of Nigeria’s president and government is hurting the country’s reputation at home and abroad
FOR the past few years President Goodluck Jonathan has publicly shrugged off the deaths of thousands of people, mainly in the north-east of his country, portraying them as the unfortunate but unavoidable result of a fanatical insurgency for which his government cannot be blamed. But in the past few weeks the plight of 200-plus girls abducted from a school by Boko Haram, the extremist group chiefly responsible for the mayhem, has put Mr Jonathan and his government under an international spotlight, exposing them not only as incompetent but callous, too.
As outrage spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, Barack Obama and other Western leaders, hitherto watching more or less silently from afar, have felt obliged to offer help as well as sympathy. West African leaders, led by Ghana’s president, have expressed unusual solidarity. The surge of global horror mixed with curiosity and bafflement was particularly embarrassing, at a time when Mr Jonathan was about to host a glamorous gathering of leaders, including China’s prime minister, at the World Economic Forum in Abuja, his capital, where he was hoping to celebrate the recent international re-evaluation of Nigeria’s economy as by far the biggest in Africa, well ahead of South Africa’s.
The girls, abducted on April 14th from a school in Chibok, a town in the north-eastern state of Borno, are probably being held in a rebel stronghold. One of these is in the dense Sambisa forest, 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) in area, south of Maiduguri, Borno’s capital. The other is in the Gwosa mountains, which straddle the cave-ridden border with Cameroon.
Boko Haram, which was founded in 2002 but began its violent insurgency in 2009, has been responsible for at least 4,000 deaths, mostly in the north-east. But it has also demonstrated an ability to strike at the centre of the country, setting off a bomb last month at a bus station in Abuja, killing at least 70 people, and another one on May 2nd near a police checkpoint, also in Abuja, killing around 20. The capital is now beset with checkpoints, snarling up traffic just when the government wants to show off the place to its foreign visitors.
In recent months Boko Haram has been aiming with increasing ferocity at soft targets such as schools and marketplaces, though it had not previously attempted a mass abduction. On May 5th, however, it was reported that it had kidnapped another eight girls from elsewhere in Borno. On the same day it was reported that Boko Haram had killed 300 people in the Borno town of Gamboru Ngala. Most secondary schools in the state had been closed before the mass abduction, for fear of an attack, but the education authorities had convened the girls at a boarding school so that they could take their final exams.
As worldwide outrage grew over the abductions, the American and British governments offered to help. A White House spokesman said that experts in intelligence, hostage negotiation and victim assistance would fly to Nigeria. The British offered to send surveillance aircraft along with soldiers from its special forces.
The Nigerians have been loth to accept such help in the past and are wary of perceived encroachments on their sovereignty. America has operated drones from a base in neighbouring Niger since 2012, but Nigeria’s government has long refused American requests to be allowed to do the same from Nigerian territory. Moreover, Nigerians are proud of their army, the biggest in Africa, with its long history of contributions to peacekeeping missions, most recently in Mali. And they are also notably secretive and prickly about its operations—and the low standards of soldiery which foreign experts would see. Though Mr Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the north-east a year ago, his army has dismally failed to defeat Boko Haram.
Indeed, it has itself perpetrated numerous atrocities against civilians suspected of harbouring or lending sympathy to the rebels, who thrive among embittered young Muslims in the north, the poorest part of the country. The army was widely castigated after a military counter-attack on March 14th following an attempted jailbreak by suspected members of Boko Haram detained at a barracks in Maiduguri. According to hospital sources, around 500 people were killed, mainly at the hands of soldiers. Such human-rights abuses by the Nigerian army make Western governments edgy about offering to join the fray, for fear of being deemed complicit.
Corruption, Nigeria’s great scourge, is another reason for foreign military advisers to keep their distance. Nigeria’s soldiers say that commanders pocket the bulk of their salaries, leaving them with little incentive to fight a well-equipped guerrilla movement that knows the rugged terrain and forests. Why risk death at the hands of Boko Haram for no reward? It is hard, in such conditions, to see how outsiders could raise Nigerian troops’ morale, let alone improve their military skills.
Patience not always a virtue
Perhaps the worst aspect of the Nigerian government’s handling of the abduction is its seeming indifference to the plight of the girls’ families. It took more than two weeks before Mr Jonathan addressed the matter in public. His government’s sluggish response and its failure even to clarify how many girls had been abducted provoked protests in several cities across Nigeria—itself an unusual event.
To make matters worse, the president’s wife, Patience, ordered the arrest of two leaders of the protests, bizarrely accusing them of belonging to Boko Haram and of fabricating reports of the abduction to smear the government. In a televised broadcast on May 4th, the first lady, who holds no official position, warned against further such marches. “You are playing games,” she said. “Don’t use schoolchildren and women for demonstration again. Keep it to Borno, let it end there,” the official News Agency of Nigeria reported.
Such statements do not give the impression that Mr Jonathan or his colleagues, who face elections next year, take the worries of ordinary Nigerians to heart.
From the print edition: Middle East and Africa
A clueless government
The incompetence of Nigeria’s president and government is hurting the country’s reputation at home and abroad
FOR the past few years President Goodluck Jonathan has publicly shrugged off the deaths of thousands of people, mainly in the north-east of his country, portraying them as the unfortunate but unavoidable result of a fanatical insurgency for which his government cannot be blamed. But in the past few weeks the plight of 200-plus girls abducted from a school by Boko Haram, the extremist group chiefly responsible for the mayhem, has put Mr Jonathan and his government under an international spotlight, exposing them not only as incompetent but callous, too.
As outrage spread beyond Nigeria’s borders, Barack Obama and other Western leaders, hitherto watching more or less silently from afar, have felt obliged to offer help as well as sympathy. West African leaders, led by Ghana’s president, have expressed unusual solidarity. The surge of global horror mixed with curiosity and bafflement was particularly embarrassing, at a time when Mr Jonathan was about to host a glamorous gathering of leaders, including China’s prime minister, at the World Economic Forum in Abuja, his capital, where he was hoping to celebrate the recent international re-evaluation of Nigeria’s economy as by far the biggest in Africa, well ahead of South Africa’s.
The girls, abducted on April 14th from a school in Chibok, a town in the north-eastern state of Borno, are probably being held in a rebel stronghold. One of these is in the dense Sambisa forest, 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) in area, south of Maiduguri, Borno’s capital. The other is in the Gwosa mountains, which straddle the cave-ridden border with Cameroon.
Boko Haram, which was founded in 2002 but began its violent insurgency in 2009, has been responsible for at least 4,000 deaths, mostly in the north-east. But it has also demonstrated an ability to strike at the centre of the country, setting off a bomb last month at a bus station in Abuja, killing at least 70 people, and another one on May 2nd near a police checkpoint, also in Abuja, killing around 20. The capital is now beset with checkpoints, snarling up traffic just when the government wants to show off the place to its foreign visitors.
In recent months Boko Haram has been aiming with increasing ferocity at soft targets such as schools and marketplaces, though it had not previously attempted a mass abduction. On May 5th, however, it was reported that it had kidnapped another eight girls from elsewhere in Borno. On the same day it was reported that Boko Haram had killed 300 people in the Borno town of Gamboru Ngala. Most secondary schools in the state had been closed before the mass abduction, for fear of an attack, but the education authorities had convened the girls at a boarding school so that they could take their final exams.
As worldwide outrage grew over the abductions, the American and British governments offered to help. A White House spokesman said that experts in intelligence, hostage negotiation and victim assistance would fly to Nigeria. The British offered to send surveillance aircraft along with soldiers from its special forces.
The Nigerians have been loth to accept such help in the past and are wary of perceived encroachments on their sovereignty. America has operated drones from a base in neighbouring Niger since 2012, but Nigeria’s government has long refused American requests to be allowed to do the same from Nigerian territory. Moreover, Nigerians are proud of their army, the biggest in Africa, with its long history of contributions to peacekeeping missions, most recently in Mali. And they are also notably secretive and prickly about its operations—and the low standards of soldiery which foreign experts would see. Though Mr Jonathan declared a state of emergency in the north-east a year ago, his army has dismally failed to defeat Boko Haram.
Indeed, it has itself perpetrated numerous atrocities against civilians suspected of harbouring or lending sympathy to the rebels, who thrive among embittered young Muslims in the north, the poorest part of the country. The army was widely castigated after a military counter-attack on March 14th following an attempted jailbreak by suspected members of Boko Haram detained at a barracks in Maiduguri. According to hospital sources, around 500 people were killed, mainly at the hands of soldiers. Such human-rights abuses by the Nigerian army make Western governments edgy about offering to join the fray, for fear of being deemed complicit.
Corruption, Nigeria’s great scourge, is another reason for foreign military advisers to keep their distance. Nigeria’s soldiers say that commanders pocket the bulk of their salaries, leaving them with little incentive to fight a well-equipped guerrilla movement that knows the rugged terrain and forests. Why risk death at the hands of Boko Haram for no reward? It is hard, in such conditions, to see how outsiders could raise Nigerian troops’ morale, let alone improve their military skills.
Patience not always a virtue
Perhaps the worst aspect of the Nigerian government’s handling of the abduction is its seeming indifference to the plight of the girls’ families. It took more than two weeks before Mr Jonathan addressed the matter in public. His government’s sluggish response and its failure even to clarify how many girls had been abducted provoked protests in several cities across Nigeria—itself an unusual event.
To make matters worse, the president’s wife, Patience, ordered the arrest of two leaders of the protests, bizarrely accusing them of belonging to Boko Haram and of fabricating reports of the abduction to smear the government. In a televised broadcast on May 4th, the first lady, who holds no official position, warned against further such marches. “You are playing games,” she said. “Don’t use schoolchildren and women for demonstration again. Keep it to Borno, let it end there,” the official News Agency of Nigeria reported.
Such statements do not give the impression that Mr Jonathan or his colleagues, who face elections next year, take the worries of ordinary Nigerians to heart.
From the print edition: Middle East and Africa
Indus Falcon
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Yes post #119Did I miss something
Dubious
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link removed so I will ignore it
he-man
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What gives Boko Haram its strength
Editor's note: David Jacobson, founding director of the Citizenship Initiative at the University of South Florida, is the author
of "Of Virgins and Martyrs: Women and Sexuality in Global Conflict." Atta Barkindo is a fellow at the Citizenship Initiative. Derek Harvey, director of the Citizenship Initiative, formerly led the Afghanistan-Pakistan Center of Excellence at U.S. military's Central Command. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the authors.
(CNN) -- The Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram has been active as a violent group since 2009 and in recent months has killed Nigerians, both Christian and Muslim, at rates frequently exceeding a hundred people weekly.
It is puzzling how little attention this has received in world media, especially in comparison to, say, the attack of Islamist militants on the mall in Kenya in September, resulting in 67 dead.
That is, until now. The abduction of a reported 276 schoolgirls from Chibok village in the northeastern Borno state has shocked people around the world. A deeper examination of Boko Haram provides a revealing prism of the conflict in Nigeria.
Boko Haram translates as "Western education is sin." Rarely has the name of a terrorist organization revealed so much, but it does in ways beyond the surface interpretations sometimes portrayed in the media.
In Boko Haram, we see a total storm coming together: Globalization has brought Western ideas and imagery, especially around issues of women and sexuality, into the most patriarchal corners of the world. Globalization, through Internet and broader interconnectedness, has facilitated and favored global ideologies, including globalized versions of Islam, some of which are extremist.
New media have shined a light on poor governance, including that of the corrupt Nigerian government. The impact of Wahhabi Islam, actively promoted by Saudis and Gulf Arabs, has had such an impact that in northern Nigeria, even Arabic street signs and Middle Eastern dress are seen together with Saudi-funded mosques.
But Boko Haram's rise is not only driven by global trends in themselves but by how globalization has melded with the internal dynamics of Nigerian education. The Christian South in Nigeria is much more prosperous than the Muslim North, and that economic gap is growing rapidly. The roots go back to the British colonial period from the late 19th century to independence in 1960. The British ruled the South directly, which was also being rapidly Christianized by missionaries. Missionaries ran many of the schools.
Malala: Kidnapped girls are 'my sisters'
In the Muslim North, the British practiced "indirect rule," governing through the clerical and traditional elites and allowing local religious institutions to operate autonomously (with some limitations, for example, banning slavery).
The impact of missionary schooling was to bring Western education into Nigeria, and this has had direct bearing on economic development for the regions where such schools predominated -- and this legacy is with us to this day. Access to Western-style education has been key for enabling people to adapt to a modern economy.
In the north, some missionary schools were established, but traditional elites always resisted them for obvious religious reasons and because those schools threatened to generate an alternative elite.
Instead, the schooling that predominates in the north of Nigeria consists of religious schools, or the al-Majiri education system -- often informal, with students congregating under a tree. These students are completely unequipped to work in a changing economy (and overall, Nigeria is economically growing rapidly). Some of these schools have dubious teachers who exploit the usually impoverished students by getting them to beg in the streets for the teachers' own gain.
John Sutter: 'We can't let this be the new normal'
In the wake of September 11, there was extensive discussion of Muslim schools and the extent to which some were inculcating extremism, for example madrassas in Pakistan. Some have claimed that Muslim education, properly taught, would provide an inoculation against extremism. But that debate lost sight of a larger issue, whatever the theology of such schools. The graduates of those schools are often adrift in globalized economies without marketable skills and modern education, and more vulnerable to at least tolerating extremism.
Which brings us back to the language of Boko Haram. The leadership has ranted against any form of secular education. It teaches that European colonists introduced modern secular education into Islamic societies in a conspiracy to maintain colonialist hegemony over Muslim societies: The West aims to corrupt pure Islamic morals with liberal norms.
Likewise, the leaders believe that the West wants to replace proper gender roles with sexual permissiveness. Secular subjects like chemistry, physics, engineering, meteorological explanations of rain, the theory of evolution are all denounced as contrary to the Quran.
In our research in the area, and in other surveys, it is evident that students coming out of the religious schools are more likely to sympathize with Boko Haram, significantly even those who are not particularly religious in practice. Equally significantly, religiosity as such does not necessarily bring with it a tendency to back Boko Haram. The issue is the education system, not religious belief.
In the eyes of Boko Haram, the abduction of schoolgirls is a triple strike against what they view as Western depravity: against Western schools, against "the obscenity" of having girls in school at all and against Christianity, to the degree the schoolgirls are Christian.
If northern Nigeria is to have a more stable and prosperous long-term future, it is essential to develop an education system that prepares students for a modern, globalized economy. This is especially the case in the northeast, where Boko Haram is most active.
Nigerians in northeastern Nigeria, who in part may sympathize with Boko Haram's fight against corruption, are however alienated by Boko Haram's bloodlust. And most will support developing an education system that provides the foundation to make a living.
Opinion: What gives Boko Haram its strength - CNN.com
shuntmaster
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Is Mutah allowed in Islam? Isn't it same as prostitution?
Indus Falcon
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For Shia, yes. For Sunni, No.
shuntmaster
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Don't both the sects follow the same Koran?
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