In view of claims and counter claims, Federal Government should probe the incident
From frightening media reports, it looked somewhat like a present day replication of Dante’s Inferno, a 14th century epic poem by Italian Dante Aligheri – the sheer hell of Baga, a North-East Nigerian border town, in which a Nigerian-led multinational military force and Boko Haram anarchists clashed.
A reported 185 lost their lives in gory circumstances; another estimated 10, 000 lost their homes en route to the whole town being reportedly levelled; not to talk of luckless refugees fleeing across the border into Cameroun, Chad and Niger. Baga is in Kukawa Local Government of Borno State. The border town lies some 180 kilometres north of Maiduguri, the state capital.
A local, quoted by Daily Trust, could not have put the tragedy more chillingly: “We have joined the comity of the disenfranchised … our wealth is gone, our people massacred and our merchandise burnt. In fact, we have little hope for a prosperous future again.”
For an insurrection powered basically by poverty and hopelessness, it is no comfort that Baga may have birthed another band of the hopeless and bitter, primed perhaps to join the Boko Haram anarchy.
Baga was an unmitigated human tragedy and grave humanitarian crisis which must be condemned in the strongest terms possible. Any country that sits over regular spilling of blood, as it has been since the Boko Haram insurrection started – Baga being only the latest but not likely the last – must re-think its essence. It is a most intolerable situation.
Yet, there appears to be no easy way out of the quagmire right now.
A wave of opinion is rising: that the Nigerian military, with its Chadian and Nigerien collaborators in the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF), commanded by Brig. Gen. Austin Edokpaye , was responsible for the massacre. Indeed, many natives were reported to have sworn they saw soldiers chase Baga locals out of their houses and set their homes on fire, aside from allegedly firing and mowing down fleeing civilians.
To the extent that the Nigerian military, in crisis situations, sometimes morph into uniformed outlaws, they probably had it coming being blamed for this one. Each time army personnel had some trouble with some civilians, or even weaker security agencies like the police, the soldiers just remobilise and flatten out the area of urban combat. It happened in Ojuelegba, Lagos, not too long ago, when soldiers sacked the local police station with the adjoining police barracks – and heavens didn’t fall.
In the Baga case, however, despite the intolerable human toll, the military would appear a victim of their own name (pitched against phantom Boko Haram insurgents) and bad reputation. Boko Haram has logged a fearsome record for irrational killing, bordering on the insane. Yet, hardly anyone is mentioning the sect’s part in the tragic stand-off.
It is true, the army personnel involved in the dastardly operation should strictly stick to their terms of engagement. And indeed, the tragedy should be probed; and anyone found culpable on this score should be punished – and publicly and resoundingly so. This is important since the military has denied that the casuality figure was exaggerated.
Still, in Boko Haram cases, the army deserves some sensitivity, if not understanding.
Let us review the “facts” as reported. The crisis started when some Boko Haram insurgents shot at and killed an officer on patrol, as a result of a tip-off. The base of initial conflict was a local mosque in which, intelligence said, Boko Haram operatives were holed up. From the military’s account, it was from this mosque, and in any case its environs, that the Boko Haram fighters launched their rocket-propelled grenades, the reported retaliation to which caused all the mayhem. Many of the victims reportedly died as Boko Haram’s enforced human shields.
But even before the first shot was fired, there had been a total collapse of the concept of citizenship and civic duties and responsibilities. The people that lived in the vicinity of the mosque: did they know of the Boko Haram activities around it? If they did, who did they inform? Of course, a valid point could be made that torn between the devil of Boko Haram and the deep blue sea of a toothless Nigerian state, they had little choice but to hold their peace. That is not unreasonable.
However, keeping mum made the people themselves somewhat complicit in the disaster that later befell the town. Perhaps if there had been earlier whistle-blowing, the Boko Haram threat would have been punctured; and the Baga tragedy averted. So entrenched, indeed was Boko Haram, according to a media report, that the insurgents even wrote a taunting letter threatening to dislodge the military from the locale!
But in the vociferous military blame game to follow, nobody even remembers this civic anomaly. Northern elders (as would be expected of elders of any place involved in such massacres) trenchantly blame the military. The media too has come down heavily on the army. Partisan voices have also slipped, one on the fumbling and bungling President Goodluck Jonathan, showing that many a partisan foe would not mind playing to the partisan gallery on security matters – and a dire one at that.
Still, for this problem to be solved, a national consensus is required – a consensus that must start from the Northern elders themselves. The surest point against Boko Haram – and even mail-fisted military reaction – is intelligence. But how do you ferret intelligence from a populace that fears Boko Haram and hates the Federal Government? Layers of authority in the North must therefore abandon what looks like closet sympathy for Boko Haram, totally renounce its dubious cause and somehow persuade and embolden the people to give useful information to rein in the sect’s murderous activities.
Thereafter, everyone must key into collectively solving a menacing national crisis that threatens to make bestiality and eternal slaughter a sickening national ethos. It is a period of national emergency; and everyone must come together to save the grave security situation.
Source: Thenation
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