Nigerian authorities must do everything possible to protect rights of former Boko Haram victims

Aug. 10, 2015 - PRLog -- The Nigerian authorities must do everything to protect former captives of terrorists and help them return to their homes as soon as possible, writes the Nigerian researcher for Human Rights Watch Mausi Segun in her article titled “A long way home: Life for the women rescued from Boko Haram.”

The Islamist group has been terrorizing the local population since 2010, killed as many as 8,000 people and drew nearly a million from their homes.

“The Boko Haram hallmark is brutal violence: suicide bombings, mass murder, forced conscription of young men and boys, and the destruction of villages, towns, churches, markets, and schools,” the author stresses.

She also points out that in 2015 the group expanded to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist organization.

According to the rights activist, since 2009 Boko Haram terrorists took over 2,000 women and girls captive, whom they are forcing to marry Islamists and brainwash into suicide bombers. However, the world at large learned of the bloody massacre in Nigeria only after 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from Chibok on April 14, 2014.

Mausi Segun stresses that the notorious law enforcement forces of Nigeria that gained bad popularity due to illegal arrests and killings did nothing to save the abducted at first.

“The announcement in late April that Nigerian military authorities had ‘rescued’ 293 women and girls from Boko Haram’s Sambisa Forest camp was the first time that families allowed themselves to hope that Nigeria’s security forces might bring back their relatives. More rescues followed. As of June, Nigeria’s military claims to have found about 1,000 women and girls, although the schoolgirls from Chibok remain in captivity,” the HRW representative explains.

She describes her visit to one of the displaced persons camp for the former Boko Haram victims in the Eastern village of Malkohi in mid-May 2015, where the women and the girls are treated by medics and psychologists. One of the girls, whose name was listed as Miriam to protect her identity, told the HRW representative that the terrorists broke into their house on the night into April 12, 2014, shot her father and two brothers, and abducted all women, girls and young boys from the village, including her mother, her five-year-old brother, and 14-year-old Miriam herself.

The women and the girls in the camp described how the terrorists forced them to make frequent moves on feet that sometimes went on for days, with no food and water, in an attempt to avoid the military, driving some of their friends and acquaintances to death from exhaustion.

Full text news agency "PenzaNews":http://penzanews.ru/en/opinion/59209-2015