Читать книгу The Chibok Girls - Helon Habila - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThe town lay about a mile ahead, hidden behind rocky hills and baobab trees. There was still one more checkpoint to pass before we entered Chibok. We had left Maiduguri early and spent the night in Yola. The regular route from Maiduguri to Chibok, which passed through Damboa and normally takes two hours, was still in the hands of Boko Haram, and so we had to divert through Damaturu in Yobe State, and then to Gombe in Gombe State, getting to Yola in Adamawa State by nightfall—a detour of almost 500 miles.
We left Yola at 10:00 in the morning. This was the coolest it ever gets in these parts, with temperatures falling to the low fifties Fahrenheit at night. It was January, the middle of the season of Harmattan, a wind that blows in from the Sahara, carrying with it dust from the great desert. The fine sand particles go right into your nostrils and eyes, dehydrate the skin, crack the lips, and induce coughing fits and general discomfort. Among the villagers, who mostly go about in slippers or barefoot, the Harmattan cuts deep grooves in their heels. Despite rolling up the windows, the dust still managed to get into the car. All the way from Yola it had clouded the windshield and piled up on the seats and on our clothes and hair.
The closer we got to Chibok, the more checkpoints we encountered. At each stop we had to get out of the car and open the trunk; sometimes the soldiers went through our bags, sometimes they just waved us through. As we passed through Askira-Uba, the last local government area before Chibok, signs of the ongoing battle between Boko Haram and the military became more evident. Burned tanks and military trucks stood at the roadsides, rusting away. There were houses with caved-in roofs and walls pockmarked by bullet holes. There was a destroyed bridge around which we had to detour.
Abbas, my guide, was driving. With us was Michael, a member of the civilian Joint Task Force—local hunters and youths working as volunteers alongside the military. He was from Abbas’s hometown and somehow related to him. We had picked him up on the way, at Lassa junction, where he had waited for us, seated on his bike with only his Dane rifle for company. He had left the bike there and entered the car. When I asked him if the bike was safe there in the bush by itself, he said yes.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. He appeared to be a man of few words. I was conscious of him seated right behind me, his rifle pointing in the general direction of my head.
The JTF was a coalition of the different branches of the armed forces formed on an ad-hoc basis to fight the insurgency. Civilian vigilantes knew the terrain better than the soldiers, who were mostly from distant parts of the country and didn’t even speak the local languages. Nevertheless the civilian JTF’s prowess in fighting Boko Haram had been much exaggerated and mythologized—for instance, they were believed to possess charms and medicines that made them invulnerable to bullets, and even invisible to the enemy during battle.
Michael was supposed to ease our passage through the checkpoints. And sure enough, after bringing on this new passenger we had passed two checkpoints unharassed; the soldiers only nodded at Michael and waved us through—his tan uniform and the gun seemed to be doing the trick. Until we reached one where we seemed to have passed a flag without stopping. As we passed a second flag we noticed a soldier under a tree by the roadside shouting and waving at us to stop, his gun pointed at our car.
“We thought we were clear to pass . . .”
Another soldier, a superior, came out of a house behind the tree. He was putting on a shirt and his skinny chest was exposed momentarily. “You think? You think?” he shouted as he joined the others. “You people think we are here to play? I dey here for this bush fighting Boko Haram for two years now. Two years I no see my family, and you tell me you think?”
Thinking was clearly not allowed. He was almost shaking with anger, shouting at the top of his voice. I was glad he had no gun. “You better go and talk to him,” I told Michael. There was another car next to ours; a man and the driver stood wordlessly beside the car, listening to the soldiers’ rants. They were obviously in a similar situation as we were. Michael went to the soldier with the gun and showed his ID card.
“So you are civilian JTF? So what? Four months we have been here without salary, our friends are killed by Boko Haram, and I am sick. Four months no pay. And you tell me you think. You will see. I go keep you here for hours in this sun.”
He let us go after about 15 minutes.
Checkpoints, or roadblocks as they are also commonly called, are a regular feature of road travel in Nigeria. Nigerians have become resigned to them the way they are resigned to the lack of reliable electricity or running water. Ostensibly, the roadblocks are there for enforcing traffic laws and ensuring travelers’ safety, but in reality they are nothing but extortion points. They have become a place where you paid your taxes at gunpoint, fully knowing the taxes would not get to the state coffers but into private pockets. Since the Nigerian government placed most of the northeast region of the country under emergency rule in 2013, the roadblocks have proliferated. In some places they have become almost like settlements, humming with beggars, idlers, and boys and girls—out of school due to the insurgency—selling water and food to travelers. In Borno and Yobe states, the epicenter of the Boko Haram insurgency, there were roadblocks at about every two-mile interval. Before the insurgency the blocks were manned by policemen who’d chat with you about the weather or about the traffic as you handed them their bribe. They’d even give you change if you had no small notes; all very civilized. Now the checkpoints were guarded by scowling, uncommunicative soldiers in full war gear. I almost laughed when I saw a sign warning drivers that it is illegal to give bribes at checkpoints, with a phone number to call if a soldier solicited a bribe. This was the face of the new government of Muhammadu Buhari, who was elected in May 2015 on the promise to wipe out corruption and Boko Haram. Abbas told me he had tried the numbers and they didn’t work.
At the checkpoints passengers in private cars were sometimes allowed to remain in their vehicle, but passengers in commercial vehicles had to get out and approach the soldiers on foot. Often male passengers had to take off their shirts and raise their hands as they passed the soldiers—Boko Haram insurgents sometimes detonated suicide vests at checkpoints. As the passengers passed they presented their ID cards to the soldiers, who compared them to pictures of the 100 most-wanted Boko Haram members prominently displayed at every checkpoint. Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram leader, was ranked number 100; his enlarged face with its signature leer occupied the center of the poster. A few faces on the list had already been captured. Recently, Khalid Al-Barnawi, the head of Ansaru (full name: Jamā‘tu Anāril Muslimīna fī Bilādis Sūdān, or “Vanguard for the Protection of Muslims in Black Lands”), a Boko Haram splinter group responsible for the kidnapping and killing of many foreigners, had been caught in a hideout in Lokoja, Kogi State. One other reason ID cards were checked was because Boko Haram members never carried them; to them they are a Western invention and therefore haram, or forbidden. I asked Abbas, would anyone without ID be arrested for a Boko Haram member? No, not always. It mostly depended on the discretion of the soldiers, on the answers the defaulter gave; usually the punishment was a fine of anything between 200 naira to 500 naira.
Ahead of us was the last checkpoint before Chibok. This was the most important checkpoint of all. The soldiers here would determine whether I got to enter Chibok or not. Vehicles coming in or going out were given a special pass, which they must present to the soldiers. Traders bringing supplies from neighboring towns must have an inventory listing every single item they carried. Since the kidnapping of over 276 schoolgirls in April 2014, and the subsequent media focus on the families of the kidnapped girls, the government had placed the town on lockdown. Journalists in particular were personae non grata. I was told of a British reporter who came as a guest of the wife of a local pastor and was turned back at this checkpoint.
The Chibok native, Reverend Titus Pona, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Borno State chapter, had promised that a local pastor would wait for me at the checkpoint and take me in as his guest. When I got the pastor on the phone, he made excuses and said he couldn’t meet me. Now my fate rested on the mood of the soldiers. Abbas, whose hometown, Lassa, was only about thirty minutes from Chibok, said he had lots of friends here, and concocted a new story: We were coming from Lassa to visit his friends, one of whom had just gotten married. And there was the taciturn Michael of the JTF as backup if the new story failed.
And so, once more we got out of the car and approached the soldiers who were seated under a giant tamarind tree by the roadside. With them were three civilian JTF members with their Dane guns and knives tied on ropes around their waists. Michael identified himself and handed over his ID card. Next, Abbas handed over his driver’s license and mentioned the name of his friend who we were ostensibly visiting. The soldier gave a noncommittal nod and turned to me. I handed over my State of Virginia driver’s license.
“America,” he said.
“I am Nigerian,” I said. “But I live in America.”
“Mistah Americana,” he said.
“Actually, it’s more like Nigeriana,” I said, not sure where this was going. But he seemed suddenly to relax. The other soldiers were laughing and echoing, “Americana.” Now I noticed how young they were: None of them could have been over twenty-five. They were just kids, sent here to fight a brutal enemy who relished capturing soldiers alive and slaughtering them like rams for propaganda videos. They were clustered around the one holding my driver’s license, taking turns looking at it. The mood had lifted.
“So, what do you do in America?”
“I teach,” I said. “I am a professor.”
“Ah, Professor Americana.” I laughed with them. Professor Americana. Why not. He returned my license and waved us through.
Checkpoints weren’t only for regulating traffic—they also controlled the flow of the narrative surrounding the kidnapping. Propaganda was an important part of the war against Boko Haram, and the government wanted to ensure its version of events was always the definitive one. In December 2015, seven months after his election, President Buhari had gone on the BBC and declared a “technical” victory over Boko Haram. His information minister, Lai Mohammed, backed up the president’s claim by leading a group of thirty-three journalists to parts of Borno State retaken by the military, as proof of Boko Haram’s imminent defeat. He said the military had “so degraded the capacity of Boko Haram that the terrorists can no longer hold on to any territory just as they can no longer carry out any spectacular attack.” This claim was received with skepticism.
In a move clearly calculated to undermine the government’s claim, Boko Haram launched a series of spectacular attacks a few days later. Two suicide bombers struck a market in the town of Madagali in Adamawa State, killing more than twenty-five people. In neighboring Maiduguri several attacks killed more than thirty people and injured over a hundred. Although the Buhari government’s claim was partly true—the group had been significantly degraded, and most of its captured territory had been retaken—most observers knew it’d take many years to defeat the group.
One of the defining characteristics of the group has been its special talent for resurrection, particularly after crushing defeats.
Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad, or “the People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad,” was founded by the cleric Mohammed Yusuf, who followed Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Salafist doctrine and called for the overthrow of the secular Nigerian government. Boko Haram is the group’s nickname, and very loosely translates to “Western education is abhorrent,” a centerpiece in Yusuf’s teachings. Around 2002 he set up a complex in Maiduguri; his group was rather unremarkable during its first years of existence, despite Yusuf’s claims of ties to Al-Qaeda, his increasingly militant teachings, and reports that his followers were stockpiling weapons in preparation for jihad. Tensions finally came to a head in July 2009 when members of the group battled police and soldiers in Maiduguri when they were stopped during a funeral procession for not wearing motorcycle helmets. Yusuf had found an excuse for an uprising, and launched attacks across five northern states. The government brutally put down the revolt after a few days, leaving more than a thousand dead and others captured. Troops surrounded Yusuf’s compound and executed him. The government declared Boko Haram “crushed.”
That was not the case. The leadership simply went underground in various Salafi jihadist camps in Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and even as far away as Afghanistan, learning valuable terror techniques (including bomb making) which it would put to use a year later when Boko Haram reemerged under its new leader, Abubakar Shekau. Even more violent, remorseless, and unpredictable than Yusuf, Shekau typified the attitude of the resurgent terror group. In one of his propaganda videos in 2012, he said, “I enjoy killing anyone that God commands me to kill, the way I enjoy killing chickens and rams.”
Not much is known about Shekau except that he had married Yusuf’s widow and adopted his children, symbolically taking over Yusuf’s household and his mission. His video appearances show him cradling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, sometimes while sitting down in a room with a neutral background, sometimes strutting in front of war tanks and firing off shots, but always flanked by silent, well-armed lieutenants with faces covered. His speeches are mostly taunts at the Nigerian government, with threats toward Barack Obama, the West in general, and other world leaders thrown in almost at random, and pledges to kill whoever stands in the way of “Allah’s mission.” Ideologically, the group continued Yusuf’s theological views, remaining completely against all forms of democracy (perceiving it as “a challenge to God’s sovereignty”) and insisting on sharia as the only acceptable code to live by.
Shekau’s early efforts centered on prison breaks to free some of the Boko Haram members who had been arrested during the 2009 uprising. In September 2010, over 700 inmates were released in Bauchi. More followed in Maiduguri, Kano, Gombe, and other northeastern cities.
In June 2011, Boko Haram turned to suicide bombings, first targeting the Nigeria Police Force Headquarters in Abuja. The bomber, Mohammed Manga, a thirty-five-year-old well-to-do businessman who in his will left four million naira to his five children, was an early convert of Mohammed Yusuf. Manga drove more than 500 miles from Maiduguri to Abuja overnight to target the Nigerian police boss Hafiz Ringim, who had earlier vowed to go after members of Boko Haram. Ringim wasn’t killed, but the attack marked the first ever suicide bombing in Nigeria. Boko Haram claimed responsibility by having a spokesperson make a phone call to the media to provide them with information about the killer.
A second suicide bombing followed in October, at the UN headquarters building in Abuja. A sedan loaded with explosives crashed through the gates of the compound and into the front doors before exploding, killing at least eighteen people. Until then, Boko Haram had focused their terror on local targets; this was its first and still only high-profile attack on an international organization.
Despite widespread condemnation, the U.S. State Department did not bother to place Boko Haram on its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. There were a number of reasons for this, one of which was the Nigerian government’s refusal to cooperate with international organizations in the fight against Boko Haram. The U.S. would not designate the group “FTO” for another two years, following a spate of bombings in late 2013 that demonstrated the group’s increased abilities to wreak havoc. The targets now included hospitals, churches, mosques, and markets. Boko Haram would often announce publicly beforehand the time of the attack and the target: They believed victory or loss came from God, and no power could stop them unless God willed it. Announcing their plans in advance was a test—and proof of the justness of their cause.
To raise funds, they raided banks, mostly in rural areas, hauling away millions of naira, which they used to sponsor their insurgency. The group also tried to capitalize on existing tensions between Christians and Muslims in Jos and other parts of northern and central Nigeria, hoping to provoke a full-scale war between the two religions by bombing churches and killing hundreds of Christians.
At the height of its power, Boko Haram controlled over 70 percent of Borno State and many other areas in neighboring states. With the annexing of towns and villages, the group’s ambition had expanded; it was now intent on establishing a Caliphate, ISIS style. This ambition wasn’t idle, and the group made rapid advances, routing the military in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe states. By 2015, it controlled twenty out of the twenty-seven local government areas in Borno State. The emir of Gwoza, one of the major emirates in Borno State, was killed by the sect, and they declared the town their caliphate’s headquarters. It was an ideal location, in terms of defense, high up in the mountainous region near the Cameroonian border in northeastern Nigeria.
Boko Haram professes links to foreign terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more recently, ISIS, after Shekau pledged his allegiance to the group in a 2015 video. But apart from leading to a brief name change to the Islamic States of West Africa, and a noticeable improvement in the quality of its propaganda videos, it didn’t amount to much in terms of material support.
By 2013, the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, which had responded indifferently to the Boko Haram threat since his election in 2010, finally began to take the fight more seriously. A state of emergency was declared in the northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe. Troops were mobilized and sent to the war front; Boko Haram responded by changing its tactics, looking for even softer targets.
On February 25, 2014, about fifty Boko Haram insurgents invaded the Federal Government College, a coeducational secondary school, in the town of Buni Yadi in Yobe State. They came in pickup trucks at around 9:00 at night, and threw explosives into the boys’ dorm rooms, then shot and stabbed the boys as they tried to escape. Meanwhile, they rounded up the girls, lectured them on the “evils of Western education,” ordered them to get married, burned down the school buildings, then left. They didn’t touch the girls, but fifty-nine boys were murdered in cold blood.
Buni Yadi looked like a rehearsal for Chibok two months later. This time there were no boys to kill, and the girls were simply taken. As the government troops pushed Boko Haram further into the forest, ransom payments became an easier way to raise money, and kidnappings had already become more frequent. Boko Haram fighters also needed children and older women to cook and clean for them, and the younger women became “wives”—sex slaves and mothers to the next generation of fighters. Men too old to be conscripted were simply lined up against the wall and shot.
Chibok became the most symbolic of all the kidnappings, especially because the girls were under the care of the government when they were taken. The war against Boko Haram would never be won until the victims were at least accounted for. The government understandably continues to restrict access to Chibok town, and I was lucky to get in at all.
We climbed up a narrow dirt road past what looked like a military camp to our right, and suddenly we were inside Chibok. The dirt road cut through the tiny town like a river and exited at the other end; to the left of the road at the edge of town stood the Government Secondary School. The heart of the town was the marketplace. As in most African towns, the market was more than just a place for buying and selling. It is the town’s social center. To get to one part of Chibok from another part one must pass through the market square, and in the course of the day almost everyone in town passes through the market at least once.
Since the kidnapping, the market has been dominated by soldiers patrolling or loitering on foot and in trucks; a pickup filled with vigilantes bearing their trademark Dane guns was parked in front of a store. There were individual vigilantes standing in storefronts or passing by on foot or on bikes. Everybody rode bicycles, men and women and boys and girls. Motorbikes have been outlawed since the kidnapping, since they were Boko Haram’s vehicle of choice, and anyone riding one could be suspected for a Boko Haram member and arrested, if he was lucky, or shot, if he wasn’t. Four telecom masts towered over the market square, but ever since the kidnapping only one of them worked. Electricity, which came from the Damboa grid, had been cut off by Boko Haram for years. There was no running water—all day men and women pushed carts filled with yellow jerry cans through the narrow labyrinths between the mud houses, carrying water from wells. A Union Bank branch was closed, like most other services, and the building itself was crumbling.
Chibok is perhaps the poorest and most neglected of all the twenty-seven local government areas in Borno State. The 2006 census placed the population at around 66,000. Most of the people were farmers and hunters, although many younger men and women occupied mid-level positions in teaching, the military, and the civil service. The Chibok people call themselves the Kibaku, which is also the name of the language they speak. The various clans and groups making up the Kibaku had been driven to the Chibok hills by Fulani jihadists and slave raiders in the nineteenth century, and they have remained here ever since. Chibok is predominantly Christian in a predominantly Muslim state—the Chibok local government chairman is the only Christian among the twenty-seven local government chairmen in Borno State. It is a sleepy, dusty town where nothing ever seems to happen, and it would have continued its peaceful and obscure existence but for the event of April 14, 2014.
