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The Group That Kidnapped 200 Nigerian Girls Started Out Peaceful. Here’s What Changed.

Mother Jones

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Last week, the radical Islamist militant group Boko Haram massacred as many as 2,000 people in the towns of Baga and Doron Baga in northeast Nigeria—the latest bloody event in their terror spree that began in the region around 2009. Responsible for around 600 attacks and more than 3,000 dead since 2011, according to the Department of Justice (other groups have made higher estimates), the group has made international headlines for kidnapping hundreds of school girls in 2014 and bombing the United Nations’ headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja in 2011. But Boko Haram has not always been known for its ruthless brutality.

Around 13 years ago, according to the United States Institute of Peace, the sect that became known as Boko Haram was a small, isolated, peaceful community dedicated to practicing strict Islamic Shariah law. In 2002, a group of extremist Muslim youths who worshipped at the Alhaji Muhammadu Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri, or the capital of Borno state in northeast Nigeria, decided to depart from Nigerian society and the corruption they saw there and embark on a religious pilgrimage modeled after the Prophet Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. They traveled to Kanama, near the border with Niger, to create their separatist commune. Mohammed Ali was their leader, and he called upon the group to follow “true” Islamic law.

Even after Nigerian security forces in 2003 killed the majority of Boko Haram’s members over fishing rights in a local pond, the group didn’t follow up with any violent reprisals. Police killed most of its 70 members—including Mohammed Ali—in the 2003 episode, but the group managed to reconstruct itself.

The few survivors returned to Maiduguri. They were led by a young cleric named Mohammed Yusuf, who established a mosque for the group. The community offered shelter to refugees from neighboring wars in Chad, opportunities for young jobless Nigerians, and food and resources for anyone who wanted to live there. Authorities left them alone and the group operated its own governing cabinet, large farm, and police force, which upheld the community’s strict religious law.

“Although from the outset, the sect’s mission was to impose the Shari’a on Nigeria, the leadership went about its preaching peacefully,” Simeon H.O. Aloziuwa wrote in the Costa Rica-based University for Peace’s Peace and Conflict Review in 2012. A report produced by the European Parliament also described Boko Haram as “originally a peaceful Islamist movement.”

Peaceful Democracy Ambassadors, a Nigerian group committed to human rights and peace, describe Mohammed Yusuf as “a charismatic young cleric” who founded Boko Haram “as part of his push for a pure Islamic state in Nigeria.” Though it’s not certain where the group received its money during its first few years, some experts believe that Yusuf received donations from Salafist contacts in Saudi Arabia or wealthy northern Nigerians. One Boko Haram donor who spoke with the United States Institute of Peace claimed it was part of his responsibility as a good Muslim to give money to charity—in this case, Boko Haram.

There is some disagreement about when exactly the group’s turn toward violence began. Many experts believe that in 2007, Mohammed Yusuf may have ordered the death of a prominent cleric who had criticized the group.

When the group again made headlines in 2009, it was for clashes with the police after an argument about traffic regulations. Then Boko Haram threats escalated; Yusuf released viral videos speaking out against the police, which attracted a large audience in Nigeria. The government and police both tried to crack down even more aggressively on the group, arresting hundreds. Boko Haram attacked multiple police stations. When the authorities regained control of Maiduguri, they reportedly began executing hundreds of Boko Haram members.

A local journalist told a researcher at the United States Institute of Peace that police likely “disappeared” and executed over a hundred local imams and rulers, or suspected sympathizers with Boko Haram. Yusuf, the Boko Haram leader, was allegedly arrested by the army on the street and handed over to police—where he was executed within hours, according the United States Institute of Peace. The police claim he was killed while trying to run away after being interrogated. Regardless, Yusuf’s death marked another transition. The remaining members of Boko Haram fled, their locations potentially including radical camps from Algeria to Mali, only to return in 2010 more violent than ever before.

Shehu Sani, the president of the Civil Rights Congress in Nigeria, spoke with PBS’s Frontline about his assessment of Boko Haram’s turning point, which differs slightly from other research:

The 2009 killing of Mohammed Yusuf was a result of a security traffic incident. And as a result, the subsequent killing of hundreds of members of the group after a simple traffic conflict between the group and the police became the ignition that spiraled into the violence and bloodshed that we have been suffering the last three to four years. So we had a movement that was peaceful and that was crushed by the Nigerian army, Nigerian police, and later they went underground and became more monstrous.

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The Group That Kidnapped 200 Nigerian Girls Started Out Peaceful. Here’s What Changed.

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32 Countries Where Global Warming Could Make Violence Worse

Mother Jones

Recently, the Pentagon released a disturbing report. Climate change, it warned, will exacerbate problems like terrorism and disease outbreaks, drain military resources, and create new enemies. The report said that the military’s basic operations—everything from training to its supply chains and infrastructure—are now threatened by rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. It all points to one conclusion: Global warming is a national security issue.

Now a new analysis, released Wednesday, is naming 32 countries in which conflict and civil unrest could be worsened by the changing climate. The findings are part of the seventh annual “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas” from Maplecroft—a firm that studies how vulnerable countries are to various risks. It concludes that climate change is already impacting “food production, poverty, migration and social stability—factors that significantly increase the risk of conflicts and instability in fragile and emerging states.”

Those pressures could also “lead to disenfranchisement and drive support for radical groups.”

Maplecroft

Maplecroft analyzed how exposed populations in these are countries are to climate impacts and assessed how well their governments will be able to adapt over the next 30 years. According to the report, the five countries most vulnerable to climate-related conflict and food insecurity are Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Chad.

The 10 countries that Maplecroft found were most vulnerable to food insecurity and climate change. Maplecroft

The report’s authors highlight Nigeria (tied for third the list), where “widespread drought and food insecurity helped create the socio-economic conditions that led to the emergence of Boko Haram and the violent insurgency in the North East of the country.”

Boko Haram is a militant Islamist group that the US Justice Department says has been responsible for 600 attacks on government, churches, mosques and schools. It has killed about 5,000 people since 2009 and displaced over 650,000. The group kidnapped more than 200 girls and young women in April. (The Nigerian government says it has reached a ceasefire with the militants that would include the release of the girls, but according to the BBC the talks are still ongoing.)

After visiting Nigeria earlier this year, my Mother Jones colleague Erika Eichelberger found that drought, population explosion, environmental degradation, and poverty are all aggravating the country’s armed conflicts. There are now more clashes between farmers and nomadic herders over ever-dwindling agricultural land, and economic hardships in the country are boosting Boko Haram’s recruitment efforts. Eichelberger quoted Oluwakemi Okenyodo, the executive director of CLEEN Foundation, a Nigerian security-focused nonprofit, as saying that when “young people are pushed to the wall,” there’s a greater chance that they will be sucked into the growing Boko Haram insurgency. Eichelberger reported that “there’s not enough hard evidence yet to implicate human-caused climate change in the bulk of the ecological disaster” in Nigeria—but that could change in the future as rising temperatures increasingly threaten agriculture in the region.

In a 2011 report, the United States Institute of Peace outlined a “basic causal mechanism” linking global warming to future conflict in Nigeria: Water and agricultural land shortages are followed by sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Governmental inaction on these issues in turn opens the door to conflict. “In the increasingly parched, violent northeast,” writes the report’s lead author Aaron Sayn, “members of groups like Boko Haram explain their acts by voicing disgust with government.”

Lake Chad supports vast swathes of Nigerian farming and grazing land, but it has lost more than 90 percent of its original size. Jacques Descloitres/NASA GSFC

Maplecroft’s rankings lend even more weight to the growing body of research tying climate change to the potential for more violence. Prior to the unrest that eventually exploded into revolution and armed conflict, Syria had experienced an unprecedented drought that led to the internal displacement of thousands of people who had lost their livelihoods.

Natural resources were also at the heart of the Darfur crisis. “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed. “Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

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32 Countries Where Global Warming Could Make Violence Worse

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Why We’re In A Golden Age of Global Investigative Journalism

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In our world, the news about the news is often grim. Newspapers are shrinking, folding up, or being cut loose by their parent companies. Layoffs are up and staffs are down. That investigative reporter who covered the state capitol—she’s not there anymore. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune have suffered from multiple rounds of layoffs over the years. You know the story and it would be easy enough to imagine that it was the world’s story as well. But despite a long run of journalistic tough times, the loss of advertising dollars, and the challenge of the Internet, there’s been a blossoming of investigative journalism across the globe from Honduras to Myanmar, New Zealand to Indonesia.

Woodward and Bernstein may be a fading memory in this country, but journalists with names largely unknown in the US like Khadija Ismayilova, Rafael Marques, and Gianina Segnina are breaking one blockbuster story after another, exposing corrupt government officials and their crony corporate pals in Azerbaijan, Angola, and Costa Rica. As I travel the world, I’m energized by the journalists I meet who are taking great risks to shine much needed light on shadowy wrongdoing.

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Why We’re In A Golden Age of Global Investigative Journalism

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Another week, another oil tanker hijacking

Another week, another oil tanker hijacking

Last week, we explained why piracy has shifted from Africa’s east coast to its west. In short: higher security near Somalia combined with a new strategy near Nigeria. In at least one hijacking, pirates sought a tanker’s cargo of oil instead of ransoms for crew members.

Or, rather, in at least two hijackings. From the AP:

A French-owned oil tanker missing off Ivory Coast with 17 sailors on board likely has been hijacked, an official with an international piracy watchdog said Monday, in what may be the latest attack by criminal gangs targeting the ships to steal their valuable cargo. Meanwhile, a sailor died in a similar attack Monday near Nigeria’s largest city.

Details remained scarce Monday about the fate of the ship, flagged in Luxembourg. The ship had been reported missing Sunday and officials believe it fell victim to the same pirates operating throughout the Gulf of Guinea, said Noel Choong, a spokesman for the International Maritime Bureau in Malaysia.

usnavy

Pirates surrender to a U.S. Navy vessel near Somalia in 2011.

This is on top of two near misses.

The presumed attack Sunday comes amid a series of escalating attacks in the Gulf of Guinea, which follows the continent’s southward curve from Liberia to Gabon. On Monday, pirates attacked another oil tanker anchored off Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, shooting one of the crew members, Choong said. The sailor died while in transit to a local hospital, the maritime bureau later said, though offering no other details.

A security detail from the Nigerian navy shot back at the attackers, driving them away, the bureau said. Commodore Kabir Aliyu, a spokesman for Nigeria’s navy, declined to immediately comment about the attack.

In another attack Thursday off Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta, pirates on several small boats assaulted another tanker. In a sign of how violent the attacks have grown, the pirates fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the tanker during the onslaught, which missed the ship, the maritime bureau said. The crew suffered no injuries in the attack and their ship escaped, though it sustained damage from the gunfire, the bureau said.

As we’ve mentioned before, some of the region’s oil is headed for America’s East Coast. When pirates plagued the coast of Somalia, corporations hired security teams and the U.S. Navy got involved. It would be very surprising if similar measures weren’t under discussion at Shell and Chevron at this very minute.

Source

French tanker likely hijacked off Ivory Coast, Associated Press

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Another week, another oil tanker hijacking

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