by GARY K. BUSCH
Boko Haram militants Press TV
The kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls by Boko Haram has outraged the world; particularly after their captors promised to sell the girls as slaves. They are portrayed as Muslim fundamentalists seeking to impose a harsh Sharia Law over the whole of Nigeria. They have murdered over a thousand Nigerians in the past few years and are acting with utter impunity against the pathetic forces arrayed against them by the Nigerian State.
The last sentence highlights the reality of the problem – it is not the rise of Boko Haram which is the problem but the willing inability of the State to confront them and the concomitant complicity of several major political forces in the country in the formation and sustenance of Boko Haram for their own domestic political aims. The complicity of ‘legitimate’ Nigerian political forces in the activities of Boko Haram is a guide as to why the president, Goodluck Johnathan, is afraid to move against Boko Haram in anything more than a token resistance.
Boko Haram emerged around 2002 in Maiduguri led by Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf. In 2004 it moved to Kanamma, Yobe State, where it set up a base called ‘Afghanistan’, and used to attack nearby police outposts, killing mainly police officers. It t started as a cell of the Muslim sect called ‘Jama’atul Ahlus Sunna Lid Da’awatis Jihad’ but advertised itself as ‘Boko Haram’ from the Hausa word ‘boko’ meaning “animist, western or otherwise non-Islamic education” and the Arabic word ‘haram’ figuratively meaning “sin” (literally, “forbidden“).
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