Gradually but explosively, what Boko Haram, the Islamist
terror group, has been doing in North East Nigeria has penetrated the
mainstream from the social media. On 14 April Boko Haram (meaning ‘Western
Education is Forbidden’) abducted more than 230 girls from a boarding school.
Most are still missing. Abubaka Shekau, Boko Haram’s leader, obligingly gave a
videoed explanation: ‘I abducted your girls; there is a market for selling
humans. Allah says I should sell – he commands me to sell.’
The fact that these are girls, at least, makes their plight
of international political and media interest. Feminism is an easy fall-back
position for the foreign policy/human rights community. For that, the girls and
their parents may yet have reason to be grateful. It allows the British Foreign
Secretary to tweet that ‘using girls as the spoils of war and the spoils of
terrorism is immoral’. But what neither the UK nor the US authorities is
prepared to draw attention to is that these girls – all or nearly all of them –
are Christians.
Boko Haram might, indeed, abduct Muslim girls from school
because it thought they should be back at home, to be covered up, beaten, and
to make the soup. But it would only dare to sell Christians into slavery and
prostitution. Not only are they Christian. It is their Christianity which
caused them to be victims.
These and other abductees were at schools in the Christian
enclave of Chibok in Borno State. The region is the scene of systematic
Islamist persecution and intimidation. Chibok, itself, was regarded as safe,
until Islamists arrived to burn down the market, destroy houses, steal, kill,
and abduct at will. Full, credible, detailed accounts are available through the
Christian on-line networks.
Yet commentators still seem content to exercise
self-censorship. The religious identity of the girls has not been mentioned in
the mainstream US or British media.
The words ‘poverty’, ‘corruption’, and ‘incompetence’ figure
largely, and with some justice, in explanations of what is dysfunctional in
Nigeria. But the word “Christian’ is notable by its absence in explaining what
happened in Chibok.
