Tuesday, April 14, 2015

The Chibok Schoolgirls. One Year Later.


It's a year since Boko Haram, an extremist Wahhabist terrorist group, captured a group of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria.  More than two hundred girls still remain disappeared.  Nobody knows their fate.  Nigeria's president-elect Mr. Buhari:

“Currently their whereabouts remain unknown,” he said. “We do not know the state of their health or welfare, or whether they are even still together or alive.”
The girls were taken late on the night of April 14, 2014, from their state school in the heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency, igniting fears among local officials that the girls would be used as slaves by the group if they were not rescued immediately.
Perhaps as many as 50 of the girls subsequently escaped. The majority remain missing, forced into “marriage” by their captors, forced to cook and do chores for them, or killed by them.
Boko Haram has since butchered and kidnapped an unknown (but large) number of people. From that angle the fate of the Chibok schoolgirls is no more awful than Boko Haram's general policies.  But this particular kidnapping is noteworthy not only for the human lives it destroyed (which is quite possible without killing someone outright).  It's also an example of Boko Haram's political views:  Western education should be banned and girls and women, in particular, should not be educated.  

To kidnap schoolgirls is to make those views into reality.  To turn those schoolgirls into domestic slaves or to force them into marriage clarifies the Boko Haram political stance even more.