WUNRN
NIGERIA – BOKO HARAM MILITANTS RAPED HUNDREDS OF FEMALE CAPTIVES IN NIGERIA
By ADAM NOSSITER
- MAY 18, 2015
DALORI, Nigeria - Hundreds of women and
girls captured by Boko Haram have been
raped, many repeatedly, in what officials and relief workers describe as a
deliberate strategy to dominate rural residents
and possibly even create a new generation of Islamist militants in Nigeria.
In interviews, the women described being locked in houses by the dozen, at
the beck and call of fighters who forced them to have sex, sometimes with the
specific goal of impregnating them.
“They married me,” said Hamsatu, 25, a young woman in a black-and-purple
head scarf, looking down at the ground. She said she was four months pregnant,
that the father was a Boko Haram member and that she had been forced to have
sex with other militants who took control of her town.
“They chose the ones they wanted to marry,” added Hamsatu, whose full name
was not used to protect her identity. “If anybody shouts, they said they would
shoot them.”
Boko Haram, a radical Islamist sect that has taken over large stretches of
territory in the country’s northeast, has long targeted women,
rounding them up as it captures towns and villages. Women and girls have been
given to Boko Haram fighters for “marriage,” a euphemism for the sexual
violence that occurs even when unions are cloaked in religion.
Now, dozens of newly freed women and girls,
many of them pregnant and battered, are showing up at a sprawling camp for the
displaced here outside the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, as Nigerian soldiers
and other military forces try to push Boko Haram out of nearby territory it has
occupied for much of the past year.
The full human toll of that occupation is only now emerging. More than
15,000 people have sought shelter at the camp, at an abandoned federal
office-worker training center, most of them women, relief officials said. Over
200 have so far been found to be pregnant, but relief officials believe many
more are bearing the unwanted children of Boko Haram militants.
“The sect leaders make a very conscious effort to impregnate the women,”
said the Borno governor, Kashim Shettima. “Some of them, I was told, even pray
before mating, offering supplications for God to make the products of what they
are doing become children that will inherit their ideology.”
The militants have openly promised to treat women as chattel. After Boko
Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok
last year, the group’s leader called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in the market.”
“We would marry them out at the age of 9,” the leader, Abubakar Shekau,
said in a video message soon after the girls were abducted, prompting the
global “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign. “We would marry them out at the age of
12.”
As the group has lost control of towns and thousands of people have fled in
recent weeks, a grim picture of that treatment has emerged: hundreds of women
and girls as young as 11 subjected to systematic, organized sexual violence.
Yahauwa, 30, used her green head scarf to wipe away tears as she clutched a
plastic bag full of medicine. She had just tested positive for H.I.V.]
“Is it from the people who forced me to have affairs with them?” she asked
a relief worker, tears streaming down her face.
Later, she explained that she and many other women had been “locked in one
big room.”
“When they came, they would select the one they wanted to sleep with,” she
said. “They said, ‘If you do not marry us, we will slaughter you.’ ”
As the women spoke, two trucks crammed with more people arrived at the rudimentary
camp guarded by watchful soldiers. Even the local news media is kept out.
Many of the residents of the camp spend the day outside in blazing
100-degree-plus heat here. They dare not return home.
Six years ago, Nigerian security forces clashed violently
with Boko Haram members, and the group has been waging unremitting war against the federal
government ever since.
It recently declared allegiance
to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and its successes over the
years contributed substantially
to the defeat of the incumbent
president of Nigeria,
Goodluck
Jonathan, in a March election. Thousands have been killed in Boko
Haram’s war against the Nigerian state, often characterized by the
indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.
Boko Haram is now on the retreat, but the countryside is not secure. People
from several towns said the militants had not been defeated, as the Nigerian
military maintains, but had simply fled as troops advanced
with superior firepower.
Indeed, Maiduguri itself, a city of more than two million, came under attack
again from Boko Haram last week. The militants tried to storm a military base
and were pushed back only after hours of what residents said was heavy shooting
by the military. On Saturday, a suicide bomber, a young girl, killed at least
seven people in nearby Damaturu, and officials said the insurgents had
recaptured the town of Marte.
The attack on Maiduguri was at least the third such attack
on the state capital this year.
The humiliation of what the refugees have been through led many of the
women interviewed at the camp to deny being abused by the militants. But relief
workers here said that when they arrived, many acknowledged that they had been
raped.
Fanna, a delicate 12-year-old who had arrived at the camp here three days
before, crouched on the floor, clasping her knees, and insisted in her thin
child’s voice that Boko Haram had not touched her. Relief officials said that
in her camp entry interview, she, too, had said she was raped by the militants.
Now, many officials worry about the long-term health effects of the abuse.
Yana, a young woman wearing sparkling golden bangles, said the fighters had
“parked” her — a word many women have used to describe their imprisonment —
with about 50 other women in a house in Bama, Borno State’s second city, with a
population of several hundred thousand. Bama was occupied by Boko Haram last
September.
Inside the house, “If they want to have an affair with a woman, they will
just take her to a private place, so that the others won’t see,” said Yana in a
singsong voice. She could not recall her age; a relief worker at the camp here
said she had been raped so often by Boko Haram that she was “psychologically
affected.”
Yana said the militants had forced her to have sex with them.
Her feet and stomach were swollen and the relief worker said she was
probably pregnant, though her test results had not yet come back. Other workers
here said many of the women had signs of physical and psychological trauma from
being repeatedly raped.
Nigerian officials have reacted gingerly as the evidence of large-scale
sexual violence by Boko Haram emerges.
The federal government appeared to have a scant presence at the camp here,
despite the thousands of small children, around a third of them parentless, and
near-daily deaths from illness or malnutrition. Flocks of little children roam
the camp, unwatched. On a recent morning, two small boys were brought into the
camp clinic with serious cuts and burns.
Unicef, a few other international agencies and the state government are
providing some help, but relief officials said some of the women were too
traumatized to leave their tents to seek help in the clinic.
Officials in the nation’s capital, Abuja, have said little. A new
government, led by the former strongman
Muhammadu Buhari, will be seated this month.
But officials and relief workers here in Borno State, where Boko Haram was
born and remains strongest, said the organized nature of Boko Haram’s sexual
violence appeared to point to a deliberate self-perpetuation plan.
“It’s like they wanted to have their own siblings to take over from them,” said
Abba Mohammed Bashir Shuwa, a senior state official in Maiduguri.
A relief official at the camp who is working closely with the abused women
echoed that thought. “We are going to have another set of Boko Haram,” said the
official, Hadiza Waziri. “Most of these women now, they don’t want these
pregnancies. You cannot love the child.”
The militants’ fixation with capturing, hoarding and “marrying” the women
allowed some to witness central elements in their military strategy.
Meriam, 36, who had just arrived at the camp in Maiduguri from Gwoza, a
Boko Haram headquarters town, spoke of being imprisoned with dozens of other
women, including some who were being trained as suicide bombers.
Increasingly over the past year, the terrorists have used women and children
to carry out suicide bombings
against civilian targets like markets.
“The Boko Haram would recite the prayer for the dead,” Meriam said. “Then
they would put on the hijab,” covering the suicide belt.
After they had prepared, “They said, ‘God will forgive us,’ ” she
said. “Then, they would enter the vehicles, and they would send the women
away.”
Meriam said she had seen a few of the Chibok village girls at the hospital
in Gwoza, and said that the Boko Haram appeared to give them a special status.
Back at the Dalori camp, Hamsat, a 16-year-old high school student from
Bama who was wearing a delicate pink head scarf, clasped her hands tightly and
looked down. No, she said, Boko Haram had not touched her. Others, yes, in the
group of over 200, but not her.
“They were having affairs with them,” she said. “Others were very stubborn.
I used to pray.”
Relief officials said that when she arrived two weeks ago, Hamsat was among
those who acknowledged having been raped.