Boko Haram Read Online Free PDF Page A

domestically focused group in the sense that their enemy really is the Nigerian federal state and certain state officials’, the same Western diplomat said. ‘And I think that in an opportunistic manner they cooperate and have communicationswith transnational groups that may be committed to the global jihad like AQIM, but that’s not their primary objective.’
    It is a problem born and bred in Nigeria – and one that Nigerians must resolve amongst themselves. The conditions that have given rise to it must remain the focus of any potential solution.
    Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the Niger Delta, has offered little beyond heavy-handed military raids that have led to accusations of widespread abuses against civilians – including shootings of innocent people, the burning of homes, torture and indiscriminate arrests. The government has engaged in doublespeak, at one point claiming to be involved in back-channel talks in a bid to halt the violence, but later dismissing this, with the president calling the Islamists ‘ghosts’ who refuse to show their faces. Shekau, whose whereabouts are unknown and who has often been rumoured to be dead, has repeatedly ruled out dialogue in videos.
    While it is impossible to know for certain whether it is always the same man in Shekau’s video messages, it would also not seem to matter much. Regardless of whether there have been Shekau look-alikes, attacks have continued and even worsened. ‘If in fact he is dead, then it shows that we are in a much worse situation than we thought’, the Nigerian official who has followed the situation closely told me. In other words, it showed he could easily be replaced without an interruption in the violence, while the decline of the Nigerian army, largely because of corruption, has left little hope that it can defeat the insurgency. Soldiers ‘would rather go to the Niger Delta to make money’, he said, referring to the allegations of members of the army being involved in the lucrative oil theft racket and other crimes in that region. ‘Whoever is doing this knows they can get the Nigerian army involved in a war they cannot win.’
    The lack of faith in both the government and the military has remained one of the most important reasons why the insurgency has not been stopped. ‘I don’t know that northern populations have a great affinity for Boko Haram or whatever they’re advocating, and civilians and moderate Muslims have been the principalvictims along with security forces of course’, the Western diplomat said. ‘But there’s this sea of indifference in which they are able to operate because you just don’t have a lot of loyalty or affinity for a central government which is seen as completely clueless and, more importantly, unresponsive to the legitimate needs and grievances of local populations.’
    As for recruitment into Boko Haram, some see a cycle of poverty and lawlessness as a main cause. ‘Religion is the basis of recruitment, so that’s why they can get so many people, but the incentive for people to get into it and remain in it is the profit they make from it’, Clement Nwankwo, a respected Nigerian civil society activist based in Abuja, told me in June 2014. ‘So if there is money available and these people would ordinarily live a street life, where they don’t know what they get for the day, but here somebody’s paying their bills, somebody is feeding them, clothing them and giving them some little profit [...] And then there is really very little consequence for their actions. They can get away with it. The military hasn’t been able to respond in a way that proves a disincentive for them to continue this path.’
    In the meantime, the list of the dead only grows longer, each attack helping push the unrealised potential of such an important nation further out of reach. In the south, in the