An American journalist has undertaken an investigation into the horrific details of how Nigerian Armed Forces under President
Buhari’s command raped girls as young as 13 years old who had fled
Boko Haram terrorists and sought refuge in internally Displaced Persons
camps.
NYTIMES journalist, Dionne Searcey, begins her article with this pitiful
tale. The camp was supposed to be a refuge. Falmata’s life had been
stolen by war ever since the sixth grade, when she was abducted from he
home and raped repeatedly by Boko Haram’s fighters for the next three
years.
She finally escaped last spring, slipping into the bush while her
captors slept. Fourteen years old and alone, she made it to a camp for
victims of the war, and had just settled in for the night when she heard
footsteps outside her tent.
A security officer’s voice instructed her to come out. Frightened,
she obeyed. He took her to his quarters, she said, and raped her. Hours
later, after she had returned to her tent, another officer arrived, she
said. He raped her, too.
“The same day I was brought there, soldiers started coming to rape
me,” Falmata said. “They did it one after another. I’m not even sure
those two knew about each other.”
Rape has been a defining horror of the war with Boko Haram, which has
consumed northeastern Nigeria for eight years and spread beyond its
borders. At least 7,000 women and girls have endured Boko Haram’s sexual
violence, the Unite Nations estimates. Militants kidnap and rape young
girls, teenagers and women, handing them out as so-called brides who are
sometimes passed from fighter to fighter.
But Nigerian security forces have also raped victims of the war,
preying on the people they are assigned to protect. Dozens of cases of
rape, sexual violence and sexual exploitation were reported in seven
camps in Borno State last year alone, carried out by guards, camp
officials, security officers and members of civilian vigilante groups,
the United Nations says. More than a year ago, the Nigerian government
pledged to investigate the allegations of rape in camps for people
displaced by the war, saying that “these very distressing reports will
not be taken lightly.”
But accounts of sexual assaults in the camps are still common,
including from young girls who say they were raped by soldiers on many
occasions.
“The soldiers would come and hold me so tight,” one 13-year-old girl
said in an interview. She said she had been raped about 10 times this
year at a camp in Maiduguri, the city at the center of the fight against
Boko Haram, before running away for her own safety.
“At first none of us knew they were doing this,” said Hadiza, 18,
“but then the stories started to spread around camp that anyone cooking
for them would be raped.” “They were old enough to be my parents,” she
said of the soldiers who raped her.
The Nigerian military has cleared parts of the countryside to hunt
for Boko Haram’s hide-outs, forcing hundreds of thousands of civilians
to move into huge settlements throughout northeastern Nigeria. Many
other civilians have made it to the camps on their own after fleeing
Boko Haram’s deadly assaults. Most of the camps are overflowing, with
new arrivals every day. Food and water are often in short supply,
residents say, and health workers are battling a cholera outbreak that
has killed dozens. At night, the camps are dimly lit.
Aid workers come during the day, but typically not after sunset
because of wartime curfews. Security forces tightly control who goes in
and out of the camps, sometimes coercing women and girls to trade sex
for food. Government officials say they need 24-hour security to protect
the residents, especially since some of the camps are regular targets
of suicide bombers deployed by Boko Haram. But in one camp, called
Teachers Village, some residents said the security forces had worked out
a system to select their victims. Young women were called to cook for
them.
After the women finished, security officers insisted that they clean
up, telling them to go bathe in the officers’ quarters as the men
watched.
“At first none of us knew they were doing this, but then the stories
started to spread around camp that anyone cooking for them would be
raped,” said Hadiza, 18. After living in the camp for several weeks,
Hadiza said, she was picked to cook for the officers. She was terrified.
“Definitely my time has come,” she recalled thinking. Later, she was
asked to serve water to four security officers in their room as they
dined. One by one they left, she said, until only one man remained. He
dragged her into a separate room and raped her, she said.
Hadiza was injured, she said, but didn’t ask for medical care,
fearing that the officers would seek revenge. She said she tried to keep
a low profile for a couple of weeks, but officers spotted her and raped
her again. She said she had been raped as many as 20 times in the camp.
“Once they identified you as a girl they wanted to have sex with,
they would hardly leave you alone a single day,” Hadiza said. By spring,
word of the rapes at Teachers Village camp had spread so widely across
Maiduguri tha people began showing up at the gates to look fo missing
relatives. Distant relatives arrived for Hadiza and took her away.
Last year, President Muhammadu Buhari called for an investigation
into sexual assaults at the camps after Human Rights Watch detailed the
abuse in a report, ordering new measures to protect the vulnerable.
Security officers have received more training, and at least 100 female
officers have been deployed inside the camps.
A a result, the number of complaints of sexual abuse has declined,
according to some aid groups and the police. The police have arrested
several men for sexually abusing and exploiting women and girls,
according to the United States Embassy. The arrests, made last December,
include two police officers, a prison warden, two civilian militia
members, a civil servant and three soldiers. But an Army Special Board
of Inquiry said in Jun that allegations against its soldiers at the
camps were unfounded, while Jimoh Moshood, a police spokesman, said the
investigations were continuing.
“Very little progress has been made by Nigerian authorities to
implement President Buhari’s promise of justice for the survivors,” said
Mausi Segun, the executive director of the Africa division of Human
Rights Watch. “The delay reinforces displaced people’s sense of
helplessness, and likely emboldens more perpetrators to prey on their
vulnerability.”
In the war with Boko Haram, Nigerian security forces have been
accused of many human rights abuses, including killing innocent
civilians and detaining children for months to determine their
loyalties.
At checkpoints to enter Maiduguri, soldiers and militia members have
turned away large groups o displaced people fleeing Boko Haram, unless
the can pay an “entrance fee,” aid workers say. People escaping with
their herds are sometimes charged a fee for each animal. Those who can’t
pay the bribes have been sent back into harm’s way.
Inside the camps, soldiers and members of civilian vigilante groups
have been accused of forcing people to pay for the privilege of setting
up tents or leaky shelters made of tarps and grass. Some displaced
people told Amnesty International that they had to sell their belonging
to survive, and when they ran out of things to sell, they had to have
sex with soldiers and civilian militia members to get food.
Falmata, the 14-year-old kidnapped by Boko Haram, said her ordeal
began when she was in primary school, enjoying her classwork and dancing
to local Kanuri music. Militants stormed into her home and took her
while she was caring for her sick mother. They forced her to marry a
fighter, but that man died i battle a week later, so they gave her to
another husband. She tried to resist, so they gave her a third. Barely a
teenager by then, she became pregnant, she said, but the baby died days
after he was born. One night, Falmata woke up and realized the whole
camp was asleep. Now was the time, she thought.
She ran until she reached a village, finding an older woman with a
lantern who pointed her to a road. Soldiers spotted her and took her to
Dalori Camp, a sprawling site outside Maiduguri. She thought she was
being delivered to safety — but immediately faced the same kind of
sexual abuse she had risked her life to flee. And this time it was being
committed by the people who were there to protect her.
During her two months at the camp, she said, security officers, not
always the same men, came for her repeatedly. Falmata described the men
as “soldiers,” but it was unclear if they were members of the military,
the police or another security force. She said they carried weapons. “I
felt it would continue forever,” she said of the abuse. She knew she had
to flee, again, so she asked fo a pass to go to the market. She walked
out of th camp the same way she had escaped Boko Haram: alone, with no
money and no idea where she was going. As a little girl, she remembered,
she had visited her grandmother once in Maiduguri, but she had only a
vague idea where. Falmata spotted a man she had seen around the camp who
spoke her dialect, and begged for help. “Look, I have a problem,” she
told him.
“These people are going to kill me. They come to me every night.” The
two drove around the city for hours, trying to track down Falmata’s
grandmother, asking everyone. Eventually, they found her. She had
thought Falmata was dead. Falmata now lives with her grandmother, but is
too ashamed to tell her what happened. Someday, she hopes to continue
her education and become a lawyer. She wants to represent th powerless.
