Nigeria is ready to talk to Islamist militants to negotiate the release of more than 200 abducted girls, cabinet minister Tanimu Turaki has said.
Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said on Monday that captured girls who had not converted to Islam could be swapped for jailed fighters.
Mr Turaki said that if Shekau was sincere, he should send representatives for talks.
The BBC’s Mark Doyle, in the capital, Abuja, says it appears some sort of negotiations will take place because of the large presence of international advisers in the country, including hostage negotiators.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden”, had previously said the girls should not have been at school and should get married instead.
The militants have been engaged in a violent campaign against the Nigerian government since 2009.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Monday for a special tribunal for South Sudan, saying there are grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed since widespread violence began five months ago.
The U.N. chief welcomed last Friday’s cease-fire agreement by President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar, and demanded an immediate end to fighting, which flared over the weekend. He called for “30 days of tranquility” so farmers can plant crops in peace to avoid famine in the world’s newest nation.
“If the conflict continues, half of South Sudan’s 12 million people will either be displaced internally, refugees abroad, starving or dead by the year’s end,” Ban warned the U.N. Security Council.
Nigeria has immediately rejected a proposed deal to free the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls after the captives were paraded on a video released by the terror group Boko Haram.
Abubakar Shekau, the group’s leader, claimed in a 17-minute tirade that the girls have converted to Islam and said that they will not be released until all Boko Haram prisoners have been freed from Nigerian jails.
But President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria swiftly ruled out the possibility of a prisoner swap or of paying a ransom.
Read it all (requires subscription).
Ahead of Pope Francis’ Holy Land visit, the heads of Christian churches in the region plan to launch an international awareness campaign following a series of anti-Christian vandalism believed to have been carried out by Jewish extremists.
News of the campaign, which was announced on the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem Wednesday (May 7), comes weeks before the pope’s May 25-26 visit to Israel and the West Bank.
The announcement was spurred by what the patriarchate called a “wave of fanaticism and intimidation” against local Christians and institutions.
New video claiming to show a number of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls has been released by the Islamist militant group, Boko Haram.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby warned on Sunday of the difficulties of negotiating with an “utterly merciless” group like Boko Haram, but called for active contact with the Nigerian Islamists over their abduction of scores of schoolgirls.
Welby has experience of negotiating with violent groups in the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, and with a predecessor to Boko Haram around Maiduguri, the capital of northeastern Borno state where the group started out.
In an interview with BBC radio about the fate of more than 200 schoolgirls seized by the Islamist group last month, the archbishop said the girls faced a “colossal” risk.
“They’re in the hands of a very disparate group which is extremely irrational and difficult to deal with and utterly merciless in the example it’s shown in the past, and it must be a huge concern,” he said.
Read it all. The [London] Times also has Archbishop calls for talks with Boko Haram for those who have subscriber access.
Everyone loves to whack away at blogs but they sift information through a personal grid which means you get information someone else sees that you do not.
Case in point, when was the first Boko Haram post on this blog? August 2009: Nigeria violence sparks new concerns.
Watch it all carefully and note especially the section beginning at 2:25 when he is asked about the American Government. “They’re not interested…”
But little attention has been paid to the group’s formal Arabic name: Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as “The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War.” That’s a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.
The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists’ mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai””as she rode a school bus home in 2012””because she advocated girls’ education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.
How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as “Islamophobes” than to stand up for women’s most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers? These girls’ lives deserve more than a Twitter hashtag protest.
Read it all and take up the challenge (w/thanks to Locusts and Wild Honey).
The morning after Mkeki Ntakai learned of the mass kidnapping by Boko Haram, he fired up his rickety motor scooter and sped down a dirt road in northern Nigeria to find his 16-year-old daughter.
Mr. Ntakai was joined by more than 100 fathers, uncles and big brothers, all seeking several hundred girls taken by force from a boarding school in the remote hamlet of Chibok. The men followed a trail of hair ties and scraps of clothing the girls dropped to lead rescuers. One found his daughter’s flip-flop; another retrieved a remnant of a school uniform.
But the kidnappers had too big a head start. Three weeks later, the trail has gone cold for the 223 girls still missing. More than 50 managed to escape in the first few hours, jumping out of the beds of pickup trucks or slipping away while they were supposed to be washing dishes.
The rest are presumed held by the jihadi group, whose leader Abubakar Shekau said he would sell the girls as slaves.
Forty American Anglican (U.S.) bishops, as well as the Most Rev. Robert Duncan, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, (ACNA) have signed on to a Pledge of Solidarity & Call to Action on behalf of Christians and Other Small Religious Communities in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.
The pledge was released at a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, May 7, 2014, and hosted by U.S. Representatives Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA), strong advocates for the persecuted and the co-chairs of the bipartisan Religious Minorities in the Middle East Caucus, collaborating with Nina Shea, the director and senior scholar at the Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom. Wolf, a firm believer in the power of prayer, observes “there are more churches than there are chambers of commerce in America.”
The “Bring Back Our Girls” hashtag””retweeted nearly two million times so far by Twitter users including the Vatican, the first lady and celebrities including singers Mary J. Blige and Chris Brown ””wasn’t created by Ms. Mosley but by Nigerian Ibrahim Musa Abdullahi, a 35-year-old attorney in the capital Abuja who adapted a chant he heard on television there. This week, Twitter users began calling attention to that fact in a storm of angry tweets to Ms. Mosley.
Ms. Mosley said in an interview on Thursday that she didn’t take credit for the hashtag: “The idea that people are so upset has been a complete shock.”¦I felt compelled to help spread the word.”
“Pound for pound, year for year, few greater heroes if any,” says a wooden sign surrounded by toys and flowers at a memorial outside Marty’s house. Bob Barnett, a Richmond retiree who never met the boy, spent most of Saturday carving it.
On the front are the words: “Martin, a real hero, lived, fought, and died here.”
“Barring a rescue of the abducted women, Jonathan’s standing will deteriorate,” Philippe de Pontet, Africa analyst at Eurasia Group, said in an e-mailed note yesterday. “The political implications are damaging for the Jonathan administration, which has been seen as ineffective in its response.”
Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, which means “western education is a sin” in the Hausa language, has claimed responsibility for the April 14 abduction of 276 girls from their dormitories in Borno state in the northeast. He has threatened to sell the girls in “markets” and marry them off, helping galvanize a global campaign to free them joined by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama and Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai.
…here’s a challenge.
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and, by all means, let’s use it to celebrate the moms in our lives with flowers and brunches. But let’s also use the occasion to honor the girls still missing in Nigeria.
One way is a donation to support girls going to school around Africa through the Campaign for Female Education, Camfed.org; a $40 gift pays for a girl’s school uniform.
Another way to empower women is to support Edna Adan, an extraordinary Somali woman who has started her own maternity hospital, midwife training program and private university, saving lives, providing family planning and fighting female genital mutilation. At EdnaHospital.org, a $50 donation pays for a safe hospital delivery.
On a recent visit to the CMS offices. Stephen Lubari, education programme manager of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan (ECSSS), had a simple message from the world’s newest nation:
“Pray for peace, reconciliation and healing in South Sudan. Pray for those in the internally displaced people (IDP) camps and for those involved in the peace process ”“ including the church which is working with the government and outside agencies to achieve this.”
The most pressing need for the IDPs, according to Stephen, is making sure that enough emergency relief reaches them in the shape of food, water and shelter ”“ especially as April and May is when the rains start. The United Nations humanitarian coordination agency, UNOCHA, said in a situation report on 25 April that as many as 4.9 million people need humanitarian assistance.
Islamic militants who have triggered international outrage over the kidnapping of more than 270 Nigerian schoolgirls opened fire on a busy marketplace, killing hundreds of people in a new spasm of violence in the country’s northeast.
The attack escalates Nigeria’s growing crisis from a campaign of bombings, massacres and abductions being waged by the Boko Haram terrorist network in its campaign to impose an Islamic state on Africa’s most populous nation.
As many as 300 people were killed in the assault late Monday on the town of Gamboru Ngala on Nigeria’s border with Cameroon. The extremists opened fire on a marketplace bustling with shoppers taking advantage of the cooler nighttime temperatures in the semi-desert region, then rampaged through the town for 12 hours, setting houses ablaze and shooting those who tried to escape.
Nearly 300 girls are still missing after being abducted by a terror group in Nigeria three weeks ago….
Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town today called for “all of Africa, and especially South Africa” to rise up and demand the release of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted from their school three weeks ago.
The Anglican archbishop was preaching at the 150th anniversary celebrations of St John’s Church, Bellville in Cape Town.
During his sermon, he called on the congregation to “voice your outrage at the killings in northern Nigeria, and at the recent abduction of hundreds of schoolgirls there.”
The BBC’s Paul Wood in Beirut says the rebel fighters and their families are sad and bitter as they say goodbye to a place they swore they would never leave.
They buckled finally, our correspondent adds, after two years of siege – the government’s forces following a tactic of what some Syrian army officers called “surrender or starve”.
The siege of the Old City was tightened in recent months with intense shelling and air strikes.
“The rest of the world failed us,” one activist told the BBC by Skype as he prepared for the evacuation.
When someone asked the Rev. Canon Andrew White why members are so happy at St. George’s Church in war-torn Baghdad, the response came from Lina, whom White considers his adopted Iraqi daughter: “When you’ve lost everything, Jesus is all you have left.”
The question was not a theoretical one for Canon White (more popularly known as the “Vicar of Baghdad”), his loved ones, or his parishioners. St. George’s Church is a cathedral that has suffered the loss of 1,276 congregants during the last decade. And yet he declares with joy and a tinge of wonder in his voice, “I have one of the most wonderful congregations you can imagine.”
Visiting Washington, D.C., to receive the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview’s William Wilberforce Award, White spoke on “Reconciliation and Peacemaking in the World, Church, and the Anglican Communion” at Truro Anglican Church on May 1. He is the author of several books, including Father, Forgive: Reflections on Peacemaking (Monarch, 2013).
The radical Islamist group Boko Haram isn’t new. The group has been around for more than a decade and has waged a bloody insurgency in northeastern Nigeria for the past five years. But it has suddenly achieved international notoriety by kidnapping more than 200 schoolgirls who have now been missing for more than three weeks.
Read it all. Mother Jones has a helpful explanatory piece also that includes this:
Why did the foreign press decide to start paying attention now?
Part of the reason is the sheer scale of the kidnapping. According to the latest numbers, nearly 300 schoolgirls were abducted on April 15 from Chibok boarding school in the northern Nigerian state of Borno. Last year, Boko Haram abducted handfuls of children, as well as Christian women, whom the group converts to Islam and forces into marriage. The group attacked 50 schools last year too, killing more than 100 schoolchildren and 70 teachers. The number of kids taken during the raid on the Chibok school is staggering, however. “It is the largest number of children abducted in one swoop in the country,” says Nnamdi Obasi, a senior Nigeria analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit conflict resolution organization. “Certainly not a minor incident that could be ignored.”
But it’s not just the shock value of the Chibok school attack that’s put a recent spotlight on Boko Haram. The group has terrorized the country on this scale before, having killed thousands over the past five years. In November 2011, the militants attacked police facilities in the northern state of Yobe, killing 150. That year, the group also carried out a brazen attack on the UN compound in the capital city of Abuja. In January 2012, coordinated bombings by the Islamist militants in the city of Kano killed about 150. And in July of that year, the group attacked multiple Christian villages in the north, killing more than 100. Those attacks prompted obligatory reports by the likes of the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, and the BBC.he real reason for the disproportionate amount of press coverage and outrage this time around, experts say, has to do with a combination of things: the Nigerian government’s tepid response to the missing girls, the international media’s initial indifference, and Nigerians becoming fed up with both.
American military and law-enforcement personnel will coordinate with Nigerian officials in a stepped-up effort to find nearly 300 schoolgirls who were abducted by Islamic terrorists in the country last month, President Obama and John Kerry said Tuesday.
The United States first publicly announced an offer for help last week, but on Tuesday Kerry spoke with Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan and a plan was put in action.
“So what we’ve done is ”” we have offered, and it’s been accepted ”” help from our military and our law enforcement officials,” Obama told NBC News’ Al Roker on Tuesday. “We’re going to do everything we can to provide assistance to them.”
South Sudanese president Salva Kiir has agreed to meet face to face with former vice-president turned rebel leader Riek Machar on Friday, senior diplomats in Juba disclosed on Monday.
“The Ethiopian prime minister in his capacity as the chairperson of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has notified the government of the meeting which the president had accepted to take place between him and Riek Machar,” a senior diplomat told Sudan Tribune on Monday.
“I am told the meeting will take place [this] Friday 9 [April],” added the official who requested anonymity.
Leaders of the International Anglican Women’s Network have called on women around the Anglican Communion to do what they can to help the 200+ girls kidnapped in Nigeria by terrorist group Boko Haram.
IAWN Steering Group convener Ann Skamp has written to members encouraging them not to forget the girls some of whom, the media is reporting, have been forced to marry by their captors.
“Three weeks ago now, over 200 girls were kidnapped from their school in the northern Nigerian city of Borno. As we continue to keep the girls, their families and communities in our prayers please consider what we can do to support them,” she said.
A resolution expressing support for Christians in Nigeria, under siege by the Islamist terrorist group, Boko Haram, passed unanimously at the Annual Synod of the Missionary Diocese of CANA East on Saturday, May 3, 2014, in Wayne, PA. The Synod was the second annual gathering of the diocese, one of four missionary dioceses in the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) led by Missionary Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Julian M. Dobbs.
Thousands of Nigerian Christians, including Anglicans, have been killed or injured by Boko Haram, which was finally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department last November. The radical Islamist group seeks the eradication of Christians and the total Islamization of Nigeria.
Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of their strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday.
The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, follows the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the Islamist militant group last month.
Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.