Boko Haram (20 page)

Perhaps the worst single incident of soldiers being accused of rampaging would occur in April 2013 in the town of Baga, located on the edge of Lake Chad in Nigeria's far north-east. On the evening of 16 April, attackers believed to be from Boko Haram shot dead a soldier serving under a task force in the region, apparently the latest in a string of incidents blamed on Boko Haram in Baga. Reinforcements from the task force arrived in Baga later the same night and, according to residents and a police incident report, unleashed fury on the town. The soldiers ‘started shooting indiscriminately at anybody in sight including domestic animals. This reaction resulted to [
sic
] loss of lives and massive destruction of properties', the police incident report quoted by
Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission said. Residents also accused the soldiers of setting entire neighbourhoods ablaze in revenge, and the police report said the troops ‘completely razed down' at least five wards in Baga.
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According to the Red Cross, 187 people were killed. A local senator put the death toll at 228. The military bitterly disputed those numbers as well as the assertions that soldiers set buildings alight, arguing that the fires would have been caused by insurgents. According to the military, 37 people were killed, including 30 insurgents, six civilians and a soldier.
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News of the violence was slow to emerge from the remote town, and when it did, access to the area was restricted by the military. My colleague Aminu Abubakar managed to enter Baga with a military escort more than two weeks after. One resident told him that the area where he lived ‘was burnt the following morning in broad daylight by soldiers who went door-to-door setting fire to homes and everybody saw them'.
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As the military continued to deny abuse allegations, Human Rights Watch published satellite photos appearing to show wide swathes of the town destroyed by fire. It said that, according to its analysis, it had counted 2,275 destroyed buildings, ‘the vast majority likely residences, with another 125 severely damaged', and that the destruction was spread over about 80,000 square metres – roughly the area of 11 football pitches.
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Nigeria's space research agency conducted its own analysis and disputed Human Rights Watch's findings, saying that the area affected was 54,000 square metres and the ‘active zone of destruction' was 11,000 square metres. It also argued that the area analysed was not large enough to fit the 2,400 buildings mentioned by Human Rights Watch.
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While the multiplying allegations could lead one to believe that Nigeria had developed its own form of the old colonial-era punitive expedition, but against its own people, the military has maintained its denial of using excessive force. When I interviewed the defence spokesman Brigadier-General Chris Olukolade in May 2013, he firmly defended the military's actions. He also argued
that insurgents wearing camouflage have confused residents and led them to believe that soldiers were carrying out violence. As for indiscriminate arrests, Olukolade said anyone detained would have been accused of being directly involved in the insurgency.

‘Our position is every troop operating in this mission has been sufficiently briefed of the need to respect the rights of citizens, the need never to engage in extrajudicial killings, the need to observe all the laws of armed conflict, and not to execute anybody for whatever reason', Olukolade said. ‘So they are very much aware – the briefing is going on every day as a routine – and so every troop in this mission knows the implication of such. If we have such allegation and it is credible, it will be investigated and proper trial would go on. But so far, there is no indication apart from allegations that are evidently meant to be propaganda.'

Specifically regarding Baga, he said that ‘if I take you to Baga now, all along the route between Maiduguri and Baga is full of burnt villages. It is a pattern [...] In that same Baga, the whole burning that people are referring to did not take place during this encounter. It is accumulating. Every house that was identified by Boko Haram as not supporting, because they had invaded the community, they burn down the house. And they were doing this not in one day. It has accumulated for years.'

Later, the defence spokesman said accusations against the military had been made unfairly, either for propaganda purposes or simply because residents had been duped.

‘It's not unlikely you get people who will testify that it is done by soldiers [...] Sympathies vary, for whatever reason, and it depends on who is giving you testimony. It will reflect his sympathies.' He said insurgents have worn camouflage, sometimes of a different type from that worn by the Nigerian military. ‘They found some camo that are not Nigerian camo – there is Chadian camo, there is Niger camo. But for civilians just seeing camo, what does he see? Soldiers.'

Olukolade told me during the interview that ‘I have not confirmed that soldiers did the burning in Maiduguri or anywhere. No soldier will do that now. They know the implication. I can tell you no soldier is involved in any form of arson.'

The dead bodies lay under a scorching sun, at least 26 of them, some contorted and twisted, others seeming to have been set out, if not neatly, then at least in something resembling a row. One man's head was tilted up toward the sky, his mouth open as if he were yelling. The smell was putrid, familiar to anyone who has smelled death before, but worsened by the intense heat, and yet somehow the workers in nearby medical units carried on, moving about the hospital grounds while occasionally covering their noses with their shirts or gowns. They seemed as if they had grown accustomed to it. One explained that the bodies had come from an area about 45 miles away called Benisheik and had been dumped either by security forces or residents who had recovered a corpse along the roadside. If relatives did not come soon to collect the bodies, the corpses would be buried in a mass grave like others before them. The hospital worker said that both victims of insurgent attacks and the insurgents themselves, or at least those labelled as such, were regularly dumped there in that manner, though dead soldiers were usually taken out of view inside the mortuary, steps away. Asked why all the bodies were not placed inside instead of on the dirt outdoors, she reasoned that the lack of steady electricity would cause them to rot even faster there. She said there was an electricity generator for the mortuary, but it didn't always work properly. In any case,
the mortuary was locked up tight on this Friday afternoon since the workers there had gone to pray. It closes at other times because the attendants are often ill, according to the hospital worker. The conditions apparently make them sick.

This was at a time when, if the military was to be believed, things were getting better. The truth was far more complicated, and the reason the bodies were rotting in the dirt at the back of Borno State Specialist Hospital complex in Maiduguri would attest to that. Another state of emergency had been declared in the region more than four months earlier, in May 2013, with President Jonathan having decided after years of attacks and mayhem that something dramatic must be done. Additional troops were deployed into the region, tasked with taking back villages that the president said the insurgents had occupied. He told the nation in a televised speech that the extremists from Boko Haram had replaced the Nigerian flag with their own in certain remote border areas. Some estimates put the number of districts under Boko Haram control at 21 and described it as a gradual process, beginning around January 2013. Since Boko Haram had not been previously known to seek to take territory and had focused solely on insurgent attacks, the development would mean a sharp change in tactics. It came at a time when the world had been focused on a different Islamist extremist advance in nearby northern Mali, where rebels had taken control of around half the country, sparking a French military assault to chase them out. Jonathan's declaration led to worry over whether Nigerian extremists had gone to Mali and returned home battle-hardened, ready to emulate the strategy there, or whether insurgents who never left had simply taken inspiration from it.

Within hours of the president's emergency declaration, the military assault began, and it became clear almost instantly that determining what was really happening on the ground was going to be next to impossible. One of the army's first moves was to cut mobile phone lines in the north-east, ostensibly because the insurgents used them to coordinate attacks. Satellite phones would
also be banned later for the same reason. Since landlines are virtually non-existent in Nigeria, this meant the region was cut off from the rest of the world. On top of that, visiting remote areas without a military escort was considered too dangerous – because of the insurgents, certainly, but also thanks to the presence of soldiers with ruthless reputations. Nonetheless, through a combination of military statements, limited visits to the region, accounts from local residents and, perhaps above all, the emergence of a new pattern of attacks, details began to filter through and a picture, however incomplete, gradually took shape.

Early on in the offensive, the military claimed to have cleared out insurgents from camps, often in forests or on the outskirts of villages. It said it had done this with aircraft providing cover for ground troops. How many insurgents were involved, how many died, how many were arrested and where those who fled escaped to were questions the military was refusing to answer in any coherent fashion. The lack of publicly known information also led to concerns that soldiers were again killing civilians whom they accused of cooperating with Boko Haram or simply to instil fear.

There were also doubts about what exactly the offensive was achieving. Sporadic military statements made grandiose claims of having taken over almost all of Boko Haram's remote camps, but no one knew for sure who had really been there or what the soldiers had done. Besides that, while the number of insurgent attacks seemed to have diminished since the start of the offensive, they had by no means stopped altogether. Shekau, dressed in camouflage, appeared in a video that surfaced at the end of May, claiming that Nigerian troops were retreating and being killed in the fight against Boko Haram, while also showing weapons and vehicles he said were taken from the military.

A couple of weeks in, with the military under pressure to give some account of what it claimed to be achieving, it arranged a tour for journalists into an area of the north-east said to have been taken over by insurgents before soldiers chased them out.

A first attempt was a disappointment. Defence officials invited a mix of local and foreign journalists on the tour a day and a half before it was due to occur, and we scrambled to arrange to be there. We were told to meet in the capital Abuja, where we would take an air force transport plane to Maiduguri, but further details were unclear. Our photographer and I, like other journalists, flew from Lagos to Abuja ready for any possibility, as we had no idea what to expect once we arrived in the north-east. I had not visited the region for about a year by that point, long before the president declared his state of emergency. When our flight landed in Abuja the night before we were to meet the soldiers and I turned my phone back on, I saw that a text message had come through from the army officer who had been arranging logistics. The trip was cancelled, he said. He later assured me by phone that there would be another one scheduled soon.

The trip was indeed rescheduled about a week later, so we again packed our bags and headed to Abuja, all the while doubting whether it would actually go ahead. This time it would, and along with the other journalists we piled into a military transport plane at an airbase in the capital Abuja and took off for Maiduguri. I had visited Maiduguri twice before, and as the insurgency intensified, it had become a city under lockdown. My previous trip there had been in May 2012, and certain neighbourhoods had eerily seemed like ghost towns, with burnt-out buildings, the carcasses of torched cars and bullet-pocked walls. Schools had been hit by arson, but children were still attending classes in what remained of at least one of them, scampering around the rubble in green and yellow uniforms, one of the teachers telling me that parents insisted that learning continue. A night-time curfew caused a scramble to get home and off the streets toward the end of the day or face the wrath of soldiers. Shop owners and traders said they could no longer support their families. While most Maiduguri residents were Muslim, it was also home to a substantial Christian population, whose churches had been attacked so many times that they were
forced to erect large concrete walls topped with razor wire. Some were protected by small military posts, where soldiers with AK-47s stood behind sandbags near the church entrance. Worshippers attending Sunday mass were scanned with metal detectors and women were forced to leave their handbags outside. On the roads throughout the city, there were regular military checkpoints, causing excruciating traffic jams that left drivers waiting in fear over whether yet another homemade bomb targeting soldiers in the area would explode or a gun battle would break out. I visited retired army general Mohammed Shuwa, known for his role in Nigeria's civil war, at his home in the city and he showed me the Beretta handgun he carried because he feared that even he could one day be targeted. He was right. Later that year, gunmen shot him dead.

After we landed in Maiduguri for the military tour in June 2013, it was difficult to draw any firm conclusions about whether the situation in the city had significantly changed, with soldiers keeping us on a tight leash. We were corralled on a military base and an erratic form of show-and-tell began, with military officers making presentations that were haphazard and contradictory. Inside a meeting room, they first showed us slides that explained characteristics of the region as well as aspects of Boko Haram. We were then rushed around to different areas of the base so soldiers could present weapons to us supposedly seized from insurgents. They included rudimentary weapons such as daggers and bows and arrows, but also AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns to be mounted on 4×4s that one military official called anti-aircraft guns. Asked repeatedly where the insurgents were obtaining these weapons, military officials informed us that they did not know, but said most of the arms seemed to have been of the type that would typically come from the former Soviet bloc. There had also been concern that the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011 and resulting chaos had led to looted weapons being sold across the region, helping further arm extremist groups.
Boko Haram elements may have benefited. A Nigerian military arms depot at a barracks in the town of Monguno had been raided as well.

We were hurried along, limiting the number of questions that could be asked but assured there would be time for further discussion later, then told to board buses for the drive deeper into the north-east towards the villages of Marte and Kirenowa, the area where insurgents were said to have set up a camp later cleared out by soldiers. The road would pass through increasingly remote territory as we travelled in the direction of Lake Chad, and we were soon moving through flat, semi-desert landscape, only acacia trees, shrub and occasional patches of grass breaking up the dull, grey sand for long stretches at a time. A tiny village sometimes made of thatched huts, others with homes of concrete or brick, would periodically come into view. It felt in some ways as if we were travelling back in time. The silent, wide-open savannah can seem like a separate country altogether compared to a place like Lagos, the heaving economic capital in Nigeria's south-west, or even nearby Maiduguri. As we moved closer to Lake Chad, the patches of grass became more frequent, the trees more prevalent. The rainy season had not yet fully begun, though it would soon come and would alter the landscape.

During the journey, the military asked that we wear flak jackets as a precaution, but, to our surprise, the route seemed to pose little risk. We reached a military base after driving for a few hours, the road having become so eroded in one stretch that we veered off to the side and rumbled across the sand, dust billowing around our convoy. When we entered the base, Lieutenant-Colonel Gabriel Olufemi Olorunyomi stood before maps and a large, hand-drawn diagram, then launched into a choppy explanation of how the army had retaken control of the area from Boko Haram. According to the narrative he laid out, Boko Haram members arrived in the area and preached to the local people that ‘everything that has to do with government is haram' and forced girls to marry them. Later
they sought to forcefully take control of areas of Marte, burning a local government secretariat, the governor's lodge and a church, while also destroying a hospital and looting drugs from it. He said they even raised their own flag in place of Nigeria's – an echo of one of the points made by the president in his state of emergency declaration. The lieutenant-colonel was unsteady when pressed for details, however. He could not say what the flag looked like, and his description of the military assault that reclaimed the area left many details open to interpretation. He did not want to say how many extremists had been arrested or killed. He said that some had scattered when soldiers cleared out a camp they had used. Asked where they had run to, he said, ‘I don't know. They're in the bush.' The day would continue in this manner.

We were hurried back onto the buses to be driven to a second base, but along the way stopped in an area known as New Marte so we could be shown the blackened cement walls of a bare-bones church. There was only time for a few pictures before the soldiers began ordering us to board the buses again, saying it would be dark before we knew it and we must move quickly. We grudgingly followed the orders, aware that we were being made part of a ham-fisted attempt at public relations, but also understanding that even a glimpse of villages such as this one was worth the trip. We made another stop at a spot which military officials said would usually be planted with crops, but Boko Haram had caused farmers to flee.

At the next base, we were given another presentation, this one declaring how the villagers of Kirenowa had been rescued from Boko Haram and the nearby Islamist camp had been cleared. However, it seemed again that the military was cobbling together details that were contradictory. We held out hope that the next stop on our tour, a visit to Kirenowa itself, would shed some light.

We rode in military trucks and our convoy manoeuvred closer towards Lake Chad before crossing a canal, then into the village itself. We piled out of trucks and followed fast-walking military officials across the dusty ground broken up by patches of dry scrub.
The soldiers provided varying explanations of what had happened and why as they led us back to what they said had been the Boko Haram camp. Whatever had been there, it seemed that it had not been much.

Set within a clearing between trees and tangled scrub, we were shown burnt-out cars, empty food containers and abandoned clothes. Soldiers told us the insurgents had burnt the vehicles before they fled because they did not want the military to recover them, but the explanation did not seem to add up: why would they bother? They seemed to be just cars. Under the shade of a stand of trees, we were shown empty boxes of medicines and medical supplies such as surgical gloves, apparently looted from the hospital in Marte. There were also condoms – a reminder of a military statement several days earlier proclaiming that ‘more of the dirty sides of the insurgents' lifestyle are being revealed as troops continue to stumble on strange and bizarre objects such as several used and unused condoms'. Needless to say, we were sceptical, and not only about the condoms.