Children are particularly vulnerable, especially the 1. Nigeria is bearing the brunt of the crisis, he noted. Nigeria accounts for seven million of the nine million people in need across the Lake Chad Basin. Last month, the Nigerian authorities rightly declared a nutrition emergency for Borno state. Direct reports from the field indicate that affected communities are rapidly running out of food. In Niger, one single attack by Boko Haram left over 70, people displaced in Bosso town in June this year, bringing the total number of displaced people in the Diffa region to over , Niger is the poorest country in the world; yet despite living on virtually nothing, families there have welcomed the displaced into their homes, and shared their meagre supplies of food and water with the newcomers.
This is no longer a localized conflict or insurgency. In dozens of interviews conducted in April and May in Borno and elsewhere, police officers, soldiers and government officials complained that corruption was hobbling efforts and sapping morale. Many junior officers complain that superiors pocket the money meant for their allowances and for equipment. With our bare hands? A car bomb in Maiduguri, the city that is the birthplace of Boko Haram extremism, killed at least 56 people on July 2, Officials said victims were mostly elderly women who sold peanuts and lemon juice at the market.
In May, army soldiers fired on the car of a general, whom they blamed for allowing the deaths of fellow soldiers at the hands of Boko Haram militants. Other soldiers have reported that Nigerian military officers have defected to fighting alongside Boko Haram forces. One told VOA how his military unit, based in Borno, was ambushed by fighters in May, some of whom he recognized. Some of the [Boko Haram] people we were fighting against were members of the Nigerian military who trained us.
Bama, the chairman of the Borno State Chamber of Commerce, said not long ago he was driving near the village of Kawuri southwest of Maiduguri when he witnessed an ambush by Boko Haram fighters. The militants chased a motorist trying to escape the ambush and killed him not far from a military checkpoint near Konduga. The soldiers looked on, doing nothing to intervene and save him, not even firing weapons. They later told other motorists that their orders are to only open fire when attacked, Bama said.
The roughly 2-minute video, whose date places it on May 26, show the throat-slitting of at least four men by what appears to be members of the Nigerian military or security agencies.
In the video, the soldiers direct the killings; two are performed by the soldiers themselves, as two other men wearing civilian clothes hold down the victims on the rim of a shallow grave dug in sandy soil. The victims say nothing audible. The soldier who provided the video to VOA, a lance corporal with the 7 th Division, provided it and others during a meeting in Borno state, on the condition that neither his name nor the location of the meeting be revealed.
The video was also viewed by one outside expert, who said it appeared authentic. Amnesty International also published parts of a video that appears to have been shot during the same incident, with different camera angles.
The April attack in the northwest state of Zamfara that killed about people underscored the problem of violence spreading far beyond Nigeria's troubled northeast. Mike Omeri, director of the National Information Center, established by the government in the wake of the schoolgirls kidnapping, said officials were aware of this and other videos, and suggested that video was taken somewhere else in West Africa. The armed forces, the armed forces that I know, are professional.
Nigeria is a civilized democracy. We are not barbaric, we are not cannibals. For outside observers, however, these tactics may have the opposite of their intended effect: breeding resentment and anger among the populace, and adding to support for Boko Haram. In a region peppered with failing states—think Mali, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic— that makes the group much more dangerous.
In the weeks after the kidnapping of the schoolgirls in April, the Jonathan government initially spurned offers from the United States, Europe and elsewhere to help in the search. As outrage mounted, however, Nigeria relented. At present, Nigeria lacks a comprehensive demobilisation and reintegration strategy for these militia members, as well as a coordinated and inclusive approach to reintegrating persons associated with Boko Haram. Together, we are creating stronger relationships between the different groups involved in the conflict, and fostering peaceful coexistence among militia groups, and between militia members, people associated with Boko Haram and communities.
We are improving the skills and knowledge of communities of how to respond to violence, and promoting effective collaboration between the different levels of government, and between government, militias and communities. Through bringing these different groups together to discuss the issues we are helping to build trust, tackle prejudice and peacefully address different grievances.
The common thread has been the challenge of defining a clear political end goal for these programs. In more secure areas, bottom-up efforts to strengthen citizen participation and government accountability, while still small-scale, have shown local-level successes—yet it is unclear to what extent they will be able to impact countervailing political and institutional incentives at the local and state government level.
While acknowledging the political roots of the crisis, donors have generally been cautious in raising the need for more systemic political reform, which is considered a sensitive issue. As noted in the first part of the paper, some donor programs were designed to bring back civilian government presence to areas newly liberated by military operations in and The hope was that these programs would help address local perceptions of government neglect.
Small-scale infrastructure projects simply proved insufficient to alter long-standing perceptions of government predation and neglect. Corruption and continued abuses by security forces also worked against their intended effects. These challenges mirror findings from other conflict contexts: in Afghanistan, for example, stabilization programs were most effective at reducing support for the Taliban when multiple projects were clustered in the same area over time.
In contrast, one-off interventions in different villages—which were far more common than sustained stabilization programming in one locality—proved far less likely to change local perceptions of government legitimacy. Faced with evidence of limited impact, USAID in Nigeria adjusted by moving away from the objective of restoring local government presence.
Instead, over the course of , it refocused its efforts on targeted community-level interventions that try to address specific local-level needs in areas most vulnerable to extremist recruitment by ISWAP, particularly along the Borno corridor stretching from Maiduguri northward to Lake Chad. Rather than channeling services through the Nigerian government, USAID is providing direct assistance to individuals and communities.
We try to provide an alternative to the extremists. However, these efforts have little connection to local- or state-level governance, and thus are not clearly working toward a defined political end state. As such, they may be contributing to community resilience in the short run, without directly addressing the deficiencies in local governance that have characterized the region. Over the past two years, other programs aimed at rehabilitating basic services and addressing experiences of government neglect have nevertheless expanded across the northeast.
However, the incomplete return of local government and civil servants in many parts of Borno State has proven a significant challenge.
In some LGAs, local government officials are back at headquarters, although with limited resources and capacity. In others, officials visit only periodically, but are still based in Maiduguri. In some places, donors have rebuilt public infrastructure such as schools, markets, and health facilities through cash-for-work interventions, but health workers and teachers have yet to return. The problem also extends to the police force. While the police have been ordered to redeploy to some recaptured towns, they have at various times resisted doing so, arguing that they lack the necessary resources, equipment, and training.
Yet some aid officials also note that the government has not sufficiently prioritized the return of civilian authority structures or incentivized local officials to return.
In Borno, the state government has pursued a stabilization approach centered on concentrating civilians in so-called garrison towns: LGA headquarters ringed by a narrow perimeter of farmland and protected by Nigerian security forces. Authorities have argued that concentrating people in urban centers will ensure greater safety and facilitate better service delivery. Reconstruction has stalled, and services are primarily delivered by already overstretched international aid organizations.
In Dikwa, for example, aid providers observed people sleeping outdoors, without any shelter or assistance. This raises the question: where has all the money gone? The town of Bama is a case in point. Following several months of reconstruction, the Borno State government in April began the return of IDPs with the promise that their homes had been rebuilt.
Yet many found their shelters still destroyed or lacking electricity, and no ambulances in the town. They can typically only leave with a military escort and cannot access farmland beyond a narrow corridor surrounding the city. In IDP camps, the military and the CJTF still fill important policing functions, and typically control entry to and exit from the camps—which heightens the risk of civilian abuse, particularly of women and girls.
The military therefore remains the dominant security actor across large parts of Borno State, despite already being overstretched. The lack of a clear political framework or vision became particularly apparent over the past year, when the Nigerian government began pushing for the rapid return of IDPs to their home LGAs without a comprehensive plan to ensure the towns in question were ready for their arrival.
In reality, many IDPs returned to towns that were still destroyed and insecure, struggling to accommodate the needs of new arrivals.
For example, in the aftermath of Operation Last Hold, a Nigerian military effort launched in May to facilitate the return of more displaced communities to northern Borno, some IDPs were sent back to Guzamala and Marte LGAs, areas around Lake Chad that aid organizations still considered dangerous and hard to reach. Following coordinated international pressure, Nigerian authorities agreed to temporarily halt returns to northern Borno. In August , the governor of Borno and the UN humanitarian coordinator signed a Return Strategy and Policy Framework aimed at ensuring future relocations would be voluntary and coordinated with humanitarian partners.
Yet many aid officials on the ground remain cautious about the implementation of the policy in practice. We need to continue to chip away at these broader structural issues. Even in more secure areas, weaknesses in local governance capacity have created challenges for programs aimed at improving accountability relationships between citizens and local officials, and strengthening government capacity to deliver services.
Programs to date have primarily focused on bringing people together to discuss their needs and communities, bridging gaps between different local-level leaders including traditional leaders and local government officials , and creating forums for citizens to voice their concerns to local officials.
Initial outreach efforts have focused on building relationships with state-level officials and raising their awareness of participatory development approaches. Efforts to connect these processes to planning and budgeting processes are still at an early stage.
In the long run, however, these bottom-up approaches face institutional hurdles that go beyond the immediate impact of conflict. On paper, they are meant to be run by elected councils and to serve as the primary interface between citizens and the state. In practice, many states have not held local government elections in years. In the northeast in particular, governors have used insecurity to justify repeated delays. Instead, they have preferred to put in place appointed caretaker chairmen who are political allies, often with a statutory six-month term of office.
Borno State, for example, has held only two local elections since the end of the military dictatorship in , one in and another in While the situation varies from place to place, the irregularity of local elections means that citizens do not have a direct mechanism to hold local government accountable. They are trying to protect the image of the government rather than helping. But these are very political issues, and it is difficult for donors to address them.
In addition, local governments lack financial autonomy from state governments, which contributes to weaknesses in service delivery across the country. Local governments receive most of their funding through a State and Local Government Joint Account that is shared with the state government, through which the federal government distributes resources including national oil revenues. The residual funds released to LGAs mostly go toward paying the salaries of civil servants and political appointees.
Some donors view the postconflict recovery phase as an opportunity to reshape the role of LGAs and to push for more bottom-up planning and accountability. They point to initial successes in Yobe and Adamawa States, where parts of the state governments have indicated greater interest in supporting local-level development planning. The mass influx of federal and international funding has further lowered the incentives for state government officials to improve transparency or devolve decisionmaking over resources.
So far, only a small number of aid providers have initiated programs that focus on strengthening local governance in the northeast as a core objective. Most donors view the question of local government autonomy as highly complex and politically sensitive. Existing national-level democracy and governance programs have largely remained divorced from the conflict response. Many focus on strengthening electoral processes and anti-corruption institutions and supporting civil society.
While donors note that these programs should eventually help address contributing causes to the insurgency, they were generally not designed with a conflict perspective in mind. One of the biggest complicating factors in local-level stabilization efforts is that Nigerian security forces have themselves been sources of insecurity, displacement, and radicalization for local communities. During the early years of the insurgency, the military heavily relied on a strategy of collective punishment of villages suspected of harboring Boko Haram fighters.
As security forces recaptured territory, they treated all men, women, and even children found in those areas as potential Boko Haram members. Thousands of civilians were forced to relocate from rural areas into military-controlled satellite camps in recaptured towns. Between and , Amnesty International documented at least 20, arbitrary arrests, as well as widespread cases of extrajudicial killings.
They also impeded U. Over the past three years, these brutal tactics have become less common. As a consequence, U. Special Operations Forces team to Maiduguri to assist Nigerian counterparts with counterterrorism operations. Yet many core challenges remain. First, security forces continue to treat civilians trapped in Boko Haram— or ISWAP-controlled areas as likely terrorist suspects, and they starve the countryside to deprive Boko Haram of its resources.
Cross-border trade has suffered, while accusations of military corruption abound. Fishermen and traders around Lake Chad have accused soldiers of seizing their deliveries and working with local authorities to collect illicit taxes.
A second hurdle has been the lack of civilian oversight over detention and screening facilities, and the difficulties of establishing a workable legal and policy framework for the demobilization and reintegration of Boko Haram members. Donors seeking to support the defection and rehabilitation of low-level Boko Haram members early on recognized the need for a broader policy to guide these efforts.
In contrast to programs targeting community security and local governance, which at least in the short term can proceed without federal action, community reintegration depends on national guidelines that clarify who is eligible for rehabilitation and under what conditions. To do so, the agency—with the support of the State Department—had to gain authorization from Congress, using a specific appropriations rule for the use of foreign assistance to support DDR programs.
After lengthy consultations, they agreed on a solution, with the State Department and USAID working together to select and vet prospective military counterparts. Treasury sanctions made it difficult for the United States to provide direct support to Operation Safe Corridor and those already cleared by Nigerian security forces to undergo deradicalization and reintegration, as any such assistance required time-consuming interagency coordination and vetting.
Over the past two years, several civilian agencies have become more involved in the process, particularly the Office of the National Security Adviser. In December , the Nigerian government adopted an initial Action Plan for Demobilization, Dissociation, Reintegration, and Reconciliation targeting suspected Boko Haram members, and it is now working in cooperation with the International Organization for Migration to integrate this plan into the existing Policy Framework and National Action Plan for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism.
Yet the screening and vetting of detainees is still handled by security forces, with no civilian oversight or accountability mechanism. The screening criteria remain opaque, with no clearly articulated guidelines or principles to distinguish between hardline elements within extremist groups and those that only provided low-level support.
Efforts to push for a civilian structure to manage the inside of the screening centers have had little success. Several factors explain this hesitancy.
0コメント