A Catholic priest in northern Nigeria has questioned the determination of the country’s Government to fight the Islamist group Boko Haram, after militants carried out fresh abductions in the troubled region.
Fr John Bakeni, secretary of Maiduguri diocese, described a scene of horror in the town of Mubi in Adamawa state on Friday following attacks by Boko Haram militants. The jihadists were "killing and butchering human beings like chickens". "Corpses litter the road as pregnant women, the elderly and children die on their way, trying to escape."
He said that a number of students had been abducted and the town's banks have all been looted.
“Pray and pray for us, our people are perishing, and the Government has not said anything about this whole massacre.”
Militants also raided Mafa village in Borno state on 23 October and abducted 30 children despite the federal Government’s announcement of a ceasefire on 17 October. The new abductions appeared to cast doubt on a second government announcement that the more than 200 Christian schoolgirls kidnapped in April from their boarding school in Chibok would be freed.
Fr Bakeni warned that, despite the Government’s announcement, Boko Haram was consolidating the “caliphate” it announced in August.
“The Government is not serious. It wants to score a cheap political point [with these announcements], but towns and villages are still held by the terrorists,” Fr Bakeni said. “They have carved a caliphate for themselves – a country within a country. The caliphate has become a militarised zone.”
The area of the self-declared caliphate stretches across the vast state of Borno and parts of neighbouring state of Yobe. Since capturing the region, Boko Haram has embarked on executions and forced conversions, and has defaced Christian symbols.
Fr Bakeni said Maiduguri’s 17 parish churches, 200 “out-station” churches and 14 rectories have been looted and destroyed by fire, and more than 80,000 Catholics are now displaced. Some 2,000 women were being held captive by the Islamists, he added.
His bishop, Oliver Doeme, spoke of a humanitarian crisis in which people “are dying every day and in most cases with no one to bury them decently, they are left to rot. Their homes and properties looted. They have become slaves and prisoners in their fatherland.”
Bishop Doeme told the Catholic charity, Aid to the Church in Need, that some of the displaced are living in caves or in the forests, others are being put up by friends and stills others have fled to Cameroon, where they are living without water, food, shelter and medication.
“We are in dire need of external assistance to help alleviate the difficult situation of the refugees, especially of the children, who are out of school and vulnerable to disease and face an uncertain future,” he said.
“Here is a government that cannot safeguard the lives of its citizens,” the bishop said, adding that there were reports of the Nigerian army fleeing when faced with Boko Haram fighters, and asking civilians to do the same.
Meanwhile the United States-based group, Human Rights Watch, issued a report that found that the Nigerian Government had failed to adequately protect women and girls from a myriad of abuses.
Fr Bakeni said that the realities on the ground spoke not of a unified country but a marriage of convenience, economics and politics.
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