Priest condemns Government over Islamist fighters

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.

The militants abducted 30 children from Mafa village in Borno state on 23 October 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 school in Chibok would be freed.

Fr John Bakeni, secretary of Maiduguri diocese, warned that Boko Haram was consolidating the “caliphate” it announced in August. “The Government is not serious. It wants to score a cheap political points [with these announcements], but towns and villages are still held by the terrorists … 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. Boko Haram has carried out executions and forced conversions there, and 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 forests, others are being put up by friends and others have fled to Cameroon, where they are living without shelter.

A?report by Human Rights Watch this week found the Nigerian Government had failed to adequately protect women and girls from a myriad of abuses.