OUT OF THE RUINS
Kareem Omar had the misfortune to be shopping at the Monday market in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria, when a Boko Haram gunman took a pot shot at a soldier and ran for it, disappearing into the crowd.
Troops rounded up Kareem, along with others, telling them to ‘fish out the boy or die’. The young man in front of him was rough-looking and shook with fear as he answered the soldiers’ questions, arousing their suspicion. The boy had no gun, but they killed him anyway. ‘Back then, if someone was shot, nobody bothered,’ Kareem recalls. ‘They killed thousands of people like that.’
In 2011, the army’s indiscriminate response to an uprising of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in Maiduguri, the provincial capital of Borno state, was such that the influential local elders begged the President to withdraw the troops altogether. If this is how the army is going to behave, they said, please take them away. They are killing more people than Boko Haram. We can handle this ourselves.
It’s a familiar story across Africa and the world at large: military responses to violent extremism routinely make things worse. Nine years since Boko Haram rose up against the state, over 30,000 people have died, 2.4 million are displaced and 5 million are dependent on food aid. The insurgency’s eye-watering brutality – against women in particular – has made it a household name. But deploying violent force against Boko Haram has only made things worse.
How it all began
The bad behaviour of governments is often at the heart of why conflicts begin and persist. Northeast Nigeria is no exception. When Boko Haram first emerged in Maiduguri in 2003, the group was oppositional but largely peaceful, under the leadership of a radical Salafist cleric, Mohamed Yusuf. ‘We saw them as serious, religious people,’ remembers one Maiduguri resident. ‘They said they would bring social amenities, and lent money for young people to start a business and to get married.’
That all changed in 2009 when the police and military cracked down on the sect. Around 800 of its members were killed, including Yusuf, who died in police custody. While no-one knows for sure if Yusuf ’s long-term
