The \u201chumanitarian\u201d U.S. military occupation of Africa has been very successful, thus far. \u201cThe Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa.\u201d Imagine: the superpower that financed the genocide of six million in Congo, claims to be a defender of teenage girls and human rights on the continent. If you believe that, then you are probably a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a post-Gaddafi Africa \u2013 thus justifying a larger military presence for the Americans.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the \u201cinternational community\u201d and the Nigerian military \u201cDo something!\u201d about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged \u201cnews\u201d products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been \u201cdoing\u201d to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley<\/a> pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried \u201cnot a single television news story about Boko Haram\u201d in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn\u2019t mean the Nigerian army hasn\u2019t been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country\u2019s mostly Muslim north.<\/p>\n The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood, but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans who read \u2013 which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who took her husband\u2019s place on radio<\/a> last weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls \u2013 would have learned in the New York Times<\/em> of the army\u2019s savage offensive near the Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb \u201cWithout Asking Who They Are,\u201d according to the NYT headline<\/a>. \u201cThey don\u2019t ask any questions,\u201d said a witness who later fled for his life, like thousands of others. \u201cWhen they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot,\u201d said a student. \u201cThey catch many of the others and take them away, and we don\u2019t hear from them again.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The Times\u2019<\/em> Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army\u2019s \u201call-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency.\u201d He reported:<\/p>\n \u201cAll spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram \u2014 a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents \u2014 for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it.\u201d<\/p>\n In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.<\/p>\n In March of this year<\/a>, fighters who were assumed to be from Boko Haram attacked a barracks and jail in the northern city of Maiduguri. Hundreds of prisoners fled, but 200 youths were rounded up and made to lie on the ground. A witness told the Times<\/em>: \u201cThe soldiers made some calls and a few minutes later they started shooting the people on the ground. I counted 198 people killed at that checkpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n All told, according to Amnesty International, more than 600 people were extrajudicially murdered, \u201cmost of them unarmed, escaped detainees, around Maiduguri.\u201d An additional 950 prisoners were killed<\/a> in the first half of 2013 in detention facilities run by Nigeria\u2019s military Joint Task Force, many at the same barracks in Maiduguri. Amnesty International quotes a senior officer in the Nigerian Army, speaking anonymously: \u201cHundreds have been killed in detention either by shooting them or by suffocation,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are times when people are brought out on a daily basis and killed. About five people, on average, are killed nearly on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n Chibok, where the teenage girls were abducted, is 80 miles from Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.<\/p>\n In 2009, when the Boko Haram had not yet been transformed into a fully armed opposition, the military summarily executed their handcuffed leader and killed at least 1,000 accused members in the states of Borno, Yobe, Kano\u00a0and Bauchi, many of them apparently simply youths from suspect neighborhoods. A gruesome video<\/a> shows the military at work. \u201cIn the video, a number of unarmed men are seen being made to lie down in the road outside a building before they are shot,\u201d Al Jazeera reports in text accompanying the video. \u201cAs one man is brought out to face death, one of the officers can be heard urging his colleague to \u2018shoot him in the chest not the head \u2013 I want his hat.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c950 prisoners were killed in the first half of 2013 in detention facilities run by Nigeria\u2019s military.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n These are only snapshots of the army\u2019s response to Boko Haram \u2013 atrocities that are part of the context of Boko Haram\u2019s ghastly behavior. The military has refused the group\u2019s offer to exchange the kidnapped girls for imprisoned Boko Haram members. (We should not assume that everyone detained as Boko Haram is actually a member \u2013 only that all detainees face imminent and arbitrary execution.)<\/p>\n None of the above is meant to tell Boko Haram\u2019s \u201cside\u201d in this grisly story (fundamentalist religious jihadists find no favor at BAR), but to emphasize the Nigerian military\u2019s culpability in the group\u2019s mad trajectory \u2013 the same military that many newly-minted \u201cSave Our Girls\u201d activists demand take more decisive action in Borno.<\/p>\n The bush to which the Boko Haram retreated with their captives was already a free-fire zone, where anything that moves is subject to obliteration by government aircraft. Nigerian air forces have now been joined by U.S. surveillance planes<\/a> operating out of the new U.S. drone base in neighboring Niger, further entrenching AFRICOM\/CIA in the continental landscape. Last week it was announced that, for the first time,AFRICOM troops will train a Nigerian ranger battalion in counterinsurgency warfare.<\/p>\n The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa, which were conjured-up to justify the permanent stationing of U.S Special Forces<\/a>in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, in 2011, on humanitarian interventionist grounds. (This past March, the U.S. sent 150 more Special Ops<\/a> troops to the region, claiming to have again spotted Kony, who is said to be deathly ill, holed up with a small band of followers somewhere in the Central African Republic.) The United States (and France and Britain, plus the rest of NATO, if need be) must maintain a deepening and permanent presence in Africa to defend the continent from\u2026Africans.<\/p>\n When the crowd yells that America \u201cDo something!\u201d somewhere in Africa, the U.S. military is likely to already be there.<\/p>\n \u201cAFRICOM troops will train a Nigerian ranger battalion in counterinsurgency warfare.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Barack Obama certainly needs no encouragement to intervention; his presidency is roughly coterminous with AFRICOM\u2019s founding and explosive expansion. Obama broadened the war against Somalia that was launched by George Bush in partnership with the genocidal Ethiopian regime, in 2006 (an invasion that led directly to what the United Nations called \u201cthe worst humanitarian crisis is Africa\u201d). He built on Bill Clinton and George Bush\u2019s legacies in the Congo, where U.S. client states Uganda and Rwanda caused the slaughter of 6 million people since 1996 \u2013 the greatest genocide of the post War World II era. He welcomed South Sudan as the world\u2019s newest nation \u2013 the culmination of a decades-long project of the U.S., Britain and Israel to dismember Africa\u2019s largest country, but which has now fallen into a bloody chaos, as does everything the U.S. touches, these days.<\/p>\n Most relevant to the plight of Chibok\u2019s young women, Obama led \u201cfrom behind\u201d NATO\u2019s regime change in Libya, removing the anti-jihadist bulwark Muamar Gaddafi (\u201cWe came, we saw, he died,\u201d said Hillary Clinton) and destabilizing the whole Sahelian tier of the continent, all the way down to northern Nigeria. As BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka writes in the current issue, \u201cBoko Haram benefited from the destabilization of various countries across the Sahel following the Libya conflict.\u201d The once-\u201cshadowy\u201d group now sported new weapons and vehicles and was clearly better trained and disciplined. In short, the Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a post-Gaddafi Africa \u2013 thus justifying a larger military presence for the same Americansand (mainly French) Europeans who had brought these convulsions to the region.<\/p>\n If Obama has his way, it will be a very long war \u2013 the better to grow AFRICOM \u2013 with some very unsavory allies (from both the Nigerian and American perspectives).<\/p>\n Whatever Obama does to deepen the U.S. presence in Nigeria and the rest of the continent, he can count on the Congressional Black Caucus, including its most \u201cprogressive\u201d member, Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only member of the U.S. Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001. Lee, along with Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and fellow Californian Karen Bass, who is the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on African, gave cart blanch to Obama<\/a> to \u201cDo something!\u201d in Nigeria. \u201cAnd so our first command and demand is to use all resources to bring the terrorist thugs to justice,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n A year and a half ago, when then UN Ambassador Susan Rice\u2019s prospects for promotion to top U.S. diplomat were being torpedoed by the Benghazi controversy, a dozen Black congresspersons scurried to her defense. “We will not allow a brilliant public servant’s record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state,” said Washington, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.<\/p>\n As persons who are presumed to read, Black Caucus members were certainly aware of the messy diplomatic scandal around Rice\u2019s role in suppressing United Nation\u2019s reports on U.S. allies\u2019 Rwanda and Uganda\u2019s genocidal acts against the Congolese people. Of all the high profile politicians from both the corporate parties, Rice \u2013 the rabid interventionist \u2013 is most intimately implicated in the Congo holocaust, dating back to the policy\u2019s formulation under Clinton. Apparently, that\u2019s not the part of Rice\u2019s record that counts to Delegate Norton and the rest of the Black Caucus. Genocide against Africans does not move them one bit.<\/p>\n So, why are we to believe that they are really so concerned about the girls of Chibok?<\/p>\n _______________________________<\/p>\n Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at <\/em>Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n