Nigerian military accused of committing atrocities in hunt for Boko Haram

Boko Haram has been emboldened by the success of the Islamic State, observers say, and like IS, the group has declared an intent to create a “caliphate,” a religious state where governing principles are interpreted from the Koran. The group has been known to massacre the inhabitants of entire small villages, using modern weapons or the ancient terror of beheading, and not sparing women or children. The Nigerian military has sporadically tried to halt the group’s advance and had been regarded as a force for good. But now, as PBS’s “FRONTLINE” documentary, “Hunting Boko Haram,” chronicles in dozens of witness testimonials, video documentation and interviews, Nigeria’s armed forces have crossed a boundary into darkness. As the raiser of militia groups under the two-year-old “Operation Flush,” Nigeria’s army has trained, paid and haphazardly armed an amateur military that has become as deadly and feared a force as Boko Haram itself. Caught between are Nigeria’s innocents.

There is nowhere for people to go … They can’t go to the military or the police and say, ‘Where is my son, where is my father,’ without themselves being marked as having a possible tie to Boko Haram.

Evan Williams, producer, “FRONTLINE” documentary “Hunting Boko Haram”

A man who belonged to one of the Operation Flush militias gave Williams 35 video recordings depicting its methods and told him how he was beginning to deeply question the mission. “The military and the state government gave them the power to hold and detain anyone,” Williams told Yahoo News. Over time, Williams collected and corroborated more than 130 videos, often shot on mobile phones as the militiamen sought to document activities to prove to their bosses that they deserved to get paid. The videos depict the worst kinds of torture. With machetes, swords, bows and arrows, Operation Flush militiamen were encouraged to deal with Boko Haram suspects as harshly as they chose, wherever they thought they might have found them. Subsequently, Williams matched these accounts with those of eyewitnesses, other members of Operation Flush militias, and human rights workers and experts. All wanted to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from the military, he said, not from Boko Haram.

The problem, and it remains, and it is intensifying, is that these militia are not trained, they are local boys, often with machetes. … They tortured confessions out of people—and as we know, torturing victims to get evidence is the least effective way of getting anything truthful.

Evan Williams

Africa