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Joined: 06 Sep 2013
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| Post subject: Boko Haram, too many dead to count. |  |
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It this a poor relation because it's not a western Country, I think that is the reason for the lesser coverage. But here we have yet another extremist Islam organisation doing horrible things ..... please don't make excuses for the lack of outrage from the Mosques.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/09/boko-haram-deadliest-massacre-baga-nigeria
| Quote: | Amnesty International calls the killings a disturbing and bloody escalation and a local defence group says its fighters have given up trying to count the bodies
Hundreds of bodies too many to count remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International described as the deadliest massacre in the history of Boko Haram.
Fighting continued on Friday around Baga, a town on the border with Chad where insurgents seized a key military base on 3 January and attacked again on Wednesday.
Security forces have responded rapidly, and have deployed significant military assets and conducted air strikes against militant targets, said a government spokesman.
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.
The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous, Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defence group that fights Boko Haram, told the Associated Press.
He said the civilian fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now, Gava said.
An Amnesty International statement said there are reports the town was razed and as many as 2,000 people killed.
If true, this marks a disturbing and bloody escalation of Boko Harams ongoing onslaught, said Daniel Eyre, Nigeria researcher for Amnesty International.
The previous bloodiest day in the uprising involved soldiers gunning down unarmed detainees freed in a 14 March 2014 attack on Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri city. Amnesty said then that satellite imagery indicated more than 600 people were killed that day.
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The attacks come five weeks away from presidential elections which are likely to trigger even more bloodshed. Already under a state of emergency, the three north-eastern states worst hit by Boko Haram asked the central government for more troops earlier this week. The government has said voting will take place across Borno state although the worsening insecurity means few international observers are likely to get clearance to oversee voting in an area that is traditionally opposition-supporting.
Around 1.5 million people have been displaced by the violence, many of whom will not be able to vote in the polls under Nigerias current electoral laws.
Boko Haram also appears to be regionalising the conflict, after threatening neighbouring Cameroon in a video earlier this week.
The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.
The five-year insurgency killed more than 10,000 people last year alone, according to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations. More than a million people are displaced inside Nigeria and hundreds of thousands have fled across its borders into Chad and Cameroon.
Emergency workers said this week they are having a hard time coping with scores of children separated from their parents in the chaos of Boko Harams increasingly frequent and deadly attacks.
Just seven children have been reunited with parents in Yola, capital of Adamawa state, where about 140 others have no idea if their families are alive or dead, said Saad Bello, the coordinator of five refugee camps in Yola.
He said he was optimistic that more reunions will come as residents return to towns that the military has retaken from extremists in recent weeks.
Suleiman Dauda, 12, said he ran into the bushes with neighbours when extremists attacked his village, Askira Uba, near Yola last year.
I saw them kill my father, they slaughtered him like a ram. And up until now I dont know where my mother is, he told the Associated Press at Daware refugee camp in Yola.
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Oops. Too much data. |
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| No Westerners killed, be lucky to make a headline here. |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Read about it on the News.com website.
http://www.news.com.au/world/africa/islamic-extremist-attack-in-nigeria-named-the-deadliest-massacre-in-history/story-fnh81gzi-1227180726580
This Boko Haram mob want to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria rather than have a democratically elected government and aren't above slaughter of civilians and using children as involuntary suicide bombers to achieve it.
Islam, going from strength to strength bringing back the 14th century, using 21st century tools that they would instantly discard if they got power to ensure that those they oppress couldn't use them in the same way.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this isn't "Islam". Many of the countries in Western Africa being attacked by these Al-Qaeda affiliated nutcases are majority Islamic. People have lived peacefully in these places worshipping Allah for centuries. So, when Boko Haram (or Al Qaeda in Mali) violently attack these people and try to drag them back to the 14th century, it's hardly accurate to say that it's "Islam" doing it...
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace
Last edited by David on Mon Jan 12, 2015 11:19 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: |
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this isn't "Islam". Many of the countries in Western Africa being attacked by these Al-Qaeda affiliated nutcases are majority Islamic and have been for centuries. |
Islam is not itself the cause. The cause is a power struggle in various parts of the world ; most particularly the Arab and central Asian (Iran, Pakistan and Afghan) world, but in Nigeria (this case) and Kenya as well. the Boko Haram issue is akin to the Darfur crisis of a few years ago : a weak central government which is prey to the forces of civil war organised along ethnic, tribal and religious lines.
Islam is being hijacked by groups that are struggling brutally for power, and using Islam as their emotional rallying cry. In some cases, such as the recent Peshawar school atrocity, Islam is hardly even mentioned as a cause. I suspect there are other factors, such as the existential threat posed to Islam by secular, libertarian values- but the big issue is power within the Islamic world. We need to see this as a political issue, and meet it (or avoid it) on those terms.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this isn't "Islam". Many of the countries in Western Africa being attacked by these Al-Qaeda affiliated nutcases are majority Islamic and have been for centuries. |
That's a deeply misleading claim, David.
Sure there have been Muslims in northern Africa for centuries, and in some cases they have been in the majority for a long while, but you are ignoring the many, many millions of non-Muslim Africans. We are not talking about small minorities here: in Nigeria, where the slaughter went on this week, Muslims are not even the majority. Right across Africa you see a (to the outsider) bewildering mix of different, often syncretic, belief systems. Many parts of Africa have long traditions of coexistence between different religious groups - conflicts tend to be tribal or clan-based rather than religious - and while you can say easily enough that a given population is "largely Christian" or "majority Islamic", once you leave the strongly Islamic northern and north-eastern coastal areas (where the stereotypes are largely pretty true), you enter a whole different world of subtlety and complexity where religion merges into culture merges into tradition merges into belief systems. Islam, in that context, is simply one more influence to be absorbed and modified and folded into the complex whole. The same applies to Christianity. Many nominally Christian groups have beliefs which would be almost unrecognisable to, say, your local Baptist minister.
What we are seeing now is a determined effort by Islamic groups to overwhelm and take over all the other groups through violence and fear and terrorism. It isn't just in places like Nigeria with the Boko Haram extremists; the same sort of conquest by terror and extermination has been going on elsewhere for quite some time; obvious examples are the Sudan, and Egypt, where the large Coptic Christian minority, which has survived intact for more than a thousand years, is facing ever-increasing pressure which even they, the survivors' survivors, may not be able to withstand.
No other religion is actively trying to dominate Africa by violence and terror. Islam is the problem child here. That may not mesh with your idealistic all-men-are-brothers dreaming, but it is a fact established beyond all doubt. Read some history, David. Put some time into studying Africa. Africa has a thousand problems, but right now by far the biggest problem northern Africa faces is the rise of Islam and its relentless efforts to destroy all other belief systems.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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Curiously enough, Mugwump and I just cross-posted nearly opposite responses, and yet both are fair and accurate statements, two different sides of the same coin.
Without violent men with a lust for power, Islam would not be the deadly force it has become (Mugwump's point), and without the claim to unity and glory and moral superiority Islam provides, the eternal clash of brutal warlords and tribal groups in Africa would not be able to sustain its present terrible scale or hold the ground which it has gained. Islam alone cannot destroy whole cultures. Neither can tribal or ethnic warlordism. Sooner or later - usually sooner - the warlord dies or loses power or his faction splits and its members start fighting one-another, and then society starts to recover. Little by little, it returns to something like its former state. It is the combination of the two which is so deadly. Guns and terror tear down a whole society (that's being going on here and there in Africa since the days when it was spears and knives instead of guns); Islam and Islamic Law keep it down and make sure it can never heal itself.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Tannin wrote: | Curiously enough, Mugwump and I just cross-posted nearly opposite responses, and yet both are fair and accurate statements, two different sides of the same coin.
Without violent men with a lust for power, Islam would not be the deadly force it has become (Mugwump's point), and without the claim to unity and glory and moral superiority Islam provides, the eternal clash of brutal warlords and tribal groups in Africa would not be able to sustain its present terrible scale or hold the ground which it has gained. |
Yes, I agree with that. Truth is a mingled yarn. i just see Islam as the vector, not the cause. Islam is the mosquito, political power in the Islamic world the malaria itself. Isalm's universalist claims and emotional resonance make it a powerful vector for the virus.
Since we cannot influence the virus itself without making things worse (qv Iraq), we need to control the vector within our societies. That control does not have to be oppressive, but it will not accord with my best libertarian sympathies and it starts with some plain speaking.
_________________
Two more flags before I die! |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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That may well be true, Tannin, but a local, idiosyncratic variant of Islam still counts as "Islam" last time I checked. I mean, how do you define these things? By proximity to the teachings of Sunni Mullahs in Saudi Arabia? And if you're going to point to intermingling with traditional religious beliefs, let's not forget that much of mainstream Christian (and, I'm guessing, Muslim) paraphernalia has been directly appropriated from pantheistic pagan traditions, for whatever that's worth.
It's also not true that Christians and other religious groups have been the only target of Islamic fundamentalists. That may be true for parts of Nigeria, but look elsewhere. Niger, one of the four countries Wikipedia lists as having suffering Boko Haram attacks, has a 94% Muslim population. We already know enough about Islamic State's methods to understand the mentality of these psychos: to them, it doesn't matter whether you follow Jesus, Allah or a traditional African religion; if you don't follow Allah the way they think you should, you're fair game. So painting this as Islam vs Christianity (or Islam vs everybody else) is obviously deeply misleading. It's a specific strain of Islam vs everybody else.
There's enough careless language out there. Those of us who know better have no excuse for buying into it.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| true Christians and other religious groups was the target of Islamic fundamentalists is not true that Christians and other religious groups. |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | That may well be true, Tannin |
It's not "may well be true", David. It is true. Do your reading. Get back to me when you have a better grasp on the place. Your other points are not relevant. f course there are places with a Muslim majority, just as there are places with a Christian majority, lots of places with no clear majority, and - let us not forget - lots and lots of places where religion isn't the all-encompassing black and white thing it's painted as. Right across Africa, religion as you and I understand it tends to take a back seat to other cultural and social factors.
If it is really "deeply misleading" to characterise this as "Islam vs everybody else", as you claim, how do you explain the relentless extirpation of non-Islamics right across the African continent? Short answer: you can't. The problem is Islam. (Or to be more precise, as you yourself say, the more extreme forms of Islam, and as Mugwump says, all against a background of power struggles and greed and violence.)
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| HAL wrote: | | true Christians and other religious groups was the target of Islamic fundamentalists is not true that Christians and other religious groups. |
HAL, well done. You are making more sense than David tonight.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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Most of the commentary I'm seeing simply lacks any sense of self awareness and due irony: Forget quantum physics, these folks are still labouring over relativity.
Global compression creates a lot of illusory effects which lead people to impose exotic or extravagant interpretations on fairly standard historical occurrences. There is nothing unusual to see here, except that we happen to be viewing it from an extremely different perspective and in glorious technicolour. If we were reading about it happening as part of a twentieth-century postcolonial struggle, we wouldn't think twice about it.
It's no different to any other sort of racist, fanatical imperialism right up to Iraq. And if extreme motivations can be mustered at will in wealthy, stable, highly-organised states, how much more in the midst of an environment that is postcolonial, impoverished, and can't modernise due to the resource curse?
It's only shocking because we're not reading about it in a musty old book. Which is not to dismiss it, but to dismiss the lavish storytelling which has jumped like a rat on a sinking ship from glorying in American exceptionalism, to the even more pitiful delights of dehumanisation; here asylum seekers, there "the Chinese", and now Muslims and Eastern European "job thieves".
Development economists have been studying this very stuff for years while no one else was interested in places like North Africa because folk there were dealing with, ahem, the colonial European legacy. Now there are brownish folks to blame the region is all the rage againminus the four decades of solid economic analysis.
The risk for me is that this is so boringly obvious one forgets we have the capacity to alleviate much more suffering than ever before. The risk for others is the apparently irresistible urge to turn something terrible into something much worse and much more protracted without any natural resolution whatsoever, such as another Vietnam, Central America or Iraq.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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