#BringBackOurGirls: Kidnapping and the Truth

The former Nigerian minister of education, Oly Ezekweslli, and lawyer Ibrahim Musa Abdullahi have caused an avalanche. They started their initial demonstration with the demand that the Nigerian government “return their daughters.” Scarcely four weeks earlier, the Islamic sect Boko Haram kidnapped almost 300 schoolgirls from a school in northeastern Nigeria. Lawyer Abdullahi sent the demand out to the world under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls via Twitter.

Initially, the campaign had the effect its initiators had hoped for. For three weeks, mainly women have taken to the streets demanding the girls be returned.

But the protest went global within a few days. America’s CNN news heard of the story and sent a reporter of African heritage to Nigeria who began reporting daily on the unfolding drama. Meanwhile, #BringBackOurGirls has morphed into an American campaign with the U.S. public demanding U.S. troops be used to get the girls back. It was reminiscent of two years earlier when an American activist working with a nongovernmental organization began a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #Kony2012 demanding the pursuit and capture of Joseph Kony, the obscure, brutal head of the fundamentalist Christian sect, Lord’s Resistance Army. He succeeded, although it quickly became known that the videos he used in his campaign were old news clips from an earlier time. Meanwhile, 150 elite U.S. troops had been deployed to capture Kony in the event he was even still alive.

Skepticism about the U.S. solidarity campaign is rising in Nigeria with the thought that it might be neocolonial style land-grabbing. There is a real danger that an oversimplification of the internal Nigerian political dispute could build upon itself. In the capital Abuja, Western media is putting pressure on the Nigerian government. Most Nigerians are thankful for that because normally their government officials are able to quickly and successfully deflect any criticism.

Nigerian journalists have taken a closer look at the origins of this drama: Chibok. That’s what the investigative Internet news outlet Premium Times reported about a neglected region in the northeastern state of Borno with a population of some 60,000. The region is distinguished by two unusual facts: The population has only one language, namely Chibok, and it’s the only region in Borno that is predominantly Christian in an area that is otherwise principally Muslim. The kidnapped girls are Christian and Muslim. As soon as that fact becomes known to the fundamentalist Christian right wing in America, the campaign will certainly be called Christian persecution, and that will mark the end of Nigerian control over their own issue.

The global campaign for the kidnapped girls makes the Islamist Boko Haram sect into something larger than life. Its primarily loose connection to the al-Qaida terrorist network has attracted the attention of the U.S. intelligence agencies. The outcome is predictable: The world is a global village but the various parts of the village don’t understand one another.