Nigeria crackdown may backfire

A MILITARY crackdown across Nigeria has hobbled Boko Haram for now, but as the army campaign intensifies it is likely to fan popular anger in the impoverished north that could ultimately make the militant organization’s 3-year-old rebellion stronger.
The group remains the top security threat to Africa’s leading oil producer, and Western powers are worried about its growing links to more fiercely anti-Western militant groups in the region.
At least 2,800 people have died in fighting since the insurrection began, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.
Nigerian soldiers and police have swept through the largely Muslim north in past weeks, raiding suspected militant hideouts, seizing weapons and killing or arresting scores of suspects.
Last month they intercepted a vehicle carrying the group’s spokesman and ideologue, Abu Qaqa, whom they said they killed in a shootout, although its leader Abubakar Shekau said Qaqa was captured alive. Better policing of roads and around targets has reduced the number of deadly bomb attacks, and there has been no repeat of anything as coordinated as the strike on the north’s main city of Kano in January that killed 186 people.
“A series of tactical setbacks against Boko Haram have helped contain the militancy,” said Roddy Barclay, Africa analyst at Control Risks. “But they won’t bring an end to it, since they still don’t address the core drivers.” Those drivers include a deep-rooted feeling of alienation among northerners, who have watched their semi-arid region stagnate while the oil-rich south enjoys relative prosperity.
They also include a burning sense of injustice among Boko Haram’s members, who say their movement was wrongly persecuted by the authorities in 2009. Then, Nigerian troops killed hundreds during an uprising, including group’s founder Mohammed Yusuf, who died in police custody.
Jonathan’s administration, seen by northerners as the most southern-Christian dominated in decades, is no less an obstacle. Boko Haram are fighting to revive an ancient Islamic caliphate in modern Nigeria, but many of their supporters might settle for a greater share of power for Muslim northerners in office.
The United States, worried that Boko Haram’s fraternizing with other terror groups like Al-Qaeda could lead it to shift its focus to Western targets, has heaped pressure on Nigeria to tackle the root causes of the rebellion, with limited results.
A security raid on Monday gave a taste of how Nigeria’s pursuit of a military solution to the conflict could backfire.
After a bomb blast struck an army convoy passing through Maiduguri — a dusty, bullet-ridden northeastern city on the threshold of the Sahara and the sect’s official headquarters — soldiers raided homes, shot people and burned down buildings in revenge attacks that left at least 35 dead.
“The soldiers are causing more harm than Boko Haram,” said Hajiya Amina Tole, furious after seeing her house razed. “By the time they leave, our daughters will have no husbands to marry: Most young men would have been killed by the military.”
Yusuf Ahmed said he watched four of his friends executed in the raid and saw his family home destroyed. “If I join Boko Haram now, won’t I be justified?” he asked. Lt.-Col. Sagir Musa, spokesman for joint army and police forces in the northeast, denied extrajudicial killings, and said security efforts had brought relative peace. But analysts say they may be counterproductive longer term.
“With the government’s extremely heavy-handed approach... you have to wonder what the consequences will be in terms of acquiescence or support for Boko Haram,” said John Campbell, who was US ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007.
“It may have a temporary impact, but without any kind of political process, the lull won’t be anything more than a lull.” Concentrated mainly in northern Nigerian, Boko Haram became active in about 2003 and is loosely modeled on the Taleban movement in Afghanistan.
Nigerian authorities assumed it was finished after the 2009 crackdown. Instead, it morphed from a radical clerical movement opposed to Western culture into a fully-fledged armed rebellion.
“You’re dealing with a guerrilla force that withdraws when the odds are against it but then resurfaces when the pressure eases off,” said Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress, a group calling for dialogue to resolve the crisis.
“They’ve been written off before, only to come back.”
If a military solution to the conflict is well nigh impossible, a political one is still a tall order.