In one of the photographs — this one particularly poignant — the parents stand together with tormented looks on their faces, holding on to their signs, which proclaimed, “Enough is enough, these abductions must stop,” “Bring back our girls” and “Free our little angels.”
The appeals, of course, were addressed to the leader of the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram, Abubaker Shekau, who last month claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls and threatened to sell them as “slaves on the open market.” In a 57-minute video rant, he justified the abduction and continued imprisonment of these girls on the grounds that they were receiving a western-style education. “Western education should end. It is a sin,” he averred. “Girls should go and get married.” He warned that he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We would marry them out at the age of 9, at the age of 12.”
Throughout the world, there are different cultures, with different mindsets and different values. But this is beyond redemption. What is even more galling is that Boko Haram rebels are presenting themselves as Muslims, whose struggle is mounted in the name of Islam. To the best of my knowledge, there is no rationale in any society’s moral canon and clearly not in that of Islam, for the abduction of children. There has never been in the past and one suspect there never will be in the future, any logic that would sanction this kind of human trafficking in children. It is reprehensible.
One wonders why the world, marshaling the combined massive resources of Malaysia, China, Australia, the United States and other countries, continues to this day to pursue its underwater search for Malaysia Airline 370, which went down in the Indian Ocean on March 8, but has shown little enthusiasm to deploy equally massive resources in their search for well over 300 kidnapped Nigerian girls, whose fate since mid-April remains uncertain.
Truth be told, after they were snatched by Boko Haram, the abducted girls earned little attention from anyone outside Nigeria or even from the Nigerian government itself, until supporters took to Twitter to demand their safe return. Indeed, earlier this year, more than 50 teenage students were slaughtered — some burned alive — by Boko Haram at a government school in the north of the country. That massacre was quickly forgotten in Nigeria and barely noticed outside it. The recent abductions, however, should now be an issue of moral concern for all of us who care about the right of children to be protected from predatory practices, including abuse by unhinged kidnappers who have the gall to call themselves Muslims — Muslims who are in reality mockingly remote from the tenets and spirit of Islam.
But if anything good comes out of this tragedy, let it be a wake-up call to all of us about the plight of children, not just in Nigeria but around the world. We speak of human rights, and these of course are sacrosanct. But there are rights that apply only to children, unique rights that adults do not need — hence the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that protects minors, certainly in Article 24, from violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect and maltreatment.
Despite the ratification of the Convention by the overwhelming majority of the UN member states, children around the world continue to be victimized, according to the NGO Save the Children, by trafficking linked to criminals, whose aim is to exploit children in agricultural work, in domestic servitude, in factory employment, in mining and in child-soldiering. Save the Children cites the mindboggling figure of 215 million children currently engaged in child labor — much of it hazardous — around the world. Sometimes children, we are told, are sold by a family member, or lured by false promises of an education or a “better life,” when the reality is that these trafficked children are held in slave-like conditions without enough food, shelter or clothing, and often severely abused and cut off from contact with their families.
A country that turns a blind eye to these children’s plight and a deaf ear to their pleas for help is defining it’s own, not its children’s, inadequacies. As Nelson Mandela wrote in this context: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children.”
To call Boko Haram insane, kooky, mad, crazed, mentally disturbed — all of which are monikers it deserve — is not enough. We get nothing out of this name-calling than a cheap thrill. Instead, let this tragedy in Nigeria be, I say, a wake-up call for all of us engaged in the public debate to recognize that, despite the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, children in mostly impoverished countries continue to be dehumanized — all 215 million of them.
Consider what one of our insightful poets, Khalil Gibran, had to say when he addressed us about them: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you, and they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
