A new book emphasizes the perils of social media campaigns and the limits of military intervention in saving Nigeria’s Chibok children. MA...
A new book emphasizes the perils of social media campaigns and the limits of military intervention in saving Nigeria’s Chibok children.
MAY 1, 2021 | EASTERN PILOT
In April 2014, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons was on a yacht cruising in the Caribbean when he tweeted about the 276 girls kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram from a secondary school in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. The hashtag he copied lit a matchstick that inflamed the world. Politicians and celebrities followed suit and shared the viral campaign, #BringBackOurGirls.
It was perhaps the first time a single hashtag had driven a multilateral military intervention. Yet the combined intelligence capabilities of seven powerful nations—the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and Israel—failed to rescue any of the kidnapped schoolchildren and couldn’t defeat the terrorist group hiding in a forest.
The failings of this global intervention led to a number of fatal miscalculations, argue the Wall Street Journal correspondents Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw in their new book, Bring Back Our Girls. What’s more, the fame brought about by the social media campaign kept the girls in captivity for even longer and the mistrust between the U.S. and Nigerian governments delayed action on vital information sharing.
For instance, the authors found that a Nigerian military airstrike aided by U.S. drones had accidentally bombed some of the kidnapped girls, killing at least 10. It wasn’t reported to senior officials in Washington despite a grim Boko Haram video circulating online of the dead bodies.
U.S. intelligence officers listened to intercepted calls in languages they couldn’t translate but didn’t share, not quite trusting the Nigerian government of Goodluck Jonathan with the information they’d found. Instead, the National Security Agency put out a highly unusual ad looking for Americans who spoke Kanuri, a dialect spoken in Nigeria and throughout the region.
At one point, when two girls managed to flee, the “fame meant to free them had also made it harder for them to escape,” the authors write. Boko Haram sympathizers in the first village they came across recognized the schoolgirls and promptly handed them back to their captors, largely due to their sense of loyalty toward the terrorists, who had provided basic needs for villagers when government authorities had historically failed to do.
By the time Nigerian soldiers pushed into the vast Sambisa forest, in northeastern Nigeria, the Chibok girls were already living openly in Boko Haram-held towns.
By 2017, Washington found itself bound to an anti-terrorism war it wasn’t winning in the region. Insurgencies led by Boko Haram had grown, bringing horrific scenes of churches and mosques being bombed, and of children used as suicide bombers against their own communities, covered by the world’s media.
So what did foreign governments get so wrong in the effort to take down Boko Haram and bring the schoolchildren back home? Parkinson and Hinshaw’s account begins at the White House with that infamous tweet by then-first lady Michelle Obama to #BringBackOurGirls—and the hollow interpretations of extremism and victimhood in Africa that followed.
As the authors tell it, many who took part in the #BringBackOurGirls social media wave knew that 800 U.S. troops were deployed to Niger and another 300 to Cameroon to train local security operatives, provide surveillance, and gather intelligence in the region. But many of them weren’t aware that Boko Haram had already been left to fester unabated by the Nigerian government since 2009.
High youth unemployment, poverty, and heavy-handed policing sucked men into Nigeria’s grim prisons, and those who managed not to die were spat out as hardened criminals through a circle of torture and abuse by judicial, police, and prison officials. By the time the Obama administration began pouring troops into countries surrounding Nigeria in 2014 to gather intelligence, Boko Haram already controlled significant infrastructure networks.
Parkinson and Hinshaw cast in sharp relief how Washington’s failed efforts, alongside the virality of the kidnappings, actually emboldened Boko Haram. While Nigerians were protesting on the streets for the government to do something about the missing girls, Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, released YouTube videos threatening to marry off the girls. “This was petrol for a Twitter fire,” the authors write. As they note, social media sold the popular but harmful trope of needy African children calling for a savior in the form of a celebrity. The authors call it “the identifiable-victim effect.” But it also echoes the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s warning about the “single story of Africa,” in which repeated media versions of one incomplete story of the region becomes the only story.
While the world was tweeting about the Chibok girls, Boko Haram seized six more villages with hardly any coverage outside the Nigerian press. In fact, the simplistic media constructs, the authors argue, furnished Boko Haram with the materials to build its terrorism brand. The group’s videos of the girls were being broadcast and talked about on television stations globally. Boko Haram became a household name, and it was more rewarding for the group to keep the girls captive.
No comments