Turf wars

International rights group, Amnesty International (AI), penultimate week unveiled its 2017/2018 report that laser-rayed the military with accusations of abuses against female Boko Haram victims in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in the North-east.

Titled ‘They betrayed us: Women who survived Boko Haram raped, starved and detained in Nigeria,’ the report accused soldiers and civilian Joint Task Force (JTF) operatives fighting Boko Haram insurgents of raping and extorting sex from women sheltered in IDP camps, oftentimes in exchange for providing them with essential food rations. Where sex was denied, the report alleged, food was withheld and the women involved left to starve.

Amnesty said that report was based on personal accounts of victims of the alleged abuses. “It is absolutely shocking that people who had already suffered so much under Boko Haram have been condemned to further horrendous abuses by the Nigerian military. Instead of receiving protection from the authorities, women and girls have been forced to succumb to rape in order to avoid starvation or hunger,” Country Director of Amnesty, Osai Ojigho, said at the report presentation.

The military, however, was swift in taking the Amnesty report to the shredder, accusing the rights group of plotting to destabilise Nigeria. Defence spokesman Brigadier-General John Agbim said the report was concocted and utterly lacked factual content. “The Nigerian Military admonishes AI to desist from cooking reports from time to time to demoralise the entire military system, and the nation as a whole whose troops are sacrificing their lives in the fight against Boko Haram and other enemies of the country,” he added, among others, in a statement.

The Presidency found it necessary to weigh in with the military, thrashing Amnesty’s report as lacking credibility and falling short of “evidential narration.” Presidential spokesman Garba Shehu added: “In some breath, the report seemed like the one in 2015, and the one in 2016, and the one after that year: the same things being recycled again and again. It ignores the fact of the existing mechanisms put in place by the military as a self-correcting step, and the high-level committee constituted by the Presidency to examine any such claims.’’

Even ahead of the public unveiling of the controversial report, Amnesty’s office in Abuja was for some while barricaded by some self-avowed civil society cheerleaders of the military who threatened to sustain their pressure campaign against the rights group until they run it out of town. According them, Amnesty by its report told “destabilising lies” aimed at discrediting the military and, ultimately, the Muhammadu Buhari presidency for sheer political motives.

But Amnesty insisted on the authenticity of its report. To give credence to the claims therein, the rights group fielded live testimonies from some of the abuse victims at the public presentation of its report in Abuja. Country Director Ojigho was further reported telling a newspaper medium: “We go on missions to these areas, we meet with the victims in person. In total, we had 250 interviews. Forty-eight of those interviews were with the women who had recently been released from Giwa Barracks, which is an IDP camp. It was based on eyewitness and personal accounts. Three of those women were at our report launch to share their experiences, so they could put human face to the story. These women exist, they are not fictitious, they are not trying to tell a story of what they have not experienced, it is their personal story.”

The credibility battle that has raged over Amnesty’s report happened to be the standard fare with most reports or commentaries that are critical of the present administration and its institutions, particularly the military. To be sure, our concern here isn’t in the least with trite criticisms by political actors motivated by the drive for partisan advantage, but rather with ostensibly dispassionate narratives by civic and non-political actors.

‘(The military) readily sees in criticisms an affront on its image and a flagrant challenge to its ego turf’

First, a point of procedure. Amnesty would need to learn to adopt what in journalism we call ‘balancing the story’ to deepen the credibility of its future reports. Where rights abuse victims in particular IDP camps have made specific allegations against military operatives in those locations, for instance, the rights group would have better shown its objectivity by seeking the response of the military high command to those allegations before putting its report together. Actually, the detailed response by the military leadership should have formed a significant part of Amnesty’s report. And just in case the military leadership really wanted to, it could have used Amnesty’s pre-documentation queries to launch an investigation of its members in those camps where abuses were alleged.

Having said that, there is the more substantial issue of practice culture. Often with support from the Presidency, the military is famously intolerant of criticisms of its rights and professional records. The reason for this seems to be that it readily sees in such criticisms an affront on its image and a flagrant challenge to its ego turf, and as such, it readily lapses into rebuff mode. Consequently, even where claims plied against the institution at a particular point ordinarily call for professional introspection and thorough interrogation of its operational ranks, the military’s default response has always been to stiffen up and push back with counter-claims of disreputable motives informing the critical report.

When former Defence Minister Gen. Theophilus Danjuma, who isn’t at all known for idle talk, recently alleged openly that soldiers were less than dispassionate in the communal clashes wracking his home state of Taraba and called on the people not to look to the military for help but rather defend themselves, the military hastened to dismiss that concern as unjustifiably hostile to it (the military) and even unbecoming of Danjuma’s personality. No surprise then that when the high command subsequently announced it was interrogating the elder statesman’s allegation, it soon returned with a blank – claiming to have found no substance whatsoever to his allegation. Most Taraba citizens insist otherwise, though, saying the former minister was bang on.

In the present instance, Amnesty reported the accounts of women in IDP camps who claimed to have been raped or compelled by soldiers and civilian JTF operators to have sex with them, at the risk of being deprived of essential food rations if they refused. And the standard response by the military was that the rights group cooked up its report to demoralise its men who were sacrificing their lives in the fight against Boko Haram and other enemies of the country. But, how can!

Has the military ever heard of the ‘ten percent rule’ – that whatever you do even with the strongest commitment to rectitude, there is always a 10 percent margin of those that are a part of your organisation who would be deviants and would breach the prescribed standards in spite of all that you do? Even with all the professional conditioning of the United States marines, the squad harboured the likes of Sergeant Robert Bales who carried out the Kandahar massacre in Afghanistan in March 2012.

A major point of departure between the military and Amnesty over its latest report apparently is that where the group sees those allegations as a rights issue, the military sees them as an image issue. Either side is entitled to its perspective, but you seriously can’t rule those allegations out of court without scant interrogation.