Where are they?
Every morning for a week the news has been dominated by the South
Korean ferry tragedy. The terrible grief of the parents, the shocking response
of the crew to the unfolding disaster, and the inexorably rising body count.
Two days before the South Korean students boarded their ferry for
a study trip to the nearby island of Jeju, terrorists broke into a girls'
school in Chibok, in the remote state of Borno, in north-eastern Nigeria. They
shot guards and abducted about 200 students, who were loaded into trucks and,
it seems, taken off into the forest. Two groups of the girls, perhaps 30 in
all, managed to escape. The rest have simply disappeared.
No one has admitted carrying out the mass kidnapping, although it
is assumed to be the work of Boko Haram, the al-Qaida-linked jihadi group.
Amnesty International says 1,500 people have been killed this year in the
conflict between Boko Haram and Nigerian security forces, more than half of
them civilians. The latest bombing by the group was in Abuja, on the same day
the girls were abducted, in which at least 70 people died. Nigeria's president,
Goodluck Jonathan, was soon on the scene. The first appearance of the Borno
state governor in Chibok came yesterday, eight days after the attack.
The fate of the Nigerian girls, who had been recalled to class in
order to sit a physics exam, when all the other schools in the area were closed
by security fears, has not been entirely ignored by the world's media. But it
has been overwhelmed by the story of the sinking of the Sewol.
Some of the reasons for that are obvious. The South Korean story
has unfolded on camera, in a first-world country with every facility for news
reporting. In contrast, the young Nigerians have vanished into the darkness of
a dangerous world.
Nigeria is complex and messy and unfamiliar. It is easy to feel
that what happens there is not real in the way that what happens on camera in
South Korea is real. Watching the images of the almost mad grief of the
parents, ready to plunge into the water themselves to find their sons and
daughters, is like an awful realisation of one's own worst imaginings.
No one knows what will befall these young women. In February, Boko
Haram – whose founding purpose is to defeat the influence of western education
– murdered 59 students. Teachers, schools and children are in the front line.
In Abuja, politicians talk of a decade-long war of containment against jihad to
come. But already its objective of peace is being undermined by reports of
extra-judicial killings by the military. The insecurity exacerbates the poverty
and holds back development.
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