In the little more than two years since the above was posted, Fulani-associated attacks on Nigerian farming villages have skyrocketed, bringing to play suspicions about a Muslim dominated government and security apparatus. One BackChannels source has suggested that all the top military and police officers have Arab names and Islamic affiliation, and, therefore, so may go the reasoning, the same have turned a blind eye to attacks in the making. Add to that, the state’s confiscation of old unregistered firearms from villagers, leaving the same completely bared to the whims of AK-47 equipped rape-and-rapine “Fulani Land Pirates”.
Not surprisingly, the complaint of Islamic Jihad and the ethnic cleansing of Christians has surfaced in more recent news.
Governor Ortom in his speech, stated that what was happening in the state was ethnic cleansing and Jihad. Ortom said, “this is not a hidden agenda, it’s known and those people who are perpetrating it did say it. They’re not hidden. They held press conferences, they came out and said they were going to resist our law, that they were going to do ethnic cleansing, it’s about Jihad, it’s about taking over the land, it’s not about herders and farmers clashes.
Related in Vanguard on this day: an editorial critical of “The probe on Army ‘partiality'”; and another, finally, on theshooting of armed herdsman in the “Gwer, Logo and Guma Local Government Areas of Benue State” — and in use: Russian Mi-35 helicopter gunships.
BackChannels has been curious about where “the bandits” have been obtaining their arms — and the mention of such curiosity alone should raise knowing and cynical smiles in West Africa: “Firearms Trafficking in West Africa” n.d., PDF.
The Boko Haram back story in relation to arms and equipage has been poked at:
However, the “tank” in the photo appears to be a Panhard ERC-90 Sagaie, a wheeled armored fighting vehicle of French manufacture. Chad and Cote d’Voire each have a few of these vehicles, and, according to one commentator, the Nigerian military has forty-two of them. If that is accurate, then it is likely that the tank and the armored fighting vehicle were stolen from a Nigerian military armory and did not come from Libya.
Last year the police carried out a dawn raid on Orilowo-Ejigbo, a Lagos suburb, and arrested three men after seizing a cache of arms that was sufficient to outfit a 20-man army. In another incident last year, at the border town of Seme, bandits overwhelmed the huge security presence at the border post, laid in wait for traders and robbed them. Many lives were lost. As an officer testified after the incident, it wasn’t the effrontery of the robbers that unnerved him and his colleagues, but the sophistication
of the arms they used.
However acquired — and whatever the true (cultural, communal, economic, personal religious, social, tribal) motivations of Boko Haram or Fulani Land Pirates — the violence targeting the state’s peaceful (and disarmed) Christian communities has brought into view the possibilities for deep mistrust across the Christian-Muslim discriminator and forced the state to defend its integrity with greater military power, skill, and resolve, which, of course, requires heightened military spending.
Distilled: violent rogue organizations promote defense spending, i.e., they’re good for business!
Affected states, perhaps especially today Nigeria, have no choice but to heighten integrity in their ranks and push back or, over time, disintegrate down into feudal squabbles that might presage — for lack of decency in governance — meltdown into the modern dark ages of failed states.
At the same time, BackChannels fears the Orwellian possibility of state-based manipulation of bandits, jihadists, and raiders in the producing the sustained chaos and conflict profitable to two kinds of markets: 1) the black markets known to “failed states” and “frozen conflicts” in which authorities have been so compromised, corrupted, or otherwise weakened (absented in force) that anything goes and EVERYTHING illicit moves through the territory; and 2) the state-to-state business markets invested in defense economies nurtured for expansion.
Appreciate the contemplation: the truth really is Out There where ships stop in the night far out at sea and hours later smuggled arms move across the land toward the money that makes it all seem worthwhile.
What will happen if the seemingly limitless tide of young men recruited in the wild become supplied with shoulder-launched rockets?
President Buhari has urged patience on the part of the Nigerian public:
Once again I sympathize with the people of Benue State, and the families of all those who‘ve lost their lives in these attacks. The security agencies will continue to work to protect all Nigerians. And we will not allow anyone who takes the life of a Nigerian to evade justice. pic.twitter.com/eqKp3YSJoa
Nigeria’s issues with the nomadic Fulani, pressured by drought and motivated some by Islamic supremacist egotism, has been a developing conflict issue in Nigeria for some time. Herewith a smattering of related reports and news news reports and fair use excerpts from them.
Fast Reference
All excerpts are partial (there’s more to be read at the source) and dated either in the address line or short after the URL.
Fulani herdsmen and farmers conflict in Nigeria is a land resource based conflict in north-eastern Nigeria. According to a Human Rights Watch report of December 2013 violence between Fulani herdsmen, farmers and local communities had killed 3,000 people since 2010.
On herdsmen, Adebanjo said he had no trust on the ability of the police to quell the activities of the group as the police hierarchy had already described the killings as communal clashes.
He further lambasted President Buhari over his handling of the killings, stressing that “even when someone in the caliber of Falae was kidnapped, he didn’t utter a word. He has also refused to identify Fulani herdsmen as terrorists.
President Muhammadu Buhari had barely left Plateau State when the attacks were launched on Ganda village of Daffo District in Bokkos Local Government Area and Miango village in Bassa Local Government Area. The communities were attacked few hours after the inauguration of Plateau State Peace Building Agency by the President, who was in Jos, the state capital, on a working visit.
He said: “Twenty-five people lost their lives in a fresh attack on Dundu village of Kwall District of Bassa Local Government Area. The incident occurred just as the Irigwe community had planned a mass burial for four of the five earlier killed in a similar attack on Nzhauvo village.
“When we reacted to a claim by the Miyetti Allah group in January of missing cattle, we told you it was a ploy to justify another round of killings. True to this, the Fulani militia, which the Federal Government has refused to brand a terrorist organisation to the dismay of Nigerians, have continued to visit our villages with orchestrated and unwarranted carnage.
Daily Sun gathered that the attack, which occurred at about 7pm, left several houses burnt and scores injured.
It was learnt that the attackers took the villagers unawares when they were preparing to take their dinner and the entire village was enveloped by gunfire from the attackers, leaving children, women and the aged scampering for safety.
A youth leader, Lawrence Timothy, said 25 corpses have been found, while more were still being recovered from the bush
Attributed to Lawrence Zongo, spokesman, Miango Youth Development Association:
“Others, including two women are now receiving treatment in a nearby hospital in the community. One girl later died in the hospital, making it 26 victims. This is too bad as we are planning for a mass burial of the last attack. So far, we have more than 500 in Internally Displaced Persons camp. The international organisations should please come to our aid.”
Information about perpetrator groups was reported for 77% of terrorist attacks in Nigeria in 2016. Due to a 63% decrease in the number of attacks carried out by Boko Haram and a 62% increase in the number of attacks carried out by Fulani militants, Fulani militants were responsible for the most terrorist attacks in Nigeria in 2016.
In recent weeks, Nigerian security forces have claimed that some groups of semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen engaged in bitter and bloody conflicts with farmers in several Nigerian states are actually composed of members of Boko Haram. A statement from Nigerian Director of Defense Information Major General Chris Olukolade claimed the potentially dangerous identification came during the interrogation of Fulani herdsmen arrested after a series of killings and arson attacks in Taraba State (Vanguard [Lagos], April 23; Leadership [Abuja], April 24; Nigerian Tribune, April 24). Reports of Boko Haram members (who are mostly members of the Kanuri ethno-cultural group) disguising themselves as Fulani herdsmen while carrying out attacks in rural Nigeria are common. Though many of these reports may be attempts to deflect responsibility from Fulani herders for attacks on sedentary farming communities throughout north and central Nigeria, even the perception that the Fulani herdsmen have joined forces with Boko Haram could propel Nigeria into a new and devastating civil war.
Note: because Russia has been cited as arming the Taliban in Afghanistan in its war against liberal and democratic modernity in that state, BackChannels may suggest searching for similar connection in the “handling” of both Boko Haram and the portion of Fulani Herdsmen engaged in creating chaos, dispossession, and ruin in Nigeria.
It should be evident worldwide that Soviet / post-Soviet Moscow works to weaken states: Syria has been half destroyed in association with Moscow, Crimea invaded and today badgered daily by related military and terrorist-type elements, and so one may ask — or must ask — where else? And for whose benefit?
For more immediate Nigerian and practical realpolitik, the response to Fulani “softening” for incursion may turn out the state’s army and armed local militia.
Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.
The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.
Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.
Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.
Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy. In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.
Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution. P. 142. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990.
Below: bold type added.
The author noted with dismay the effects of radical propaganda on the peasants:
How curiously our speeches, our concepts were interpreted by the peasant mind! . . . their conclusions and comparisons utterly astonished me. “We have it better under the Tsar.” Something struck me in the head, as if a nail had been driven into it . . . . There, I said, are the fruits of propaganda! We do not destroy illusions but reinforce them. We reinforce the old faith of the people in the Tsar.”
The disillusionment with the people pushed the most determined radicals to terrorism. While many of the disappointed Socialists-Revolutionaries abandoned the movement and a handful adopted the doctrines of German Social-Democracy, a dedicated minority formed a secret organization called the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia). The mission of its thirty full-time members, banded in an Executive Committee, was to fight the tsarist regime by means of systematic terror: on its founding, it passed a “sentence” of death on Alexander II. It was the first political terrorist organization in history and the model for all subsequent organizations of this kind in Russia and elsewhere. Resort to terror was an admission of isolation: as one of the leaders of the People’s Will would later concede, terror
requires neither the support nor the sympathy of the country. It is enough to have one’s convictions, to feel one’s despair, to be determined to perish. The less a country wants revolution, the more naturally will they turn to terror who want, no matter what, to remain revolutionaries, to cling to their cult of revolutionary destruction.
The stated mission of the People’s Will was to assassinate government officials, for the twin goal of demoralizing the government and breaking down the awe in which the masses held the Tsar. In the words of the Executive Committee:
Terrorist activity . . . has as its objective undermining the fascination with the government’s might, providing an uninterrupted demonstration of the possibility of struggling against the government, in this manner lifting the revolutionary spirit of the people and its faith in the success of the cause, and finally, organizing the forces capable of combat.
The ultimate political goal of the People’s Will was the convocation of a National Assembly through which the nation would express its wishes. The People’s Will was a highly centralized organization, the decisions of the Executive Committee being binding on all followers, known as “vassals.” Members were expected to dedicate themselves totally to the revolutionary cause, and if called upon, to sacrifice to it their properties and even their lives.
I have for months spent a good deal of time each day passing along the “Hey, Martha’s” of breaking or recent news, primarily using the BackChannels reader page on Facebook to do it.
That ain’t writing, and even with highlighting and juxtaposing stories (“Related:” appears in the first one or two comments pointing to additional reading), it’s not really opining either. At best, the method shares this blog’s editor’s interests and outlook of the day. Much on the web becomes media passing along other media. With that in mind, both internal reflection and weather — and aesthetic charm — seemed to point toward 19th Century time and the luxury of long reading.
To be fair, one cannot share the whole book, technically, at least, except by recommending it or joining others in classroom or colloquy to discuss it.
As much characterizes a process in democratic and responsible governance in which the general public may follow good advice — buy the book or take it out of the library — but what portion does becomes no longer the “general public” but an enlightened public cleaving away from former peers.
Putin’s game with election hacking favoring our President Trump?
While collusion would seem a possibility that the most determined of ongoing investigations may well dredge up and beat into reality, one might consider the alternative of interpreting Moscow as cynically narcissistic and malign in using methods still related to the “People’s Will” to disparage our noble democracy by seeing elected to head it a bullying businessman and entirely inexperienced politician.
With that interpretation for a base, Moscow (and Tehran) would seem to believe they have figured out how to divide us and undermine our confidence in our democratic integrity and the related institutions and processes that guaranty American justice (truly for all) and robust internal as well as external security. However, now that that possibility may be seen — 🙂 — BackChannels is starting to like this latest in Presidents of the United States of America.
Go Trump!
And tackle Putin in his nasty dash back to Russia’s imperial glory and apparent future without the benefit of conscience.
“Similar to the destruction of Palestinian urbanization in 1948, the theft of Palestinian visual culture is another attempt by Israel to control the historical narrative and erase Palestinian history. “
And yet the authors of both the documentary and the gushing +972 promotion launch their criticisms from Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University with the help, frankly, of the IDF that could as well have kept its information out of the public sphere.
Palestinians may wish to revisit the real history behind Yasser Arafat — https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/ — who survived his repeatedly defeated troops and impoverished people to die himself with upwards of $100 million in loot (and about the same may be said of the living Abbas who has also built a remarkable system of patronage on the suffering of the Palestinian main base).
A few reminders about the PLO and perhaps the principle of evil.
Two of Bukovsky’s documents appear in English for the first time in Behind the Desert Storm. The first is Yuri Andropov’s memo to Leonid Brezhnev in 1974 detailing a KGB meeting with Palestinian terrorist Wadie Haddad. It recommends that the Soviet government provide material support to Haddad’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The second is the transcript of a 1984 Politburo meeting approving the shipment of 15 million rubles’ worth of weapons and ammunition to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine in exchange for a collection of ancient art. The invention of modern terrorism: All credit is due to the Kremlin.
But not everyone wants to be sacrificed. When vigilante mobs and Myanmar’s soldiers burned down his village, Noor Kamal, 18, tried to flee with his 6-year-old brother, Noor Faruq. Both were hacked in the head by ethnic Rakhine armed with machetes and scythes.
At a bleak government hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Noor Kamal shivered with outrage at the ARSA insurgents from his village in northern Maungdaw Township, who attacked a local police post last month. “We are the ones who are suffering because of Al Yaqin,” he said. “They disappeared after the attack. We were the ones left behind for the military to kill.”
The Rohingya, marginalized in Burma / Myanmar and ripe for agitation by Islamist organizations have been forced into conflict by way of the agitation and provocations produced by the latter.
As you read through the excerpts chosen by BackChannels for display and continue following the story, the image of the “poor Rohingyans” being placed at the mercy of Myanmar military may need to be modified by the barbaric criminality produced by those who have infiltrated their numbers.
Still, what compels Myanmar to use so much force against the Rohingya?
BackChannels would venture that earlier border insecurity and inability to defend informants and detect the Islamists for arrest have contributed to the wholesale response.
In essence, the Ummah is especially being “played” — manipulated! — by Islamic extremists who have learned how to abuse the innocent among Muslims to turn them into the victims of larger but also legitimate forces. This is the same model that Hamas has used in its rapacious abuse of the Palestinians to create the showcase of victimization while the leadership and patronage system make off with billions in loot wrung from global sympathy.
The insurgent group, which refers to itself as Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement, HaY), is led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and is commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics. It benefits from the legitimacy provided by local and international fatwas (religious judicial opinions) in support of its cause and enjoys considerable sympathy and backing from Muslims in northern Rakhine State, including several hundred locally trained recruits.
The emergence of this well-organised, apparently well-funded group is a game-changer in the Myanmar government’s efforts to address the complex challenges in Rakhine State, which include longstanding discrimination against its Muslim population, denial of rights and lack of citizenship. The current use of disproportionate military force in response to the attacks, which fails to adequately distinguish militants from civilians, together with denial of humanitarian assistance to an extremely vulnerable population and the lack of an overarching political strategy that would offer them some hope for the future, is unlikely to dislodge the group and risks generating a spiral of violence and potential mass displacement.
Al Qaeda has warned Myanmar will face punishment for its “crimes against the Rohingyas”.
“The savage treatment meted out to our Muslim brothers … shall not pass without punishment,” Al Qaeda said in a statement, according to the SITE monitoring group.
“The Government of Myanmar shall be made to taste what our Muslim brothers have tasted.”
But not everyone wants to be sacrificed. When vigilante mobs and Myanmar’s soldiers burned down his village, Noor Kamal, 18, tried to flee with his 6-year-old brother, Noor Faruq. Both were hacked in the head by ethnic Rakhine armed with machetes and scythes.
At a bleak government hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Noor Kamal shivered with outrage at the ARSA insurgents from his village in northern Maungdaw Township, who attacked a local police post last month. “We are the ones who are suffering because of Al Yaqin,” he said. “They disappeared after the attack. We were the ones left behind for the military to kill.”
Myanmar has launched a project of re-construction of destroyed houses in conflict-torn areas in northern Rakhine state under a mechanism of the Union Enterprises for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development (UEHRD), Xinhua reported quoting the Myanmar News Agency.
Someone always has to pick up the pieces — and the terrorists never do.
BackChannels may experiment here with watch-write updating on this post.
This is a complicated attack made more so by the foreknowledge that the Russian State, if true to form, will frame it for the public and neither the public nor the sincere among police may have access or authority in the investigation launched.
In the west, the public would trust involved security services to get to the truth and to tell the truth. In Russia, one may expect absolute authority to say what it may and for the public to nod agreeably or mumble away in political impotence.
