Nigeria is “concerned” about Amnesty International’s (AI) activities, a spokesman for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said on Monday, just days after the government briefly banned UNICEF over claims it was training “spies” sympathetic to Boko Haram.
“The federal government is increasingly concerned about the role that Amnesty International is playing in the war against terror in Nigeria,” Garba Shehu said.
“The organization’s operations in Nigeria seem geared towards damaging the morale of the Nigerian military,” he said.
“It often appears as if the Nigerian government is fighting two wars on terror: against Boko Haram and against Amnesty International,” he said.
The statement comes on the same day that the Nigerian military threatened the “closure” of the global rights watchdog in a statement posted on Facebook.
Army public relations director Brigadier General Sani Usman said that Amnesty was “determined to destabilize” Nigeria through the “fabrication of fictitious allegations of alleged human rights abuses” and “clandestine sponsorship of dissident groups to protest.”
The military has in the past been critical of international organizations operating in the country and has hit out at organizations reporting that it committed rights violations and war crimes during its fight against Boko Haram.
The bloody Islamist uprising in northeastern Nigeria began in 2009 and has spread to Cameroon, Chad and Niger, killing at least 27,000 people and leaving millions dependent on aid for survival.
Buhari, who came to power in 2015 pledging to end the violence, is under increasing pressure to act as he gears up to seek re-election in a February ballot.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing