The women surged forward, anguish creasing their faces. Many were crying. A collective wail went up, but the officials traveling with the visiting local dignitary pushed them back, shushing them so he could speak.
Mutely, the mothers of Chibok bent their heads, clasped their hands tightly and knelt on Sunday on the grounds of the burned-out ruins of Chibok Government Girls Secondary School, their sobs subsiding after a brief moment on this overcast, but stifling afternoon.
Their daughters were kidnapped from this desolate place and taken into the surrounding sandy scrub nearly four weeks ago by the Islamist sect Boko Haram. As many as 276 girls here were taken. Although about 50 escaped, not a single one of the remaining girls has been found, and despite international offers of help, the Nigerian government has been slow to act.
Photo: AFP
The town of Chibok, deep in the bush of northeastern Nigeria and down the most Boko Haram-dense road in the country, is gripped by fear and pain, several said.
“We are deeply in sorrow,” said Mary Dawa, whose 16-year-old daughter, Hawa Isha, is missing. “Every day, I am in deep sorrow. I don’t even feel like eating.”
Asked how she was coping, she said: “How can I start?”
Photo: Reuters
Behind her the dignitary, the elderly traditional ruler of the region, made a 10-minute speech of mumbled condolence, sitting under a tree.
There are widespread fears that the girls are being forcibly married off, exacerbated by a video released last week in which the group’s apparent leader called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in the market” and “marry them out” rather than let them get education.
To travel the road here — much of it an ungraded dirt track that throws up dense dust clouds — from the state capital, Maiduguri, 130km away, is to understand how vulnerable this school was.
Photo: Reuters
The road is punctuated by the shells of other schools burned by Boko Haram, the carcasses of cars the militants attacked and empty villages — their buildings also destroyed, whose residents have fled.
Little traffic roams this road; the Nigerian police say the Islamists still lurk in the surrounding bush. The military presence is light. There is an occasional checkpoint — in Damboa, a half-hour drive away on the dirt road, there is a military base, but its men did not engage with the kidnappers.
This area, for hundreds of kilometers around, has been under siege by Boko Haram for five years, with no movement toward resolution foreseeable.
For the government in Abuja, despite a defense budget of more than US$5 billion, the fight against the Islamists has been a problem occurring somewhere else, even though more than 1,500 people have died in the violence in the first three months of this year alone, according to Amnesty International.
The contrast in views on Sunday — between the mothers’ sorrow and the light response of some Nigerian officials — has helped ignite a worldwide movement of solidarity and protest on behalf of the women here.
It took Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan nearly three weeks to address the issue publicly.
However, the mothers seemed only dimly aware of the international efforts or protests and not much comforted. Their daughters are still missing.
“I’m not happy at all,” said Yana Galang, the mother of 16-year-old Rifka. “She’s in the bush. I don’t know where she is right now.”
Rifka had recently been recovering in a clinic after surgery for appendicitis, and had come to the school only to take an exam, she said.
The US, Britain and France have all pledged to lend their expertise in the search for the girls, who were probably taken into the Sambisa Forest, the forbidding, dense scrub that abuts this isolated dot on the map. Counterterrorism experts from all these countries have begun to arrive in Nigeria.
The international effort broadened on Sunday, with Israel offering help and French President Francois Hollande suggesting a summit with Nigeria and its neighbors focused on Boko Haram.
Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima, one of the few officials who raised the alarm early and loud, believes the abducted girls are still in the forest, and have not been taken across borders into neighboring Chad and Cameroon, though others disagree.
Shettima said there were indications they might have been divided into groups and told the BBC about reports of them being sighted “in some locations.”
He did not elaborate, saying the reports had been passed on to the military authorities to check.
Desperate parents have entered the forest themselves, armed only with bows and arrows. Nigerian officials say the military is searching there, but there have been no results so far.
The government has revealed little of its strategy beyond — unusually — accepting offers of international help, which it had consistently rejected over the course of the years of Boko Haram insurgency.
On Saturday, a top official in northern Nigeria, usually well-informed, said the federal government had engaged an Australian intermediary to negotiate with Boko Haram, a man once employed in Nigerian security services.
“They want to do some sort of prisoner exchange,” the official said.
In a speech on Saturday night in Maiduguri to a gathering of local notables the Borno Elders, Shettima expressed deep frustration at the lack of progress, and anxiety over the fate of the girls.
“These girls are from the poorest of backgrounds,” he said. “They are the poorest of the poor.”
“Honestly, I am so desperate, if the Americans were to colonize, I say so be it,” Shettima said. “Our people are dying like flies.”
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