Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka on Friday dismissed calls for peace
negotiations with the radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram and said
Nigerian society is at stake in what he described as a war for survival.
Nigeria’s northeast remains under almost daily attack by the sect,
which is blamed for killing more than 740 people this year alone,
according to an Associated Press count. Three police officers died in an
apparent bombing carried out by the sect in Yobe state early Friday
morning, officials said.
Soyinka, a 78-year-old playwright and essayist, was once marked for
death by one Nigerian military ruler. He has both feuded with and
befriended others. Africa’s most populous nation now has a civilian
government, though the military remains a powerful behind-the-scenes
force.
Despite his often strained relations with his country’s military,
Soyinka said the military should tackle Boko Haram head-on. He
acknowledged that grinding poverty in Nigeria’s north gave rise to Boko
Haram, but said negotiating with “mass murderers” would not end the
cycle of violence tearing at the country. He also suspects that crooked
politicians had a role in Boko Haram’s early rise.
Politicians who wanted to rig elections “activated this brainwashed
horde of religious militants. That’s how it started,” Soyinka told
foreign journalists in Lagos. Boko Haram members then “looked at those
who unleashed them and they realised they were being manipulated…and now
they are completely out of control.”
Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege” in the Hausa
language of Nigeria’s Muslim north, has carried out shootings and
bombings targeting both Christians and Muslims. The sect continues to
kill despite a heavy military presence and says it will stop only if the
government strictly implements Shariah law and frees its imprisoned
members.
Soyinka called the prospect of the government engaging in peace talks “abysmal appeasement.”
“The issue has become a security issue in which the question becomes:
who goes down? Is (it) the community, the nation, the society that goes
down or is it a bunch of killers who are totally beyond control?”
In its fight against Boko Haram, Nigeria’s military has killed dozens
of civilians in reprisal attacks after its own soldiers died. Soyinka
said the Nigerian military likely had committed “violations of
fundamental human rights” in its assaults and that innocent people have
been killed. However, he said soldiers had begun to refine their tactics
and rely more on intelligence gathering rather “than just a blitzkrieg
approach.”
“This is a new problem with the military,” Soyinka said. “They have
never had to cope with this kind of insurgency. So the military itself
is making a lot of blunders.”
Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 for those works, the first African honored with the award.
No comments:
Post a Comment