Courtney McGrailAs many as 2,000 people have been killed and several churches burned in Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria since the January 3 capture of the military base at Baga, on the Chad border. Amnesty International say most of those killed were women, children and the elderly, with about 30,000 people having fled.
Agenzia Fides reports that Fr Patrick Tor Alumuku, the Archdiocese of Abuja’s director of social communications, said while official state media is reporting 100 deaths, “in general the national media tend to reduce the number of victims so as not to further inflame minds”. He explained that the Islamist militant group’s aim was to create a caliphate in northern Nigeria, with its numbers having been boosted by fresh recruits from Libya and Mali.
Others have been joining in Niger, according to Niamey’s Archbishop Michel Cartatéguy, it generally being thought that most do so for economic rather than religious reasons. Claiming there were about 150,000 refugees in Diffa on Nigeria’s border, he lamented the lack of attention the crisis was receiving in the international press.
His concerns were echoed by the president of the Nigerian Bishops’ Conference, Ignatius Kaigama, Archbishop of Jos. Speaking to the Independent on Sunday, he contrasted the West’s response to last week’s terror attacks in Paris with its relative inaction in response to the rise of Boko Haram. Warning that trouble would spread to Europe, he said: “When it comes to the international community, they express their solidarity but it isn’t really concrete help.”
“There has to be a concrete collaboration between Europe and America,” he insisted, “to bring this to an end”.