Lindsey German Guardian/UK 6 May, 2014
It
seems almost beyond belief that more
than 200 girls can be kidnapped from a school in northern Nigeria,
held by the terrorist group Boko Haram, and threatened on a video – shown
worldwide – with being sold into slavery by their captors.. This tragedy
touches the hearts of everyone, evoking a feeling of revulsion not only at the
danger and loss of freedom itself, but at the assumption that for young girls
their destination must be forced marriage and servitude, not education. There is rightly anger that so little has
been done by the Nigerian government to find the girls, and that those who have
demonstrated in huge numbers against President Goodluck Jonathan have
themselves been accused of causing trouble or even temporarily arrested.
But we
should be wary of the narrative now emerging. This follows a wearily familiar
pattern, one we have already seen in south Asia and the Middle East, but that
is increasingly being applied to Africa as well. It is the refrain that
something must be done and that "we" – the enlightened west – must be
the people to do it. The call has been for western intervention to help find
the girls, and to help "stabilise" Nigeria in the aftermath of their
kidnap. The British government has offered "practical help".
Yet western
intervention has time and again failed to deal with particular problems and –
worse – has led to more deaths, displacements and atrocities than were originally
faced. All too often it has been justified with reference to women's rights,
claiming that enlightened military forces can create an atmosphere where women
are free from violence and abuse. The evidence is that the opposite is the
case.
Women's rights
were a major justification for the Afghanistan war, launched in 2001, when
Cherie Blair and Laura Bush supported their husbands' war as a means of
liberating Afghan women. Today, with millions displaced and tens of thousands
dead, Afghanistan remains one of the worst countries on earth for women to
live, with forced marriage, child marriage, rape and other atrocities still
occurring widely.
And
western intervention is already firmly embedded in Africa. Barack Obama has his
military forces engaged in West Africa through their Predator drone
base in Niger, which borders northern Nigeria. It also borders Mali,
the scene of recent French and British
interventions, and Libya, object of a disastrous western bombing
campaign in 2011 that has left that country in a state of civil war and collapse. US drones also operate in Djibouti, Ethiopia
and just across the Red Sea in Yemen. The west has been engaged in proxy wars
in Somalia in recent years. If Islamism
is now a threat to western interests in growing parts of Africa, it is one that
they have played a large part in creating.
But there is
another war going on in Africa: economic war. A continent so rich in natural
resources sees many of its citizens live in terrible conditions. In President
Jonathan's Nigeria, economic growth has not trickled down to the poor.
Healthcare and education are beyond the reach of many.
There is
widespread corruption, yet weapons and armies are paid to protect the wealthy
and the foreign companies, such as Shell, that want to access the country's
resources, especially oil. This corruption and inequality is not separate from
the role of the west, but an integral part of a system that is prepared to go
to war over resources such as oil and gas, but will not go to war on poverty or
to provide education for all.
It is this
background that informs the terrible plight of the kidnapped girls in Nigeria.
It will not be improved by more western weapons and armies on the ground or in
the air. [Abridged]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/06/western-intervention-nigeria-kidnapped-girls-corruption
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