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GENAVA: The atrocities of Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram, if confirmed, would constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said here today. Speaking at a special session for a draft resolution titled ‘Draft atrocities committed by the terrorist group Boko Haram and its effects on human rights in the affected countries’ at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said children are used as “expendable cannon fodder” by the militant group.
“The group has also repeatedly used young children as human bombs, including a case of a 14-year-old carrying a baby on her back who detonated a bomb in a marketplace. These reports, if confirmed, would constitute war crimes,” he added. “I am also profoundly concerned about the growing ethnic and sectarian dimensions of the conflict. There is no doubt that Christian communities have been targeted, but to date, the majority of its victims appear to have been Muslims,” the UN rights chief said.
Boko Haram, loosely translated as “western education is forbidden”, is particularly against girls’ education and in one instance abducted 276 school girls last year, the fate of whom is yet unknown. Ajit Kumar, India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Offices in Geneva, in a statement to the council, said that India welcomed the special session and added that, “We must adopt a holistic approach aimed at zero-tolerance towards terrorism. The scourge of terrorism has to be comprehensively fought and eradicated in all its forms and manifestations”.
India urged for an early adoption of the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism since terrorism does not yet have an agreed upon definition. “When dealing with terrorism, the normative framework of international conventions and protocols is found to be deficient,” Kumar said.
In recent weeks combined military offensives by Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger have recaptured swathes of Boka Haram territory in the north east of the country. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reveals mass graves, “evident signs of slaughter” and the murder of so-called “wives” — women and girls held in slavery — as the government troops advanced.
Nigeria’s Permanent Secretary to the UN offices, Danjuma Nanpon Sheni, said that the situation has been exacerbated by the fact that “we are dealing with faceless monsters”. He added that the international community should be very concerned because of the networks Boko Haram has forged with groups like Islamic State and Al-Shabaab.
The six-year insurgency which started off as a localised crisis in Nigeria’s Maiduguri city and adjoining villages, has acquired disturbing regional dimensions around Lake Chad, killing at least 15,000 people since 2009, displacing over a million others with 168,000 fleeing to neighbouring countries.
