Thursday, 24 April 2014

Boko Haram’s roots in Nigeria long predate the Al-Qaeda era

Boko Haram’s roots in Nigeria long predate the Al-Qaeda era
Analysis: While the group is linked with Salafist groups in North Africa, it’s a product of northern Nigeria’s collapse
The bomb blast near Abuja, Nigeria, on April 14 that killed at least 75 people, and the kidnapping the following day of what appeared to be more than 100 schoolgirls in the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok, have placed Boko Haram firmly at the top of local news. Security was tight in Abuja’s churches and cathedrals over the Easter weekend, and in a video released to Agence France-Presse on Sunday, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the bomb, warning, “We are in your city, but you don’t know where we are.” 

But northeastern Nigeria had been bandit country long before the emergence of Boko Haram. And while it may coincide with the growth over the past two decades of Salafist armed groups elsewhere in the region and beyond, the real context for Boko Haram's emergence is the long political and economic decline of Nigeria's northeast and enduring Kanuri opposition to northern power structures.
Writing in 1917, just three years after the amalgamation of south and north into a unified Nigeria, the colonial official Herbert Palmer reported back to London on the porous zone known colloquially by the British Foreign Office as "Central Sudan." The portent of his words repays quoting at length:
The whole Sudan belt is one country with no real geographical obstacles, with homogeneous peoples having a common religion, and with few or no real racial antipathies. They would be quite capable under certain circumstances of fighting for their faith ... though that is hardly a likely contingency in Nigeria so long as their Muslim life and social order are protected as they have been since 1903 ... There would, however, probably be a point at which their general sentiment for Islam and an instinctive desire for independence and freedom from Christian control might get the upper hand of their discretion, and assert itself.
Nigeria's predominantly Muslim north to this day maintains its fluid connections with the wider Sahel region — or "Sahelistan," as some have begun to refer to the region after the emergence of various armed Salafist groups operating across borders. The 1903 moment cited in Palmer's report refers to Lord Lugard's colonial annexation of the Sokoto Caliphate, founded in the 19th century by the Fulani leader Usman dan Fodio, who had called for "jihad" against the Hausa kingdoms of northern Nigeria. The British adopted an "indirect rule" policy, leaving administrative matters to Nigerians, consolidating the authority of an "emirate" that empowered the local Fulani elite as the "protectors" of Muslim life and social order.

But the authority of the local emirs has been steadily eroded over the years by grinding poverty, social breakdown and conflict over resources often masked in religious terms.
One precedent for Boko Haram was the 1979 revolt led by Mohammed Marwa, known as "Maitatsine" — the one who damns. He declared himself a prophet and led a rebellion against religious authority in Kano that claimed 5,000 lives. His supporters, the "Yan Tatsine," were often non-Hausa northerners alienated from local power structures and facing declining employment prospects. They are not direct precursors to Boko Haram, but they do reveal a history of violent rebellion in northern Nigeria. Boko Haram's backstory also taps into an older historical tradition of resistance to the colonial-controlled Sokoto elite led by Muhammad al-Kanem. Boko Haram's hierarchy is dominated by Kanuri people, who are descendants of the Kanem-Bornu empire.

Historical legacy aside, Boko Haram's rise has been fueled by economic decline. Lake Chad has shrunk by 90 percent in the past 40 years, drastically affecting fishing livelihoods and irrigation farming for a surrounding population of 30 million. And desertification claims more than 770 square miles of cropland every year. Boko Haram has emerged in the poorest part of Nigeria, where 71.5 percent of the population lives in absolute poverty and more than half are malnourished.

Still, despite the complex matrix of political, economic and historical trends into which it emerged, Boko Haram began as a simple local dispute. A decade ago, the radical Kanuri cleric Mohammed Yusuf had been running an effective alternative government to the Borno state Gov. Ali Modu Sheriff, providing welfare and jobs to locals who lacked access to the governor's patronage network. Yusuf was popular among the region's impoverished and disaffected youth, and his death in police custody in 2009 after an altercation at a funeral prompted many of them to take up arms and begin attacking police stations to avenge their slain leader. Yusuf was succeeded by the more militant Shekau, and the insurgency began to spread west and south.

Five years on, however, Boko Haram has morphed from a local rebellion into part of a pan-Sahelian insurgency with a diffuse set of targets, from schools and universities to the U.N. It has formed linkages sharing expertise, training camps and equipment with groups in Mali and Libya. It has now also splintered into six factions, including Ansaru — which has more direct links with Al-Shabab in Somalia and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). However, it is thought that Shekau has little operational control over these groups.

The massive increase in federal military spending on the counterinsurgency effort (the annual military budget is now $6.25 billion) has also created a perverse incentive within Nigeria's military to keep the war going. An International Crisis Group report (PDF) from earlier this month referred to “allegations that substantial sums are pocketed from defence and security appropriations by government officials, security chiefs and the contractors supplying military hardware.” 
In June 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan made the startling claim that Boko Haram had widely infiltrated Nigeria's power structure.

"Some of them are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary," Jonathan said. "Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies."
Even if Boko Haram has evolved into a national and regional insurgency, the movement's power structures may have begun to intersect with the dynamic of corruption within the state's security apparatus. At least, that's what Nigeria's president appears to believe. Others, such as Adamawa state Gov. Murtala Nyako, controversially accuse Jonathan himself of supporting Boko Haram.
A political motive for disrupting the northeast is easy to see. The International Crisis Group report notes there are now “suspicions the ruling PDP and President Jonathan, who is expected to seek a new term, are trying to suppress ballots in the region, which is largely controlled by the newly-formed opposition party the All Progressives Congress.”

Meanwhile, establishment elders such as former Chief of Air Staff Al-amin Dagash and former Minister of Finance Mallam Adamu Ciroma called a press conference in early April to query how authorities could not be aware of the use of helicopters to drop supplies to Boko Haram strongholds.
While Shekau remains the Boko Haram figurehead, the six factions of the organization, the ease with which they can penetrate secure locations in Abuja and the looming 2015 election create a far more complex picture. Even though Boko Haram has now claimed responsibility for the Abuja bomb, the State Security Service and the police are not restricting their investigations to Boko Haram. In the most recent video clip, Shekau did not even mention the Chibok kidnapping.

Political solutions are often touted as the answer to armed insurgencies, but there's little reason to expect that Nigeria's politics — and next year’s nationwide election — will produce an answer to the challenge posed by Boko Haram. The movement has established supply routes and funding sources. Caches of recovered Boko Haram weapons have been traced to Libya, and Ansaru, at least, has established links with AQIM and Al-Shabab. Nor is a "hearts and minds" approach likely to succeed when ideology may not be the key driver of the insurgency. Nor does the government in Abuja seem likely to divert resources to address the extreme poverty of the northeast; it had adopted such an “amnesty program” in response to a different insurgency in the Niger Delta largely because rebel attacks on oil pipelines there threatened state revenues. Plans to refill Lake Chad by diverting water from a tributary of the Congo are not politically feasible, and desertification is an unstoppable feature of northern life.

With these forlorn factors in mind, it is hard to see Sahelistan being anything other than violently lawless for decades to come, with its epicenter in the northeast of Nigeria. Boko Haram may by now be a mirage on the dunes fostered by alienation and merciless economic hardship; it will also remain as an opportunity to continually destabilize the Nigerian state from within. Either way, it looks as if the movement that terrorizes so many thousands of ordinary Nigerians is unlikely to be uprooted anytime soon.


Thursday, 9 January 2014

Gang guilty of trafficking 50 women for sexual exploitation in UK

Four Hungarian men and one British woman found guilty of conspiring to traffic women into UK to work as prostitutes.
 
Five members of a prostitution racket, which flew more than 50 young women into the UK from Hungary and set them up in airport hotels, student accommodation and suburban homes, have been convicted of conspiring to traffic people into the UK for sexual exploitation.Four Hungarian nationals, Mate Puskas, Zoltan Mohacsi, Istvan Toth and Peter Toth, along with Puskas's British former girlfriend, Victoria Brown, were found guilty on Tuesday following a trial at Hove crown court. Istvan and Peter Toth were convicted in their absence.

The charges relate to more than 60 incidents over a period of almost two years. The women were brought from Hungary into the UK after their "profiles" had been uploaded on to a website advertising sexual services for sale.

Customers would call mobile phones used by the gang who then arranged for them to meet young women at a hotel or in houses run by the Hungarians as brothels.
The Crown Prosecution Service, which brought the case, is preparing what it describes as an "action plan" to improve the way the criminal justice system investigates and deals with human trafficking offences. The director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, has recently held meetings with other law enforcement agencies.

The Hungarian prostitution gang operated out of an internet cafe in Croydon. "None of us can imagine how desperate the victims were in this case," said Portia Ragnauth, acting chief crown prosecutor in the south-east. "In many instances, they came to the UK to try to escape financial difficulties at home. Payments for their flights were often made by one of the five individuals convicted. Once in the UK these "debts" were used as a hold over the women who were forced to work for up to 12 hours a day.
"When the women told the group they did not want to work as prostitutes, threats would be made against them and their families back in Hungary. Threats were also made to expose the work they had been doing in the UK in their home country."

Ragneuth paid tribute to the bravery of the victims who gave evidence in the case. One woman recounted her ordeals from behind a screen in the crown court; two others who spoke via a live video-feed from Hungary.

The prosecutor added: "We know how incredibly difficult it was for them, especially as we know that the reach of this criminal group extends back to Hungary. It has not been easy for them, but we hope that today's verdict brings them justice and allows them to now move on with their lives."

The investigation was co-ordinated with police and judicial authorities in Hungary. Some of the women were said to have stayed in Sussex University student accommodation. Others were put up in houses in Eastbourne, Margate and Folkestone. Several hotels near Gatwick were also used; staff grew suspicious after they heard "muffled bangings" and found bins overflowing with toilet paper and used condoms.

All five defendants, who denied the charges, were convicted of conspiracy to traffic women into the UK for sexual exploitation contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977.

 Untold Post-War Allied Atrocities – A German Soldier’s Story

The following was sent to me by a German friend who wished to share a portion of his grandfather’s personal testimony, along with some photos and documentation, regarding his grandfather’s post-war captivity in Austria, outside of Linz:

Karl Matter 2
My Grandfather was Karl Matter. His division fought on the Hungarian border before surrendering to US forces. They fought a narrow line between the Soviets and the US and surrendered to the US side after running out of ammunition on May 9th. His Division, including others of about 20,000 men were held in an open field compound outside of Linz Austria (likely at Gallneukirchen). It was a large muddy compound just like the Rhine Meadow camps. I can assure you there were a lot more than 188 such camps that are acknowledged in the documentary.

What happened in the field is a story that I was told as a young man which I’ll never forget:
Karl Matter 3
They were placed in a muddy field with no tents, no food and no clothing, packed together for a week living in their own feces, surrounded by an enormous circling wall of hundreds US vehicles, and thousands of men. Once in a while for fun, a US guard would target practice on indiscriminate prisoners.  That was a common event I later learned, because many US soldiers never had the opportunity to claim “a kill” until after the war.

After a few days they began drinking their our own urine and eating leather. After one week with no food whatsoever, a US transport plane flew over the compound of these emaciated POW’s and dropped large Red Cross packages of butter, but nothing else. Just pure butter. Those that ate it died, because it greased their insides, causing diarrhea, and thereby, to lose whatever remaining fluids were still in their bodies. Grandfather refused to eat it, but they lost a lot of men that way. Then, the following day, a transport flew over again and dropped the Red Cross bread!  That meant, that these surrendered soldiers were deliberately refused food, which was available, for one whole week!

I later learned from my own research that local civilians were ordered not to feed them, or they would be executed as non combatant partisans aiding the enemy. The facts of the butter and bread story confirmed to me that it was an intentional, cruel and deadly plan.  The provisions were intentionally withheld for reasons of vengeance, or it was someone’s sick idea of a joke, and it was no different than the guards taking pot shots at them ‘just for fun’.
Afterwards, of those who survived the initial ordeal, the entire remaining Division, which had consisted mostly of Germans and some others from Baltic countries, was then handed over to the Russians, who executed all of them, and all within hearing distance of the US military which had transported them back over the border. But Grandfather survived because his ”Soldbuch” showed that he was born in Yugoslavia, which made him property of Tito, and not the Russians, so he was sent back to an American labor camp, but due to illness, was unable to continue working. 

Eventually reunited with his family and they escaped Tito’s concentration camps, via the Red Cross after a year or so. Perhaps closer to two years.
Karl Matter 1
Karl Matter 4
There’s also another vivid account of from my Grandfather which never made any history books, regarding the retaking of Kharkov as part of I SS Panzer Korps and the incredible war crimes that the Soviets committed on the civilian population there. It’s very sad! The story of the 3rd Waffen SS Division is not widely published and only very few survived captivity, so there were only a few autobiographical accounts. One book is “Wie ein Fels im Meer” by Karl Ulrich, the commander of one of the three regiments that made up the Division; my Grandfather’s Regiment was #3. In fact, there’s a photo of my Grandfather in that book! It well describes the final roundup of the Division like no other book, which is only available in German, but I recommend it!

Murder of former Miss Venezuela spotlights country's rampant crime

The murder of former Miss Venezuela Monica Spear and a companion in a roadside robbery was only unusual for the famous name in a country that suffers one of the world's highest murder rates.


This May 23, 2005 file photo released by Miss Universe shows Monica Spear, Miss Venezuela 2005, posing for a portrait ahead of the Miss Universe competition in Bangkok, Thailand. Venezuelan authorities say the soap-opera actress and former Miss Venezuela and her husband were shot and killed resisting a robbery after their car broke down.

Monica Spear, the 2004 Miss Venezuela and an international Spanish-language soap-opera star, was shot along with her companion Henry Thomas Berry on the road between Valencia and Puerto Cabello.

They were awaiting a tow truck after their car broke down, according to local news reports. Their five-year-old daughter was hurt in the suspected robbery, but is in stable condition.
Many took to social media to lament Spear’s slaying and share condolences. But take away the famous name and the deaths were all too familiar in a country where “express” kidnappings – in which victims are driven around town and forced to drain their bank accounts at gunpoint – are reported weekly and crime rates are notoriously high.

Australia’s worst killers: 10 of our most evil murderers destined to spend life behind bars

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/australias-worst-killers-to-of-our-most-evil-murders-destined-to-spend-life-behind-bars/news-story...