Quote:
Nigerian Forces Raid Militant Compound
By ADAM NOSSITER and SHARON OTTERMAN
DAKAR, Senegal — Nigerian security forces raided the compound of a leader of a militant Islamic sect in a town in northeastern Nigeria in an effort to halt an uprising that has led to hundreds of deaths in the region, news reports said Wednesday.
More than 150 women and children fled the compound as security forces shelled it with heavy weapons and exchanged gunfire with militants Tuesday night into Wednesday, witnesses said, according to news services.
The whereabouts of the alleged leader of the sect, Mohammed Yusuf, were unknown. Witnesses told Reuters that security forces were searching house to house in Maiduguri, where the compound is located, for him and other followers of the group, popularly known as Boko Haram.
The fighting came one day after Nigeria’s president, Umaru Yar’Adua, had said that the situation in the predominately Muslim north of the country was “under control” but warned that security forces would take all necessary measures to end the violence.
“These people have been organized and are penetrating our society and procuring arms and gathering information on how to make explosions and bombs to force their view on the rest of Nigerians,” Mr. Yar’Adua said, news services reported.
The police said they had made hundreds of arrests in Maiduguri and detained 53 Boko Haram followers in Kano, 300 miles west, confiscating their homemade guns and explosives. Arrests have also been made in Sokoto, in the far northwest of the country, Reuters said.
The violence, which the authorities said began with an attack on a police station in the town of Bauchi on Sunday that left at least 39 people dead, quickly spread across four states in a heavily Muslim region long troubled by religious unrest. In this instance it appeared to have been led by an obscure fundamentalist group opposed to what the authorities call “Western education.”
A local reporter, Idris Abdullahi of the News Agency of Nigeria, said Maiduguri was essentially shut down Tuesday. In a telephone interview, he said that the streets were deserted and that he had seen “100 bodies” of militants at the police headquarters; other reports spoke of as many as 260 dead there. The official death toll as of Tuesday was 55 — 50 militants and five security officers.
“The economy is paralyzed,” Mr. Abdullahi said. “Everything is closed down. There is no movement — only the military and police.” He said several churches had been burned by “hoodlums.”
Paul Lubeck, a political sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who specializes in Nigeria and Islam, said the violence had its roots in Nigeria’s severe economic difficulties.
Despite Nigeria’s immense oil wealth, about 54 percent of its population lives on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank. Widespread poverty and unemployment make parts of Nigeria a fertile breeding ground for the antiestablishment message of the sect’s leaders, Mr. Lubeck said.
“This particular movement is a movement of the dispossessed, the lumpen,” he said. “It’s not the major Islamic movement in the country. This is an attack on establishment Islam.”
A more mainstream Islamic group in Nigeria, the Jamaat Nasr al-Islam, or J.N.I., on Tuesday condemned the militants, whose name Boko Haram, is a Hausa expression meaning “Western education is prohibited.”
J.N.I. said through its acting secretary general, Abdulkarim Muazu, that the attacks on the police were “criminal.” Mr. Muazu added that “nobody is against Western education.”
“The first injunction is to read so that you improve on your life,” he said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/wo...30nigeria.html
short answer: we won't respond.
we won't say anything as the nigerian state crushes this movement more or less in the way they crush most forms of politcal dissent.
the more complicated questions are in the niger river area, which is the center of nigerian oil production. lots of tasty treats about royal dutch shell, collusion with the nigerian military and lots and lots of brutality.
but of course states don't say anything.
so nothing will happen. the united states will say nothing.
it hardly makes sense to run out the "just another failed state in a failed continent" line because it says nothing at all first and second in the process of saying nothing functions as a rationalization for saying and doing nothing. again.