What Got Boko Haram a Really Big Head Start

While this blog focuses on practices in Nigeria, it is only an example of what has become a pervasive global practice. According to Amnesty International, the use of torture has increased 600% if the past decade and is still routinely used in 141 countries.

The information gleaned from these unreliable procedures often results in more arrests and more tortures as interrogation victims feel they have to “give someone up” – possibly an innocent – just to stop the pain. It makes voluntary cooperation with authorities unlikely (what if they want more from me?), turns just plain folks into government-hating citizens, occasionally angry enough to betray their own country. Mistrust, distrust, hatred, rage. So much of the violence we see in so many parts of the world was born of these practices.

When Boko Haram first surfaced in Northern Nigeria, it began winning the hearts and minds of the locals simply by killing the solider/police most responsible for these interrogation abuses, challenging these imperious forces who acted more like brutal invaders than officers of the law they were supposed to enforce. Indeed, soldier/police abused and pummeled their citizens without limits, often seeking bribes and “protection money” to refrain from inflicting their “violence under the mantle of government authority” on their own people.

An Amnesty International report published September 18^th notes that Nigerian “Security forces are able to act in a climate of impunity. This report reveals the experiences of former detainees who have been tortured in police and military custody and the government’s failure to prevent such violations or to bring suspected perpetrators to justice.”

Nigeria is simply so corrupt that there are literally no internal government forces remotely capable of stemming this wide-spread practice. As horrible as Boko Haram’s current practices are, including the applying comparable practices but adding mass murder and kidnapping to erase Western influence from the region, they are often seen as the lesser of two evils by locals.

“Torture has become such an integral part of policing in Nigeria that many stations have an informal torture officer, Amnesty International says… Both the military and police use a wide range of torture methods including beatings, nail and teeth extractions and other sexual violence, it says… One woman accused of theft in Lagos said she was sexually assaulted, and had tear gas sprayed into her vagina.

“Entitled Welcome to Hell Fire, [the Amnesty International report referenced aboves,] says people are often detained in large dragnet operations and tortured as punishment, to extort money or to extract ‘confessions’ as a way to solve cases… [While these techniques antedated and incited Boko Haram’s spectacular growth, the] use of torture is particularly extreme in the north-east in the war against Boko Haram Islamist militants, Amnesty says.

“The UK-based rights group says between 5,000 and 10,000 people have been arrested there since 2009, and executions [without the benefit of a trial or a conviction] in overcrowded detention facilities are common.

“A teenage boy, [disfigured with molten plastic], was among 50 people arrested by the army in Pokiskum in Yobe state last year on suspicion being a member of the Boko Haram… At the time he was 15 years old and spent three weeks in custody in Damaturu and said he was beaten continuously with gun butts, batons and machetes.” BBC.com, September 18^th.

You have to ask yourself how groups that inflict mass horrors get started in the first place. It may come from “nothing left to lose” hopelessness as callous nations ignore the immediate needs of hordes of displaced citizens – as occurred in both Syria and Iraq as global warming reduced hundreds of thousands of once productive farms to permanent dust. Or it can be a reaction to brutal governments inflicting torture – often motivated simply to secure bribes and protection money – under the guise of justice and crime-solving.

And as we have seen with the Islamic State’s mimicking the orange uniforms of our Guantanamo prison facility and applying the same waterboarding techniques which the United States admitted using, they are happy to advertise our bully-torturer reputation to the world, even as their ultra-violence exceeds anything we have seen in centuries. It seems pretty clear that too many irregular (government?) forces around the world feel fully justified using torture on U.S. captives simply as a quid pro quo to our own notorious practices. They we have forsworn using these techniques is a subtlety that is lost on them.

Our commitment to root out torturers, to decry the practice and seek prosecution and universal condemnation for those who condone and practice torture, is really a powerful gesture that may stem the rise of violent rebels, particularly those with killing the United States as their long-term goal.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and whether we do it for our own selfish reasons or because it is morally the only correct choice, we must join together to stop torture wherever we find it.