The Guardian put the count of missing schoolgirls in Nigeria at 88 last night, with 24 more having escaped.
The Borno state education commissioner, Musa Inuwo Kubo, said on Friday night some of the latest escapees were found on Wednesday nearly 50km from their school.
Extremists had attacked schools and slaughtered hundreds of students in the past year. In recent months they began kidnapping students, who they used as cooks, sex slaves and porters.
But this week’s mass abduction was unprecedented. The attackers also burned down many houses in the town.
I don’t even think “extremists” is the right word. They seem more like psychopaths. Their only goal seems to be to kill and destroy, while having slaves to cook for and fuck them when they’re not on the job of killing and destroying.
Let me say that I recognize that I’m giving a controversial opinion, but why the fuck is journalism MORE up in arms over this than over murder?
Let me tell you, recovering from repeated rape or constant violence and threat of violence is no picnic. But I hardly think my recovery would have been faster or more successful had I only been required to deal with the one trauma of having been murdered.
I’m happy international journalism is up in arms. I’m happy that some attention is being focused on Borno and on Boko Haram. But I’m sick of people shrugging, “Oh well, it’s over now, so nothing is to be done,” when people are fucking **murdered**.
Seriously, I’ve read multiple articles that have described this as an **escalation**. Really?
Really?
I’ve got no words to respond to that. If people think terrorizing someone into cooking for you or fucking you is worse than murder, well, I can talk about the former. Whose opinion are they going to solicit on the experience of the latter?
Grilled Cheezus, I’d like to see a newspaper’s ombuds take them to task on this stuff. How thick do you have to be to describe this as escalation?
Fuck the douchegabbers who can’t take take murder as seriously as rape.
CD:
Journalism is about informing while selling, or maybe more often the other way round. Say ‘murder’ and most of the information has been conveyed in that one word. The rest of it is investigation; a mopping up exercise. Who did it? Have they been caught? Etc. Etc.
“…But I hardly think my recovery would have been faster or more successful had I only been required to deal with the one trauma of having been murdered.”
Precisely. One is altered permanently and unavoidably by assault. But then again, no recovery, no story. Well, only a short one anyway.
BTW I would be interested in your opinion on the story below:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iranian-killer-given-lastminute-reprieve-from-death-penalty-by-mother-and-father-of-victim-9266555.html
Kidnapping, rape, and slavery is far more involved than “plain” murder.
Actually they’re neither ‘extremists’ or ‘psychopaths’, they’re following the teachings of their prophet and imitating his behaviour.
It’s about time the Nigerian army pulled its collective finger out and protected innocent citizens from those predators. Is it incompetence or infiltration?
Is journalism more up in arms over this?
I don’t know if it is or not. I guess the reason I’ve posted about it repeatedly is that it’s still happening. Murder is a one-off, so there’s not much more to say, apart from fuming.
The same could apply to journalism. It’s just an ongoing story in a way that murder isn’t.
I imagine the main reason this sorta stuff gets more attention is simply because it’s less common.
I also imagine it can be rationalized away. People taken into slavery under conditions like these aren’t likely to live to long. So in a way, it can be looked at as delayed murder with a bunch of torture, abuse, and sexual assault before hand.
Or maybe it’s because Boko Haram is starting to try and do some mid-to-long term planning and is taking logisitics and such into consideration, if only in about the most horrible way possible…
I don’t know, just a couple thoughts that came to me after reading the post and comments…
It’s money.
Nigeria has all of the spectacular corruption that inevitably goes along with spectacular oil wealth. If Fukko Koran or however you spell it were operating in the south of Nigeria were the oil is they would long ago have been eradicated by the Nigerian military with generous help from the militaries of the EU nations that get the oil. As it is it’s just some shit poor peasants getting f*ked over so, who cares, the new Mercedes has just come out and the President’s wife doesn’t have enough bling.
Indeed. It’s a kind of trained lack of empathy. You vilify your opponents to the point where they simply don’t register as human anymore, so you can do anything you want and not feel bad about it. Religion is especially good at this, because it can draw on divine authority to legitimate your behavior.
You can see examples of this kind of thing in many conflicts. For example, the Bosnian conflict, which had examples of genocide and mass rape.