Still On The Need For Negotiated End To Insurgency

“ No one is foolish as to prefer war to peace, in which, instead of sons burying fathers, fathers bury their sons”---Herodotus

In the last media chat of President Goodluck Jonathan, the President dashed the hope of a peaceful resolution of the Boko Haram sect insurgency against the federal government, when he asserted that there was no ongoing negotiation to bring the insurgency to an end. In fact the president said that the federal government will not negotiate with a “faceless group”.

The media chat took place shortly after the Boko Haram sect announced a cease fire in which they nominated former head of state, General Muhammadu Buhari as the leader of its negotiation team. General Buhari promptly turned down the offer, a move that was endorsed by his friends and associates who do not want the presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change(CPC), in the 2011  election to be remotely associated with the sect.

The President’s position was surprisingly contrary to the earlier position of the Senior Special Assistance to the President on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati who said that government was open to dialogue with the sect and that indeed there was an ongoing negotiation through “back channels”. Apparently Abati was speaking for himself and not for the government.

Meanwhile, since the President’s tough stand over negotiated end to the insurgency, the sect or variant of it has allegedly carried out dare devil attack on a protestant church in Jaji Military Cantonment in Kaduna State where many innocent worshippers were killed by suicide bombers. The next day in another daring attack the insurgents attacked the heavily fortified Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) headquarters in Abuja and allegedly freed 150 of its members held in SARS detention facilities. The police however denied media report that over 150 insurgents escaped from detention following the attack on SARS headquarters insisting that only about 30 armed robbers escaped and that efforts were being made to recapture them. Whatever may be the true position the fact remains that the asymmetrical nature of the present insurgency is making it difficult for the security agents to rein them in. The collateral damage of moving forcefully against the sect has a lot of consequences for President Jonathan.

I know that there are some hardliners who think that the government negotiating with Boko Haram is a sign of weakness. Some even mischievously think that former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s  Odi and Zaki Biam ‘treatment’ should be the template for Jonathan to use against the insurgents at their bases in Borno and Yobe States. Even Obasanjo has bought that gimmick when recently he spoke in Warri and in a thinly veiled attack on Jonathan’s handling of the insurgency said that if the ‘tough’ method he used in Odi and Zaki Biam had been applied over all the years that Boko Haram appeared on the nation’s security lexicon, the group would have been history by now. And as President Jonathan rightly pointed out during the media chat, the Odi Massacre in which most of those killed by the soldiers were innocent old men, women and children, did not stop militancy in the Niger Delta. In fact it exacerbated the situation to the level that it took a more circumspect leader like President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to bring a negotiated end to the militancy in the Niger Delta. By that action of Yar’Adua, Nigeria today exports more crude oil from the Niger Delta than during the time of Obasanjo with all his braggart about how tough he was with the militants during his time in power.

There are also some Nigerians who want Jonathan to move against Boko Haram the same way United States moved against Al-Qaeda after the group attacked United States on September 11, 2001 because since then to this day, Al-Qaeda has not been successful in carrying out another attack on US soil as the group’s leaders are on the run being hunted by the Americans. Those who compare the way America is dealing with Al-Qaeda to the challenges faced by Jonathan’s administration in the Boko Haram insurgency missed the point. Firstly, America was facing an external enemy that uses unconventional methods of warfare that the world’s possessor of greatest war machine ever known to man was forced to use unmanned drones that  kill militants and innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis etc(note: no American citizen is usually killed in the collateral damage caused by drones). As a matter of fact when  American citizens was killed in Yemen through a drone attack ordered by President Barack Obama, American lefts began to question the source of the power that gave Obama the right to order the execution of an American citizen even if that American is a well known terrorist.
It would be recalled that the killing of three US citizens, one a 16-year-old boy, in targeted drone strikes last year were considered unlawful and violated their constitutional rights by not affording them due process, according to a lawsuit filed by their relatives.
Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was placed on a CIA  "kill list" last year, died in a targeted strike in Yemen that also killed Samir Khan, an alleged propagandist for Al-Qaeda, in the Arabian Pensinsula. Al-Awlaki's teenage son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate strike 200 miles away in which six others died two weeks later.
The lawsuit accuses, Leon Panetta, the secretary of defence, David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, and two military commanders of authorising and directing unlawful killings. President Barack Obama is not named in the lawsuit: presidents are immune from civil suits arising from their official actions.
The complaint alleges that the deaths are part of a broader programme of deliberate and premeditated killings by the United States which rely on "vague legal standards, a closed executive process and evidence never presented to the courts".
The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, and Sarah Khan, the mother of Khan. It aims to force the Obama administration to disclose information about secret decisions behind the killing.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said: "It is about accountability. We don't want to minimise the seriousness of the allegations [against Al-Awlaki]. The question here is not whether people are guilty of crimes but whether the government is justified in killing them."

Secondly, the American security agents were not facing Al-Qaeda on the streets of New York, California or New Jersey which would have resulted in huge collateral damage on innocent Americans. Had it been that the United States were fighting with Al-Qaeda in the streets of America we would have known if America will not be forced to negotiate with Al-Qaeda. But I am pretty sure that if Al-Qaeda is a home grown insurgency that understands the United States terrains as much as the federal and states security agencies, the United States government may not be use the drones in their country against them when they know that more innocent bystanders would be killed in the process of killing one Al-Qaeda member. From the legal action taken by the family of alleged American terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has posted messages on YouTube supporting terrorist attack against his own country, to protest his “unlawful” killing by American drone, it is obvious that if American soldiers were facing Al-Qaeda in the streets of America there will be thousands of law suits against the government for the death of innocent bystanders which will force the government to negotiate with Al-Qaeda(that is the negative consequences of democracy and rule of law).

There are media reports that in many parts of Borno and Yobe States, for any success recorded against Boko Haram, far more innocent Nigerians were also killed. That is why even though the general population in these states are said to be unhappy about the activities of the sect, they also resent the Military Joint Task Force(JTF). Given the difficulty in isolating the insurgents from the general population it will be pretty difficult for Jonathan to ‘enjoy’ his presidency without negotiating with the group. Unless of course he is ready for a long drawn insurgency war that will make it pretty difficult to run a successful campaign in the north between 2014 and 2015. It should be noted that a negotiated settlement is necessary to avert the loss of more lives. Jonathan and Nigeria have been condemned to negotiate with Boko Haram. Boko Haram has touched the raw nerves in the country and emotions are high. However this is the time for men of reason to proffer solution to the problem. I have given my own suggestions, others should give theirs. This is not time for people to be insulting each other based on tribe and religion in the social media. This is time for peace and constructive dialogue.