Destroying Baga in order to save it
According to a US soldier’s later testimony, “The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village. It was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners. We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other […]
According to a US soldier’s later testimony, “The order we were given was to kill and destroy everything that was in the village. It was clearly explained that there were to be no prisoners. We met no resistance and I only saw three captured weapons. We had no casualties. It was just like any other Vietnamese village, old papa-sans, women and kids. I don’t remember seeing one military-age male in the entire place.” The American soldiers then shot everyone in sight.
I have never been to Baga, but I have heard of it as the source of fish and water melons from Lake Chad’s shores. Today, it could be the Nigerian My Lai. Baga has given the Nigerian government and the Nigerian military a very bad name locally and internationally. Maybe Baga was only the culmination of a long, tawdry process of the cheapening of human life in Nigeria. Over the years, life has become a cheap commodity in Nigeria as a combined result of incessant armed robbery, inter-communal clashes, accidental discharges, frequent road accidents, ritual murder and lately terrorism. Even though Nigerians are known to wail and collapse when death comes to a relative or a close friend, many Nigerians merely shrug when they hear about the death of persons they don’t know. Nigerian newspapers assist this dehumanisation process by treating large casualty figures as mere statistics. There was a nasty accident in Edo State recently where a reported 60 people died. Unlike what happens when there is an air crash, I did not see a single victim of this road accident identified in the newspapers. Nor were their relatives contacted for their comments or lavish coverage given to their funerals.
The Nigerian Army is aware of this; it knows that when scores of people die, some opposition parties, human rights groups and some National Assembly members from that zone will make some noise, but in the end nothing will come out of it. No soldier will be punished for this atrocity, as was the case in Odi and Zaki Biam. After all, the policemen who extra-judicially executed Boko Haram sect leaders in 2009 were only apprehended and charged to court when Boko Haram advanced it as its reason for taking up arms. Even though the men were charged to court, nothing has been heard about the case for more than a year now. The reluctance of police authorities here to punish their officers and men for terrible infractions is well known. A case in point was the Black Maria episode of 1980, when policemen packed 70 people into a Black Maria truck and left it standing in the hot sun for three hours in the premises of a Lagos magistrate’s court. Even though the prisoners were shouting and banging at the door, the policemen refused to open it until most of them suffocated to death. President Shehu Shagari’s order for the culprits’ prosecution was mostly ignored.
One would have thought that by yesterday, 9 days after the sacking of Baga, the senior officers sent by the Chief of Defence Staff to investigate what happened would have arrested the operation’s commander along with his platoon commanders and hauled them before a court martial. If he received orders from higher military quarters to do that, we expect the senior officers to have been cashiered by now. Any ordinary soldiers who obeyed “orders” and fired at civilians should have been rounded up too. I say this because when Sgt Ahmadu Rege said he shot Colonel Ibrahim Taiwo during the abortive coup of 1976 because his immediate superior, a Lieutenant, told him to do so, he was arrested, tried and executed anyway. Then Army Chief Lt Gen TY Danjuma went to Jaji soon afterwards and delivered an address, saying any soldier who obeys an illegal order would personally answer for it. Has that rule changed?
It is not only the military brass; the Minister of State for Defence should have resigned by now to take responsibility for the evil deeds of her men. Back in 1978 when the Italian police discovered the body of abducted former Prime Minister Aldo Moro stuffed in the boot of a small car, the Interior Minister resigned and accepted responsibility for the police’s failure to rescue Aldo Moro. As a schoolboy then, I marvelled at the Italian sense of honour [cough!]. Sometimes it gets more serious than that. As soon as Emperor Hirohito decided that the Japanese Imperial Army should surrender in 1945, War Minister General Anami committed seppuku. His son and his son-in-law sat on a sofa, sipped sake and watched as their father knelt down before a shrine and drove a samurai short sword into his own stomach. It was a matter of honour.
The sacking of Baga was done in an operation assisted by troops from two neighbouring African countries, Chad and Niger Republic. Did the Nigeriens and Chadians join in the sacking of Baga the way some Nigerian tribesmen do; if I see my neighbour beating his son, without asking questions I will pick a cane and join in the beating?
The death of a soldier in battle is very traumatic to his platoon mates who figure that it could have been themselves. Soldiers here are also right to worry that many civilians in Nigeria do not see the death of a soldier or a policeman as a sufficiently serious event. They tend to think that soldiers are paid to do this job and they knew the risks they were taking when they signed up. It is a very deleterious feeling, but somehow Nigerians are not the only ones who feel that way. I remember one 1985 edition of Newsweek magazine marking ten years since the end of the Viet Nam War. One American woman said she wrote a letter to New York Times seeking information about her missing son, a bomber pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam. When her letter was published, she received a letter from a man in New York City who said, “If your son did not mind going over there to bomb innocent children, he got what he deserved, and as his parents if you brought him up that way, then you are also getting your just deserts.”
As soon as the siege on Baga was relaxed a bit, NEMA and the Red Cross rushed it with relief supplies while the Borno State Government swiftly undertook to pay for the treatment of wounded persons and to rebuild burnt homes. That however is the easy part; who can bring back the dead, who can heal traumatised psyches and who will rebuild the shattered lives of fish and water melon traders? Baga is the third episode of its kind in Nigeria in about 11 years, after Odi and Zaki Biam. If nothing is done about this one, then it’s like the military has got a blank cheque to commit many more such atrocities in future either as reprisal attacks for the death of soldiers or in the course of anti-insurgent operations.
Why must Baga be destroyed in order to dislodge a Boko Haram garrison that sneaked up into the town and took control of affairs against the locals’ own wishes? Maybe Baga is the Nigerian Ben Tre. In 1968 the US military bombed and shelled the South Vietnamese town of Ben Tre. In the process they inflicted untold civilian casualties. Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett filed a story quoting a US Army Major to have said that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” From the Viet Cong, that is. It now looks like the Nigerian Army destroyed Baga in order to save it. From Boko Haram, that is.