Military’s belated response

The cases of 614 would be reviewed, while cases of some 500 others would go for trial. Though belated, the decision is an important shift from its obdurate position regarding serious charges of human right abuses made against it. International norms demand that those found to be on the wrong side of the law, even […]

The cases of 614 would be reviewed, while cases of some 500 others would go for trial. Though belated, the decision is an important shift from its obdurate position regarding serious charges of human right abuses made against it. International norms demand that those found to be on the wrong side of the law, even in a war situation that the government and the military believe they are engaged with Boko Haram, should be treated humanely.
In the three years that the insurgency has raged, the military’s attitude to the issue of the rights of those apprehended and detained as suspects leaves much to be desired; and it reflects poorly on the image of the military and, by extension that of the country. It amounts to an abridgement of the rights of those caught, sometimes in arbitrary and random sweeps, and put in detention without trial. In conditions where armed insurgents daily imperil lives and property of law abiding citizens through senseless killings and maiming, the fate of those caught and detained would however be the least to be considered in the campaign to restore peace, law and order. Individual freedom in this circumstance, the argument goes, cannot be more important than the campaign to defeat insurgency threatening to rend asunder the fabric of the nation. But it does not obviate the necessity to ensure that the innocent are not treated like the prime suspects.
Ridding the country of insurgency can never be justification for flagrantly flouting the law by clamping people in jail and holding them interminably without trial.
It is just as well that at last the military has heeded public calls-and international pressure- to address the salient matter of its detainees, which as the JIT investigation has indicated, cannot all be members of Boko Haram. The 164 of them that would soon regain their freedom have been made to suffer incarceration with all the mental torture their detention entails and the anguish suffered by relatives and dependants, a fact that underscores the need to take an especial care to keep military operations within the bounds of the law, no matter how difficult this may be.
The fact that out of the detainees the military authorities claim are in their custody, only 500 would be sent to trial, with about 614 to be reviewed, indicates the indiscriminate manner people were whisked off and thrown into jail, which should have necessitated sorting them out promptly without delay so as not to deny the innocents their right to freedom unduly. The prolonged incarceration of people has, perhaps unwittingly, challenges the authorities to respond to the widespread suspicion that the military used the campaign against insurgency to carry out extrajudicial killings. As is being made clear now by the military itself not all those in its custody are all insurgents, it follows that many of those so killed may quite simply have been innocent souls whose lives have been needlessly snuffed out.
It is to guard against this arbitrary use of force to deny innocent people their right to life that in all situations the supremacy of the law must always be upheld. Certainly, the military’s role in maintaining peace and order is recognised and cannot be gainsaid but it must discharge this duty, onerous as it is, under the rubric of the law of the land. Anything short of this makes any claims to rule of law not only laughable but also a slippery road to anarchy perpetrated by the same organ charged with safeguarding people’s lives.
Implicit in all this is that the military should not only declare how many people are indeed in its custody and what is each person’s culpability in the insurgency; but their names public. With insurgent acts appearing to ebb, it has become imperative for Nigeria to burnish its image as a respecter of human rights under even the most difficult conditions. Those incriminated should be sent to court with the full complement of defence lawyers to argue their cases based on established facts; others against whom nothing incriminating has be established should be allowed to go home without further delay. It is bad enough to have kept them against their will; it would be criminal and unconscionable to continue doing so for no just cause.