Nigeria

Africa

Niger counterinsurgency sparks displacement crisis

The French-backed military campaign against Islamist militants in Niger is claiming victories against the insurgency that has mounted in the country since 2015. Niger’s defense ministry claims that over the past month, “120 terrorists have been neutralized,” a presumed euphemism for killed. The operation has centered on the Tillabéri region near the borders with Mali and Burkina Faso, where a state of emergency has been in place for two years. The claimed progress comes amid a massive displacement crisis, however. According to UNICEF, nearly 78,000 people have been displaced in Tillabéri and adjoining regions. Nearly 3 million people in Niger, more than half children, are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance, amid risks posed by insecurity, malnutrition, recurrent disease epidemics and outbreaks, cyclical floods, droughts and displacement. (Photo: UNHCR)

Africa

Massacre in Cameroon’s conflicted western region

At least 22 people were killed in an attack in Cameroon’s Northwest region, UN officials report—the latest incident in a wave of violence to shake the country’s restive English-speaking regions. The attack in Ntumbo village left 14 children dead—including nine under the age of five—according to the officials. Opposition groups said the army was responsible, but the military blamed the explosion of fuel containers during a gunfight with separatists. Some 8,000 people have fled anglophone areas in recent weeks for Nigeria, following rising violence involving the army and separatist groups, who called for a boycott of parliamentary and municipal elections earlier this month. (Map: IRIN)

Africa

Vigilantism fears in Nigeria’s conflicted north

Traditional rulers in Nigeria’s strife-torn north are warning that vigilante militias now forming to fight Boko Haram are a sign of a generalized social breakdown in the region. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar, told a public meeting in Kaduna that the new paramilitaries could themselves metamorphose into terror groups. “Governors must see that they do more to address insecurity, just imagine that there are over 50,000 orphans. They will be worse than Boko Haram if allowed to grow without proper care,” he said. Abubakar is chair of the Northern Traditional Rulers Council, but a youth-led Coalition of Northern Groups has emerged outside control of the traditional rulers, and launched a paramilitary network called Shege Ka Fasa to defend against the Islamist militias. (Photo: Sahara Reporters)

North America

Court hears arguments on Trump’s travel ban

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit began hearing oral arguments in International Refugee Assistance Project v. Donald Trump, a case challenging the administration’s travel bans. The plaintiffs argue that, despite the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Hawaii, their case is not barred. They contend that the high court simply addressed the preliminary injunction, and not the merits of the overall travel ban, while the administration argues that Trump v. Hawaii settled the constitutionality of the proclamation. (Photo: Syria Solidarity NYC)

Africa

Nigeria: army runs ‘child detention camp’

Human Rights Watch reports that the Nigerian military has been arbitrarily detaining thousands of children, some as young as five years old, for suspected involvement with the armed group Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, commonly known as Boko Haram. According to HRW, the military often detains children based on little or no evidence. Many children were arrested after fleeing Boko Haram attacks on their villages, or while seeking refuge. Some of the detained girls had been abducted or forced to become Boko Haram “wives.” Based on interviews with former child detanees, HRW reports that conditions at Giwa military barracks, the main detention facility, are inhumane, with detainess subject to severe overcrowsing and extreme heat. (Photo: Nigeria Today)

Africa

Ambazonia leaders on trial in Cameroon

The 10 Ambazonian leaders facing trial before a military tribunal in Cameroon's capital Yaounde are disputing the tribunal's authority to judge them, denying Cameroonian sovereignty over their homeland. They also deny their own Cameroonian nationality. asserting that they are citizens of Ambazonia, or the former British Southern Cameroons—a country the Yaounde tribunal says "does not yet exist." The defendants are known as the "Nera 10," for the hotel in Abuja, Nigeria, where they were detained by security agents in January 2018 and forcibly deported to Cameroon. They had been seeking asylum in Nigeria following Cameroon's violent crackdown on the Ambazonia independence movement. The lead defendant is Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, president of the declared Ambazonian government. Since the trial opened in November, violence has again escalated in Ambazonia, where some 400,000 have now been displaced. (Photo via Journal du Cameroun)

Africa

Podcast: the struggle in Ambazonia

In Episode 27 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Eben Egbe and Amy Dalton of the Global Initiative to end the Cameroons Colonial Conflict (Gi3C), who discuss the independence struggle in Ambazonia—a territory that was illegally annexed by Cameroon following the end of colonial rule in 1960. The past year has seen a terrible increase in state terror in Ambazonia from the French-backed neo-colonial Cameroon authorities, with protesters fired upon by helicopter gunships, and finally villages burned by military forces, sending the residents fleeing into the bush. Some 400,000 people have been internally displaced, with a further 20,000 having crossed the border into Nigeria as refugees. Cameroon also receives military aid from the US, ostensibly for the fight against Boko Haram in the north of the country—but this same military is now being unleashed against the civilian populace in the unrelated conflict in Ambazonia in the south. The Gi3C has issued an urgent call for the UN Human Rights Council, which convenes for it's 40th annual meeting this week in Geneva, to send a fact-finding delegation to the region. Listen on SoundCloud , and support our podcast via Patreon. (Photo: Ambazonia representatives with flag, far right, at France meeting of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, via Bareta News)

Africa

Nigeria: ‘war crimes’ in fight against Boko Haram

Thousands of women and girls who survived the brutal rule of the Boko Haram armed group have since been further abused by the Nigerian security forces who claim to be rescuing them, said Amnesty International in a new report. The report reveals how the Nigerian military and its paramilitary arm, the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), have separated women from their husbands and confined them in remote "satellite camps," where they have been raped, sometimes forced to submit in exchange for food. Amnesty International has collected evidence that thousands have starved to death in the camps in Borno state since 2015. (Photo: IRIN)

Planet Watch

Oil prices surge: vindication is tedious

We've been told for the past several years now that the depressed oil prices were permanent, thanks to fracking and the surge in US domestic production. Now prices are rising again, due to a convergence of crises in major producers: escalating tensions among the Gulf states, labor unrest in Nigeria, deepening instability in Venezuela. The US was able to contain the price spike after the ISIS irruption in 2014 by boosting its own production. This trick isn't going to work forever.

Africa

Nigeria: Biafra headed for new genocide?

Up to 20 were reported killed when Nigerian army troops raided the home of Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The raid follows deadly clashes between Igbo IPOB militants and ethnic Hausa and Fulani residents in several areas across Nigeria's southeast. President Buhari accuses the IPOB of a "deliberate and sinister agenda to provoke soldiers into killing innocent people."

Africa

Niger: army massacres displaced peasants

Niger's army killed 14 displaced peasants who were apparently mistaken for jihadists in a "free-fire zone" in the restive southeast, where Boko Haram militants stage regular attacks.

Planet Watch

UN moves to outlaw nuclear weapons in 2017

The UN adopted a resolution—hailed by disarmament campaigners as an important landmark—to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons.