Amid all the horrors that regularly compete for the world's attention, missing chibok school girls shouldn't be forgotten. For
one thing, the teenage captives are symbols of the importance of
educating girls. They were all seized after returning to school in a
dangerous area to take their final exams. Among them are future lawyers,
doctors and teachers — women who could someday help lead their country.
For
another, there's evidence that the international uproar might have
helped raise the cost of harming the girls too high even for Boko Haram,
an extremist group that regularly kidnaps and kills in its quest to
bring a brutal form of fundamentalist Islam to parts of Africa.
The
Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that U.S. surveillance flights
spotted large groups of girls, suspected of being the captives, in
remote parts of Nigeria. That dovetails with reports that Boko Haram —
whose name means “Western education is forbidden” — is treating at least
some of the kidnapped girls with unusual care.
Leaders of the
group, after first warning that the girls would be sold into slavery,
later offered to trade them for Boko Haram prisoners held by the
Nigerian government. The world's focus on the girls has made them both
valuable pawns and risky victims. The response of the Nigerian
government, which has often seemed overmatched in its five-year struggle
with Boko Haram, doesn't inspire much confidence. President Goodluck
Jonathan at first largely ignored the incident, then claimed activists
invented it, and finally yielded to pressure to accept international
assistance. Jonathan, in Washington this week for a U.S.-Africa
summit , says his government is making every effort to find the girls.
But he offers no evidence, is dismissive of the foreign help and argues
that divulging any details could compromise the mission.
Jonathan
has said repeatedly that a military operation to free the girls would
probably result in the deaths of many, all but ruling it out. In the
place of military action is bargaining, and Nigerian leaders have sent
ambiguous signals about who is negotiating and what's on the table.
The
challenge of fighting militants who casually sacrifice civilian lives
in the name of religion isn't confined to Nigeria. American forces have
struggled inconclusively with extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan for
more than a decade.
The world's anger can sometimes seem a weak
candle next to the flame of intolerance and murder, but in the case of
the captive Nigerian schoolgirls, it's important to keep it burning.
Culled from TNV