One Year Anniversary: World Renews Calls For The Return Of Chibok Girls.

Protesters around the world yesterday remembered the 219 Nigeria’s Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants one year ago.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the world must “never forget the kidnapped Chibok girls”. Ceremonies marking the anniversary were held in Lagos in France, the United Kingdom and United States.

High-profile figures such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and US First Lady Michelle Obama were among those who drew attention to their plight on Twitter last year under the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag.

Since then, the activists who began that campaign have spoken of relatives’ anguish at still not knowing what happened to the girls, and have criticised the Federal Government for not doing enough to find them.

In Ireland, government officials called for urgent action to rescue the schoolgirls.

Speaking yesterday, Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Charlie Flanagan, and Minister of State for Development, Trade Promotion, and North South Co-Operation, Seán Sherlock, encouraged the Multinational Joint Taskforce to defeat the terrorist group.

Meanwhile, at least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual slavery and trained to fight, says a new Amnesty International report released on the first anniversary of the abduction of the Chibok school girls.

The human rights watchdog said the 90-page report, based on nearly 200 witness accounts, including 28 with abducted women and girls who escaped captivity, and titled Our Job is to Shoot, Slaughter and Kill: Boko Haram’s reign of terror, documents multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Boko Haram, including the killing of at least 5,500 civilians as it rampaged across north-east Nigeria in 2014 and early 2015.

The Amnesty International report sheds new light on the brutal methods used by the armed group in north-east Nigeria where men and boys are regularly conscripted or systematically executed and young women and girls are abducted, imprisoned and in some cases raped, forcibly married and made to participate in armed attacks, sometimes on their own towns and villages.

“The evidence presented in this shocking report, one year after the horrific abduction of the Chibok girls, underlines the scale and depravity of Boko Haram’s methods,” Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said.

“Men and women, boys and girls, Christians and Muslims, have been killed, abducted and brutalised by Boko Haram during a reign of terror, which has affected millions.

“Recent military successes might spell the beginning of the end for Boko Haram, but there is a huge amount to be done to protect civilians, resolve the humanitarian crisis and begin the healing process.”

The report contains graphic evidence, including new satellite images, of the scale of devastation that Boko Haram has left in its wake. On Boko Haram abductions, Amnesty International observed that the 276 schoolgirls abducted from Chibok gained global attention with the help of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, but it noted that the missing schoolgirls are “only a small proportion of the women, girls, young men and boys abducted by Boko Haram”.

Sun News