A Democratic Congresswoman said Wednesday that a key piece of human rights legislation is impeding the US-backed Nigerian government’s fight against the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas), said that a landmark law authored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), is constraining the sharing of intelligence between US Africa Command and the Nigerian military.
“What I would say to my colleagues, the very eager aspect of the Africa Command, that is not the civilian part, but the Africa Command wants to utilize its intelligence capacity,” she said Wednesday at a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing.
“Many of you know the Leahy provisions, which have been appreciated for what they stood for, by human rights,” she added. “But that is a bar for the extended utilization of intelligence.”
The Leahy amendment, a ban on security assistance to systemic human rights abusers, has “impeded bilateral security cooperation as a result of the Nigerian government’s heavy-handed approach,” according to a January 2014 Christian Science Monitor report.
The publication noted that there have been “many allegations of human rights violations by the Nigerian military in its fight against Boko Haram.”
“In April [2013], Human Rights Watch published satellite imagery from the town of Baga in Borno State, showing 2,275 destroyed and 125 severely damaged buildings, and asking the Nigerian government to investigate allegations that soldiers carried out widespread destruction and killing in the town,” CSM noted.
In a March op-ed in The Hill, Nigeria’s Ambassador to the United States, Adebowale Ibidapo Adefuye called on the US to offer “counter-insurgency training for our Special Forces teams, weapons and equipment, and advanced technologies for effective intelligence gathering.” He said, accordingly, that the “US should reevaluate its application of the Leahy Amendment to our military units.”
“While we have initiated investigations and prosecutions into credible allegations of abuse, Boko Haram has succeeded at times in raiding our military bases, stealing our weapons and uniforms,” Amb. Adefuye wrote. “With these disguises, Boko Haram has repeatedly conducted attacks on civilian centers so that local people and the world would blame the Nigerian military for abuses,” he claimed.
“I am not suggesting that our military, like any in the world, has not committed abuses that both need to be punished and stamped out, but one cannot simply accept every allegation as credible,” the envoy also added.
In response, Leahy said that “if the Nigerian government wants the United States to support units that have committed heinous crimes with impunity, it needs to get serious about not tolerating it.”
In another Hill op-ed, in February, a Nigerian law student took a more pragmatic approach to making the case that US law shouldn’t restrict aid to Lagos, noting how Leahy amendment waiver privileges granted to the Secretary of Defense have seen “countries such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt…constant recipients [of] US military gear.”
US assistance to Nigeria has come into focus in recent weeks. On April 5, Muhammadu Buhari was elected President of Nigeria. A former military ruler, Buhari is the first opposition candidate in the country’s history to take control using democratic means. And April 14 marked the one year anniversary of a high profile kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok by Boko Haram.
The incident sparked the “Bring Back Our Girls” movement that gained worldwide sympathy and attention. In July, despite his envoy’s later protestations in The Hill, Nigeria’s then-president, Goodluck Johnathan, accused the “Bring Back Our Girls” activists of engaging in “psychological terrorism” for refusing to meet with him. His government had previously been accused of orchestrating something of a crackdown on the movement and its supporters, according to Think Progress.
On Wednesday, the “Bring Back Our Girls” movement again gained the spotlight when it was reported that 200 girls and 93 women were rescued by the Nigerian military from a Boko Haram prison camp. The Chibok girls, however, were not among those rescued.
