Killing for Airtime

Abstract

On the night of April 14, 2014, in the town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria, 276 girls between the ages of 15 and 24 were abducted from their school dormitory. It led to the biggest publicity coup to date by Boko Haram, the jihadist group led by Abubakar Shekau. Activists took to the streets of major Nigerian cities to protest, camping out in front of government buildings. A media frenzy ensued. The shocking incident sparked a global campaign to “Bring Back Our Girls,” which saw the involvement of celebrities from Malala to Michelle Obama. Boko Haram was discussed on high-profile talk shows across the world. Images of the group’s leader flashed regularly across TV screens. His every comment was translated from Arabic into English, French, Mandarin. His every move was analyzed by experts. Thus, Abubakar Shekau the superstar was born.Prior to the Chibok kidnappings, Shekau was just some madman Nigerians saw on TV once in a while. Bushy beard, combat clothes, he would stab at the camera with his fingers and guffaw wildly while swaying from side to side, surrounded by armed men in balaclavas. Apart from the fact that he was of the Kanuri ethnic group and from the Yobe state in northeast Nigeria, nobody seemed to know anything about his family or his origins. He appeared to have materialized from nowhere. He would rant at the former president, Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian he regularly referred to as an infidel, threatening him with death and all manner of destruction. When Shekau expressed his desire to eradicate Western education and impose Islamic education and law in Nigeria, many of us laughed. Who did this maniac from the hinterlands of our country really think he was? “President Jonathan, you are now too small for us,” he once raved. “We can only deal with your grandmasters like Obama, the president of America . . . even they cannot do anything to us.”Shekau had his first taste of global relevance on Aug. 26, 2011. Around 11 a.m. that day, a vehicle smashed through two security barriers at the entrance to the United Nations headquarters in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Its driver crashed the car into the reception area, then detonated a bomb. A wing of the building collapsed, the ground floor was reduced to rubble, 23 people died, and 73 were wounded. A spokesperson for Boko Haram later claimed responsibility. The group had previously unleashed terror on various targets in northern Nigeria, especially churches and markets, but the U.N. bombing marked its debut in international media.Nigeria’s population of 195 million is roughly divided into the predominantly Muslim north and the mostly Christian south. Northerners have run the federal government for the vast majority of Nigeria’s half century of independence—the country was liberated from British rule in 1960—attaining power mainly via military coups. Holding the reins of power for so long means that northerners have benefited the most from government largesse and control most of Nigeria’s resources, especially crude oil, which is produced in the south. This makes it easy to blame that part of the country for Nigeria’s general decline. Not only are the northern elite accused of marginalizing the rest of the country while in power, but they are also guilty of ignoring their own people. T e north has the country’s grimmest statistics on literacy, health, and poverty.In 2000, in a move widely seen as an attempt by politicians to boost their popularity among locals, 12 northern states adopted Sharia. This was followed by a proliferation of radical Islamic groups, including one founded by the cleric Mohammed Yusuf in Maiduguri, the capital city of Borno. At first, this group was known by its Arabic name, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad—“People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” But its followers’ hatred of education led residents of Maiduguri to start calling them by a Hausa name, Boko Haram, meaning “Western education is forbidden.” Boko Haram initially allied itself with the politicians, but turned against them when Sharia did not bring the changes they hoped to see. They blamed the corruption of Nigeria’s leaders on Western influence and education. “Yusuf used to call the attention of society to bad governance, no electricity, no roads, no markets,” a former Boko Haram commander, Shagari, told me when I interviewed him in 2017. Shagari was a member of Boko Haram from 2004 until his arrest by the military in 2011. “He also used to teach that if you allow your children to go to school, their attitude and manners would change; they would start smoking, womanizing, and the way they related with their parents changed. He taught that it was better for children to stay at home and continue with their Islamic education.” Following clashes between the government and Boko Haram in 2009, Yusuf was executed and Shekau emerged as the group’s leader. Shekau was more of an extremist than his predecessor. In his bid to establish Islamic law in all of Nigeria and to banish Western education, he sent his followers out to attack not only police and government facilities but also Christian and Muslim civilian targets.After the U.N. bombing, nobody expected Shekau would be able to strike again with such force. Security had been beefed up around all international premises in Nigeria: There were more stringent checks at entrances, cars were parked farther away from main buildings, and premises were surrounded with dense boulders that no speeding vehicle could penetrate. Shekau’s 15 minutes of fame seemed over.And then came Chibok.In 1999, America experienced its first mass school shooting when two teenagers at a high school in Columbine, Colorado, killed 12 of their fellow students and one teacher. The nearly two decades between then and the recent mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, have seen dozens of school shooters adopt common tactics to capture media attention. Following the February 2018 Parkland high school shooting, in which 17 people were killed and 17 more wounded, journalist Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, called for the media to cut back on coverage of mass shootings.“These people have figured out there’s really two ways to get on television [and] be the big story of the week,” he told CNN. “One of them is body count. The other is, call it creativity—to do something original.” To support his point, Cullen referenced the book Terror in the Mind of God by religion scholar Mark Juergensmeyer, who defines terrorism as “the public performance of violence.” “That’s in a nutshell what terrorism is,” Cullen said. “It’s violence, but made for TV.” The motivation to attack often goes back to the desire for power and impact.In the aftermath of the Chibok kidnappings, media organizations around the world broadcast and rebroadcast Shekau’s slightest remark. And he kept them supplied with material, such as one video in which he boasted that he would sell the kidnapped schoolgirls for $12 each. So frequently was Shekau featured on TV that my friend’s 8-year-old daughter burst into tears one morning when he appeared yet again on their screen. She was terrified of this ubiquitous monster not mentioned in her storybooks, who threatened on a daily basis to steal girls away from their schools.The coverage of the event had two major effects: It inflated Shekau’s value as a media commodity, making it increasingly rewarding to keep him in the news, and it distorted the story itself. In spite of the way it was covered by the media, the Chibok kidnappings had absolutely nothing to do with “an attack on girls’ education.” It was simply banditry gone wrong. More than two years after they were stolen, two batches of girls—the first a group of 21, the second of 82—were freed following negotiations between the Nigerian government and Boko Haram. Among the second batch was Naomi Adamu, who was 24 at the time of the abduction, one of the oldest in her class. A few months into her captivity, she and her classmate, 20-year-old Sarah Samuel, began chronicling their experiences in exercise books given to them by the jihadists for Quran lessons, which they kept hidden in their underwear and buried in the ground. The two 40-leaf notebooks contain their memories from the afternoon before their kidnapping to about five months later.According to the Chibok girls’ diaries, the militants who attacked their school on April 14 were simply on a mission to loot and steal. Their primary target appeared to be an “engine block”—a block-making machine that can be used for constructing weapons—that had supposedly been left on the premises after some construction work had been carried out. Not finding the engine block, the militants emptied out the school’s storeroom of food, and then were left with the problem of what to do with the captive students. “So they started argument in their midst,” Sarah and Naomi wrote. “One small boy said that they should burn us all and they said no let us take them with us . . . Another person said no let’s not do that. Let’s lead them . . . and then go to their parent homes. As they were in argument, then one of them said, if we take them to Shekau, he will know what to do.”This account has been confirmed by a Human Rights Watch report based on interviews with some of the 57 girls who managed to escape on the night of the kidnapping by jumping off the trucks used to ferry them away from their school and into Boko Haram’s hideout in the Sambisa forest. Although published a few months after the kidnapping, little attention was paid to that detail. Determined to make the Boko Haram attacks about the glamorous theme of terrorists targeting female education (think Malala), the media ignored any thread that did not fit this narrative. Just a few weeks before the Chibok kidnappings, Boko Haram had attacked a school in the northeast town of Buni Yadi and allowed female students to flee before slaughtering 40 boys in their dormitory. The Buni Yadi incident attracted little media attention until after the Chibok kidnappings, but this additional knowledge did nothing to sway the direction of reporting. The media insisted on viewing the Chibok incident through the lens of gender violence, unwittingly providing Boko Haram with the direction they needed to build their global brand.Boko Haram’s use of women as attackers skyrocketed after the Chibok kidnappings. It is the first terrorist group in history to use more female suicide bombers than male. Researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point and Yale University analyzed the 434 suicide bombings that the group has carried out since 2011, and found that out of the 338 attacks in which the bomber’s gender could be identified, at least 244 were carried out by women. Boko Haram sent at least 80 women to their deaths in 2017 alone. According to Hilary Matfess, co-author of the report, the fact that Boko Haram only started using female bombers in 2014—after the Chibok kidnappings—suggests the group adopted the tactic to grab headlines and elicit “shock and awe from the local and international community.” “Through the global response to the Chibok abductions, the insurgency learned the potent symbolic value of young female bodies . . . that using them as bombers would attract attention and spread pervasive insecurity,” Matfess told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.Boko Haram’s strategy has had a devastating impact on education in northeast Nigeria. A few weeks after the Chibok kidnappings, the U.N. launched the Safe Schools Initiative in Nigeria, with support from the government. “You can make your schools better by fortifications, by better communications, by sending out a message that you’re protecting it,” U.N. Special Envoy on Education, Gordon Brown, told the Nigerian media at the time. Despite this initiative, the U.N. in 2017 reported that 10.5 million Nigerian children are out of school—the largest number of any country in the world—with the majority in the country’s northeast. About 60 percent are girls. Female teachers and schoolgirls have been traumatized to the point that they’re afraid to go to school. School attendance rates for girls have radically decreased.Media coverage of terrorist attacks is important. Victims need to be remembered and memorialized. The public needs to be warned. The world needs to understand how and why things happen. But all this can be done without making stars out of those who perpetrate these heinous acts, without encouraging wannabes to follow in their footsteps and providing them with tutorials.In his CNN interview, Cullen summed up the media’s role in mass shootings this way: “I think the first thing we as journalists have to do is just accept that it’s a reality, that we are part of the equation. We didn’t start this. Obviously we’re not pulling the trigger. But we’re giving them the stage.” He advised the media to adopt several approaches to dissuade attention seekers. The simplest thing, he said, is to cut back on mentions of the attacker’s name and face. “Disappearing the killer,” as he called it, minimizes them and their power. Anybody who wants to know more about a perpetrator can trawl Google for what he looks like, his hobbies, his favorite color, and his past girlfriends. Cullen also recommended that the media avoid ranking attacks. “It’s like we’re awarding them,” he said. Similar suggestions should apply to the media’s coverage of the Abubakar Shekaus of this world and to terror groups like Boko Haram. Even when something about an attack is unprecedented, the media can limit coverage and choose language that doesn’t glamorize violence.The war against terrorism currently being fought around the world must go beyond security measures and arms buildups. We must take it to the newsrooms. We either starve these deluded performers of the publicity they crave or prepare for a world in which one murderer exits the stage only for another to make his grand entrance. Most of the freed Chibok girls have returned to school, sponsored by the national government to attend a special remedial program at the American University of Nigeria in Yola, northeast Nigeria. More than 100 remain in Boko Haram captivity. Yet the use of female suicide bombers in northeast Nigeria continues, and new attacks are reported almost every week.