Week after week, the Islamic militant group Boko Haram proudly takes credit for massacres and kidnapping all over the nation of Nigeria.
The media, however, doesn’t spend nearly enough time covering it. Between all of the gratuitous plane crash coverage and politically skewed commentary, we hardly get any information on the global war on terror.
When we do see terrorism in the news, it’s when it effects the west. The Charlie Hebdo massacre received a great amount of coverage, as well as global attention. Several world leaders arrived to show support for the writers who were killed, and #JeSuisCharlie took the Internet by storm. Why is it that Boko Haram is killing droves of people almost weekly and still receives such little coverage?
One possibility is the fact that freedom of the press exists in the west. It might be argued that it is much easier for journalists to gather news from the ground in France than it is in Nigeria- not to mention exponentially safer. Journalists are easy targets in places of political unrest, so it isn’t a stretch to imagine that people simply can’t get the ground footage in Africa like they could elsewhere. But this assumption is downright wrong. After Boko Haram massacred nearly 2,000 people earlier this year, there were hundreds of uncensored pictures all over the Internet. This proves that someone is there, capable of gathering information and sending it out to the world, so access is no longer an excuse.
Immediately after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Internet quickly and gracefully censored all of the graphic images-or at least, as much as they could. However, after simply typing in “Boko Haram” into Google images in the days following a January massacre, I found an appalling array of extremely graphic photos of men, women and children slain in the streets. It took about a week for me to stop seeing these horrid images appear uncensored at the top of Google image searches. Not only do they not get adequate coverage, but they are not even receiving the same amount of basic decency.
I have seen little blurbs here and there covering the rising threat of Boko Haram, but not nearly as much as I’ve seen for others. To suggest that westerners simply don’t care about Africa isn’t that hard to believe. The last time Africa was plastered all over the news was the Ebola scare. It seems to be that we only truly care about the suffering of Africans if there is a threat of their plight trickling over our borders. As it stands now, Boko Haram has only been a threat to locals in Nigeria. What people should be concerned about–if the massacres of thousands of civilians aren’t enough–is the fact that Boko shares shocking similarities with ISIS.
In fact, the two have just pledged allegiance to each other. The uprising of global terror networks all over the world is a cause to concern westerners. Humanitarian crisis aside, terror networks joining forces across multiple continents is an obvious threat to global security. The longer Boko goes un-checked, the longer they have to kill and rape schoolchildren, to network, to gain supplies and to gain a stronger foothold in Nigeria. ISIS has already branched out to northern Africa- their Libyan sect wreaking havoc and publishing the beheadings of Christians and kidnapping of aid-workers. The spread of ISIS’s poisonous ideologies is a terrifying development in itself, so the idea that their newly proclaimed allegiance with Boko Haram could quickly get out of hand.
Ok, we have established the severity of the threat we now face. So what do we do about it? The answer is not that simple, nor shall I speculate on possible airstrikes in yet another country or suggest boots on the ground and/ or up asses. What needs to happen is a discussion amongst world powers, African nations, the UN and citizens worldwide. This starts with adequate news coverage. If people aren’t talking about this issue, we cannot expect a favorable solution anytime soon.
There is no excuse for the inhumanity that the people of Nigeria are being subjected to. With all of this information readily available to us, it’s our responsibility to be watchdogs, and it’s our responsibility to protect our fellow man.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Drew Chowbay at andrew.chowbay@colorado.edu
