It’s been months since I wrote about the missing Nigerian schoolgirls — mainly because the information coming from the Nigerian government and international news outlets was so unreliable. But it’s still an important story that gets surprisingly little coverage.
All I can say for sure is that there are several hundred girls who were kidnapped by the Islamic terrorist organization Boko Haram that are still being held captive. Some reports indicated that women, men and young boys had also been taken at some point after the initial April 15, 2014, abduction of nearly 300 girls, but most reports only focused on the missing girls.
At certain times Nigeria’s soon-to-be-former president Goodluck Jonathan and his military announced that most of the girls had been freed or that a deal had been reached with Boko Haram for the girls’ release. The claims turned out to be false, and probably just ploys for Jonathan’s re-election. It didn’t work, but his impending successor has acknowledged the limitations in finding the missing girls.
“As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them: to do so would be to offer unfounded hope,” president-elect Muhammadu Buhari wrote in the New York Times.
That statement will be no comfort to the hundreds of parents who have not seen their children in a year.
On Wednesday, two schoolgirls who had escaped captivity appeared with several members of congress to call for international cooperation in the search for the remaining girls.
