Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
10-11-2024
ABUJA: Nigeria’s human rights commission said on Friday an investigation had found “no evidence” that the Nigerian military deliberately attacked women and children or carried out secret abortions in its fight against an Islamist insurgency in the northeast.
The Nigeria Human Rights Commission, which is appointed by the government, had been investigating three Reuters reports published in December 2022 which found the Nigerian military ran a secret, systematic and illegal abortion program and massacred children in the northeast, where the insurgency has been going on for 15 years.
The commission said in a report that it carried out its investigation over an 18-month period and interviewed 199 witnesses, including from the military, former militants, women who had been freed from Boko Haram captivity and local and foreign aid agencies. Not all of them were named.
Among those interviewed for the investigation were Chief of Defence Staff Chris Musa, who at the time of the reports led the counterinsurgency campaign in the northeast, his predecessor General Lucky Irabor and former Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Farouk Yahaya.
The seven-member panel which conducted the investigation included a retired major general, Letam Wiwa, who previously served as head of military intelligence. He is the younger brother to Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Niger Delta activist who was executed by the military in 1995.
“There is no evidence to establish that the Nigerian military conducted a secret abortion program in the north-east, ending pregnancies of thousands of women and girls freed from insurgent captivity,” said the report, which was released at a press conference in the capital Abuja.
The Nigerian military previously denied the findings in the news agency’s reports. Military spokesman Edward Buba did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday. Musa, the Chief of Defence Staff, did not immediately respond to attempts by Reuters to contact him by telephone on Friday.
Responding to the report’s conclusions, a media spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting which fully met our standards for independence.”
The human rights commission’s report found that medical registers from five civilian hospitals in northeastern Nigeria showed that the facilities carried out just under 6,000 abortions between 2013 and 2022 but it concluded that there was no record of forced and illegal abortions in military or civilian facilities.
It added that access to military records of many sorts, including postings of personnel and hospital-related data, was a major challenge.
“We could not get data from the military. We tried our best and we discovered that records were not properly kept in virtually all the military medical institutions that we visited,” the General Counsel to the panel, Hilary Ogbonna, told the press conference.
The human rights commission said the panel found no evidence to show that the army deliberately targeted children, but had found proof that the military attacked the Abisari community on June 18, 2016, leading to the death of 18 people, including women and children. Media reported, based on dozens of witness accounts and documentation, that a military abortion program involved terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
