LINK BETWEEN AL-QAEDA AND NIGERIA'S BOKO HARAM

By Osita Ebiem

 

May 1, 2012 marked the first year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. For almost ten years he succeeded in evading justice. Six of those years he spent in a compound specifically built for him in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden’s house was less than a mile from one of the most important military and security installations in the whole of Pakistan. And within those six years he lived a normal family life in Pakistan and fathered children who were delivered in the local hospital in Abbottabad, farmed chicken and raised goats. While he lived there under the nose of Pakistani security the country claimed to be fighting along the United States in the bid to capture the terror leader Osama bin Laden and defeat Islamic terrorism. The Pakistani state also collected billions of dollars in aid from the government and people of United States.

 

On September 11, 2001 Osama bin Laden through his Islamic terror outfit, al-Qaeda carried out one of the worst terror attacks on civilians in history. In a coordinated series of attacks, he killed over three thousand American civilians in an unprovoked religious rage. The world community was outraged and all agreed that Osama bin Laden must be brought to justice before he inflicted more damage on the world. And for almost ten years and the expending of billions of dollars the effort paid off on the 1^st of May one year ago. US President Barack Obama finally made the announcement that much of the world’s population had always anticipated. A detachment of United States Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan had successfully carried out an operation in Pakistan that took out the world’s number one enemy. The world jubilated and congratulated the men in uniform that carried out the operation, the President and people of the United States for helping eliminate one more threat to the peace, safety and prosperity of the free world.

 

It must be recalled that this cowardly and dastardly unleashing of fear, hatred and terror on innocent people has a lot of connection with the country of Sudan. Osama bin Laden lived there while the government of that country gave him sanctuary and support that he needed while he preached hatred and murder and developed a network that would haunt an entire world for decades. It was from Sudan that he planned and attacked simultaneously in August of 1998 two American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa.

 

When he was smoked out of Sudan he moved on and while traversing the countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan he orchestrated the 9-11 attacks. But before he left Sudan he had successfully established cells of his brand of terror in countries around Sudan. Nigeria and Somalia are among those countries where Osama bin Laden’s hate messages took root. Some jihadist clerics who studied directly under him successfully recruited into their ranks many Nigerian traditional rulers, political, military and business leaders and ever since, because they are well connected, they have carried on their terror activities without hindrances. For anyone who cares to know, the Nigerian trend has remained faithful to the al-Qaeda’s pattern. The United Nations headquarters in Nigeria had been bombed in August 2011 in the same fashion as the August 1998 bombing of the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies of the US. As the Nigerian millionaire underwear Islamic terrorist bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s stint in Sudan so is every other Islamic terror death and destruction currently taking place in Nigeria. Only recently all official activities in the American Embassy in Nigeria were halted for a while because there was a perceived threat from the Boko Haram group. Let no one make any mistake about it, the threats and actual destructions are not restricted within Nigeria’s borders and against Igbo/Biafrans. Let the world pay attention.

 

Since the world led by the United States has fought so hard to kill and defeat the man who headed an Islamic terror outfit that has tormented and caused so much loss to the world in human and material resources, we want to clearly state that the job will not be complete if they did not undo all of bin Laden’s evil machinations wherever they have taken root. We must congratulate the world community in successfully dismantling the damnable union that existed in Sudan which was responsible in creating a favorable condition that produced bin Laden and his Islamic terror network in the first place. It can be said that Osama bin Laden and his network were actually created on January 1, 1956; the day that Sudan is said to have gained “independence” from Britain. The British on that day left a monster that would eventually cost the world so much blood and destruction after a few years. They merged peoples that should never have been put together in one space as citizens of the same country. The North and South peoples of Sudan never belonged together. The right thing was done in 2011 when the two got divided into their naturally occurring sovereign countries, but not before September 11, 2001. A lot of damage had been done by that date, but it is always better late than never.

 

With the elimination of Osama bin Laden, all his works would not have been successfully come undone if the present one-Nigerian arrangement of October 1, 1960 remained constituted as it is today. If it is left to remain intact the world would be sorry for it. The present one-Nigeria will continue to breed and unleash on the world terror expendables (suicide bombers) that will continue to cost the world very dearly in human and material losses. To make the world a safer place and finally defeat the demon of Islamic terrorism, Nigeria must be dismantled in the same manner that Sudan and South Sudan had been. The same British mistake as was made in Sudan in 1956 was also made in Nigeria in 1960. Several peoples whose ethnic, religious and cultural affiliations are irreconcilable were forced together into a terribly suffocating enclave that so far have killed over 5 million Igbo/Biafran people, stunted their growth and rendered them hopeless in the one-Nigerian arrangement. Osama bin Laden had tainted and compromised Nigeria as he did to Sudan and the only solution is to dismantle it today. The world community must set up a process that will dissolve Nigeria today. The process of Self-Determination for the various ethnic/cultural nations currently subjugated in a union that can never work must begin right away. Let a referendum be organized so that the various ethnic groups will decide on where they want to belong. No one is interested in Nigeria as it is.

 

The only solution to the threat from Nigeria to world’s peace and wellbeing is to dismantle the Nigerian union and put people who can be held responsible in charge of the different resulting independent and sovereign units. Break it up along the existing several ethnic, cultural and religious divides. In this way the current dysfunctional Somali-state of affairs in Nigeria where no one is in charge will end. Presently just like it is in Somalia, the extant one-Nigeria is a no man’s land because there can never be a unifying social system that will make a society to function in a place like Nigeria, where as a result of directly opposed cultures and religions, there cannot be a uniform legal system to compel the people to strive toward a common goal. Several volumes of statutes and constitutions can be written for running a country but the crux lies in the ability to enforce those laws. And no law is enforceable when it is not rooted in the cultural norms of the people for whom it is made. Therefore it becomes a waste of time attempting to make a uniform set of laws for a Nigeria where the different ethnicities have very diverse cultures and religions that cannot be reconciled with one another.

 

The Guardian of London just revealed that there was some form of regular communication between Osama bin Laden and Nigeria’s Islamic Boko Haram terrorist group. The newspaper claimed that the correspondences are found among the documents recovered from the Pakistani residence of the former head of al-Qaeda network. With this revelation it will be interesting to see what countries like the United States and Britain will do since they had always inadvertently supported Boko Haram by defending their murderous activities as being caused by poverty, social injustice and bad governance. But to many of us this revelation is not coming as a surprise because we have always known and warned about the connections.

 

Nothing can be more frustrating and demeaning than to realize later that someone or a country had all along unintentionally supplied the enemy with the weapons it used to kill them. That sounds absurd and ridiculous but that is literally what had been going on in the case of Nigeria’s Islamic terrorist group, Boko Haram. In the interest of whatever reason United States, Britain and some other Western countries had had inexplicable sympathy for the Boko Haram group just because Nigeria’s Sultan of Sokoto went to Harvard University and delivered a paper that scandalously claimed that the Islamic terror group’s reason for the bombing of Christian southerners and their businesses was because they are poor and unjustly treated. With today’s abundant flow of information one would have thought that the policy makers in these countries would have been more discreet and spread their information gathering tentacles farther than they had done. Such narrowed, restricted and uncritical conclusions in very sensitive matters by supposedly reputable institutions is not just misleading to the public who depends on them for truth on issues of utmost importance but it also casts such organizations in very bad light. Even the very respectable United States Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton was caught up in this blatant web of lies and she repeated the same thing! For the umpteenth time, we repeat that Nigeria’s problem is in the incongruent social structure; the clobbering into one unit of peoples that can never find grounds on which to work together and pronounced them citizens of the same country. The solution is in dismantling the very dissimilar units and let them go their separate ways.