Amb Power’s remarks to UN Security Council on Boko Haram

On Wednesday, July 27, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power delivered remarks to the UN Security Council on the security threats imposed by Boko Haram on the Lake Chad Basin region. 

The following is an excerpt of her remarks.

I’d like to discuss briefly the security and humanitarian efforts we need to vanquish this monstrous group.

It goes without saying that a robust military effort is critical.

[This is] because Boko Haram has demonstrated its ability to move back and forth across international borders, governments in the region must be able to seamlessly coordinate their efforts to pursue the terrorists across those same borders. 

That doesn’t always come easy, and it has been very challenging in this region. 

But the Multinational Joint Task Force is playing a growing role in improving such coordination, as well as planning and intelligence sharing. 

These efforts have produced important gains in recent months – including freeing of thousands of hostages, destroying of dozens of terrorist camps, and – and this is worth stressing – recovering around 75 percent of the territory that Boko Haram once controlled. 

These gains must be preserved, and that requires the international community supporting and shoring up any weak link in the security posture of the region. 

While members of this Council and UN Member States unanimously agree that Boko Haram constitutes a threat to international peace and security, unfortunately few are supporting the countries on the front lines of this fight.

We applaud the European Union and the United Kingdom for their contributions to the MNJTF. And for our part, the United States is supporting the MNJTF and its members with advisors, intelligence sharing, logistics support, training, and non-lethal equipment, totaling more than $71 million of assistance, as well as providing $40 million through the Global Security Contingency Fund for training and equipment to help our partners enhance border security. 

We urge more member states to step up and support this effort.

To be effective, it is also essential that these military efforts respect human rights, as this Council importantly underscored in its Presidential Statement on efforts to counter Boko Haram in May. 

When government security forces round up civilians on nothing more than suspicion, use torture to try to extract information, apply scorched earth tactics, stand by as vigilante groups carry out mob justice, or commit any other abuses with impunity, they alienate the very civilians whose support and cooperation is crucial to combatting Boko Haram effectively.

As we continue to strengthen the military effort against Boko Haram, we also have to do much more to address the region’s dire humanitarian situation – and I stress, dire.

As we heard from Under-Secretary O’Brien, an estimated 2.5 million people have been displaced within their countries by Boko Haram, while some 150,000 have been pushed beyond their borders. 

More than 90 percent of IDPs in the region have been taken in by family members or communities, a testament not only to the tremendous generosity of the people of the region, but also to the strain – the huge strain – that has been placed on them. 

A security guard at a university I visited in Yola, Nigeria, had at one point taken in more than 50 members of his extended family displaced by the violence. 

He is a national hero and there are tens of thousands of such heroes across the region.

So we have Boko Haram unleashing this true evil, an evil that has seen them pioneering the theft of children and the use of young girls as suicide bombers. 

But alongside that evil we have seen such unbelievable altruism and goodness, and I think we of greater means should all be inspired by these heroes to do much, much more.

The situation in the camps is as dire as we have heard. Médecins Sans Frontières recently was able to reach the city of Bama, in Borno State, Nigeria, which aid workers had been unable to reach for two years due to insecurity. 

It is home to approximately 10,000 people. 

MSF found that 15 percent of the kids there were suffering from severe acute malnutrition, and nearly 1,500 people had to be evacuated. 

Most chillingly, when the group arrived, they found 1,233 graves near the camp, which had been dug in the last year.

Four hundred eighty of those graves appeared to belong to children. 

And camp residents told MSF of 40 deaths in Bama in the first three weeks of this month, due to starvation and treatable illness. 

These are the camps we can reach. 

In the parts of Borno, Nigeria; Lac, Chad; Diffa, Niger that are unreachable, one can only imagine how infernal the conditions likely are.

For Diaspora Digital Media Updates click on Whatsapp, or Telegram. For eyewitness accounts/ reports/ articles, write to: citizenreports@diasporadigitalmedia.com. Follow us on X (Fomerly Twitter) or Facebook

Pages: 1 2