On the night between 14 and 15 April 2014, ten years ago, some militiamen from the Islamist and terrorist group Boko Haram broke into a secondary school in Chibok, a predominantly Christian city in the north-east of Nigeria, and kidnapped 276 students, including 16 and 18 years old. Some of them managed to escape by jumping off the vans into which they had been loaded, others were freed in the following years in various Nigerian army operations, in exchange for large ransoms. About a hundred of them have been lost.
The kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls also had enormous resonance outside Nigeria. It was told in documentaries, books and was the subject of many events. A movement was also born, called “Bringbackourgirls” (“Give us back our girls”), which still today calls for the missing students to be found and released.
A demonstration for the release of the students kidnapped in Chibok, in 2017 (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)
The Chibok kidnapping has become somewhat of a symbol of a problem that still exists in Nigeria today: mass kidnappings continue to be frequent, carried out in ways similar to those of Chibok, both by terrorist groups and common criminal groups, and various governments have never been able to handle them.
On April 14, 2014, the militiamen reached the school in vans. In Chibok, where about 66 thousand people live, they had already been there attacks by Boko Haram, and in the hours before the kidnapping, rumors had already circulated in the city about the arrival of the group, due to some phone calls from residents of nearby towns who had seen a convoy of vans heading towards Chibok.
Once they reached the school, the militiamen broke into it. Despite previous attacks, the city did not have adequate security. About fifteen soldiers present there clashed with the militiamen and tried to stop them: the clashes lasted about an hour, but no reinforcements arrived. The Boko Haram militiamen were more and more armed: they killed some soldiers and began to kidnap the students, threatening them with death if they did not follow them, and loading them into vans. Then they set fire to the school.
Once the kidnapping was over, the convoy of vans headed towards the Sambisa forest, a huge area that extends over 500 square kilometers and which has long been considered a hideout and training site for Boko Haram militants. The operation lasted a total of five hours. The students who managed to throw themselves off the vans and escape were around fifty. In the following days, some family members of the others joined and entered the forest, on motorbikes and with homemade weapons, without success.
The kidnapping aroused very intense reactions from Nigerian public opinion and beyond: the fact that a group of terrorists could act almost undisturbed, kidnapping almost 300 people within a city, burning down a school and escaping, became the example of the serious inadequacy of the institutions, and of how criminal and terrorist groups could exploit it to strengthen themselves. Furthermore, in the following months, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International they accused the Nigerian army for having been aware of the danger of that kidnapping and having done nothing to avoid it.
The local authorities promised to use all the human and material resources necessary to find and free the students, but it took three years to obtain the first releases. In a prisoner exchange organized by the Nigerian government, 82 female students were freed in May 2017. In addition to the exchange of prisoners, the Nigerian government paid a ransom of the equivalent of 3 million euros: the amount was revealed in a long investigation by Wall Street Journalin fact the first detailed account of how the majority of the kidnapped students were freed.
With the release of the students, the first stories about imprisonment also arrived: some girls told of forced conversions to Islam, of forced marriages with Boko Haram militiamen and of the fact that those who refused were forced into violence and forced labor. Some students died in childbirth, others during attacks carried out by the Nigerian army against Boko Haram.
In the following years, some other students, who had now become adults, were freed, but many others were never heard from again. Public interest waned, and they also spread conspiracy theories according to which the Chibok kidnapping never actually happened and was invented for political purposes.
Kidnappings continued in the following years, both by terrorist groups and common criminals. Those carried out in schools were the most frequent: schools and colleges are very often found in isolated places and outside city centres, in places where security is even more precarious or absent than in the city. Kidnapping large groups of students, children or adolescents also makes it easier to obtain a ransom, due to the pressure from the national and international media and Nigerian public opinion for their release.
According to the Save the Children organization, from 2014 to today they were kidnapped around 1,600 male and female students in the north of the country alone, an area where they tend radical Islamist groups such as Boko Haram to be more active. Last month alone, over 300 students were kidnapped in three separate operations.
The governments that have followed one another so far in Nigeria have not only been unable to manage these problems, but have sometimes in turn taken advantage of them to enrich themselves. In the past, flows of money for ransoms have also been a profit opportunity for mid-level public officials, who in cases where the government managed negotiations with the kidnappers began to withhold part of the sum intended to free the hostages.
Over the years, various projects have been launched, such as Safe Schools Initiativepromoted by the United Nations to strengthen the safety around schools, and whose implementation has been hindered by various problems, including corruption of local politicians and the country’s own political instability. However, mass kidnappings have decreased since 2022, when the government passed a law making it illegal to pay ransoms and made kidnappings punishable with the death penalty if the kidnapped people die.
– Read also: Mass kidnappings continue to be a problem in Nigeria