Shocking! How Victims of Boko Haram are raped and sold as slaves in Displaced Person's Camps

On a bed at the female ward of the University
of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital lay a 15-year-
old girl in an evidently bad state. Her face and
head were bandaged, leaving slits through
which only a bruised eye and swollen lips were
visible. On her body were clearer signs of
trauma, with burns running from her neck
down to the lower parts of her body.
Around her bed wafted a foul smell, which a
nurse who came to attend to her attributed to a
septic wound in the girl’s skull.
A nurse who did not want to be named because
she was not authorised to speak to the press
told the icirnigeria.org that a group of people
from the biggest internally displaced persons
(IDP) camp in Maiduguri dumped Lami (the
surnames of all victims in this report are
withheld to protect them) at the hospital.
“We have many of them. They’d been
either raped in the camp or sold by those
that should be protecting them in the
camps,” the nurse said.
Approached by the reporter, Lami tried to
speak, but her voice was muffled to a whisper
as pains coursed through her body.
She said her parents were killed by Boko
Haram insurgents in her village and she
managed to reach Maiduguri, capital of Borno
State, in an open truck that dropped people off
at a camp for displaced persons.
In the course of moving from one camp to
the other, she was separated from her
younger brother. “I do not know where he
is,” she said through muffled sobs.
Lami said some government officials came to
the camp and took many young girls away and
later sold them as slaves. She ended up in the
house of one Alhaji Aliyu, whose brother and
wife abused her. While Aliyu’s brother
repeatedly raped her, his wife weighed in with
physical abuse.
“One day, some people came to the camp
and said that they were taking us to a
better place. That was how I got to Alhaji
Aliyu’s house and it was there, every day,
his brother forcibly slept with me.
“After that, he would beat me and one of
Alhaji’s wifes too would always beat me.
One day she attacked me with a knife. That
was how I got the wound in my skull,
In Gombe, 16-year-old Laraba told the
icirnigeria.org that an official of the state
emergency relief agency named Ibrahim took
her from the camp where she was to his home
on the pretext that she would be helping the
wife with household chores.
“I was happy leaving the camp, but when
we got to his house, there was no wife. He
raped me continuously for three nights,
locked me inside his house for days and
threatened me.”
She continued: “I managed to escape and
came back to the camp. I got pregnant. An
old woman we call ‘Kaka’, gave me some
leaves. I was bleeding for almost two
weeks and smelling.”
She said she is currently feeling better and
has overcome the ordeal. But she had to
suffer in silence, as she could not tell
anyone because she thought nobody would
believe her and for fear of being sent away
from the camp.
“I am not the only one this has happened
to and I am sure Ibrahim, the health
worker, is not the only one doing this type
of thing,” she said.
Thirty-two-year-old Binta caught our
reporter’s attention as she muttered to herself,
looking like a traumatised person. The tale she
told was shocking and distressing. Sadly, no
one believes her or is willing to do anything
about it.
“After the attack in Mubi, I fled with my
one-year-old child. From the first camp we
were, a secondary school, I was told a
family in Yola was coming to take us. They
came to pick me and my baby. When I saw
them I was suspicious, but what could I do,
without anyone to help? I put my baby in
the car, and they sped away,” she said
resignedly.
Binta is realistic to know that she might
never see her baby again but her problem
is what to tell her husband from whom she
was separated in the aftermath of the
attack on Mubi.
“I have lost all hope of ever seeing my
baby again. I do not know whether my
husband is alive or not. A family member
says he was among those who ran to
Cameroun.
“If he finds me tomorrow, what do I tell
him about our baby?” she wondered.
Kingsley Ogar, a member of staff of an
international donor agency, who did not want
his organisation named, confirmed that child
trafficking is rife in the IDP camps.
“We had a case in Gombe where a group of
persons came from the South, Lagos or
Ibadan, we can’t be so sure, paid some
people and took away children from the
camp.
“We went to deliver relief items in this
particular IDP camp and took a census so
that we could come back the following day,
which we did, only to realise that over a
dozen of them were missing. They were
mostly young children between the ages of
5 and 15.
“Upon investigation, we discovered that
some ‘lords’ in the camp were colluding
with the Lagos people to sell the kids.
“We reported to the police (Gombe State
command), but we do not know whether
they have done anything,” he said.
Our reporter visited the camp posing as an
official of a church that takes care of children
and made startling discoveries. An official in
the camp named Raila, who wore the reflective
vest of the National Emergency Management
Agency (NEMA), told the reporter to wait while
she went into a makeshift office. There, she
spoke with a male colleague, whom she said
was an official of NEMA.She returned to
announce:
“You will pay N50,000 for each child and
you can only go with three if you want
them today,
Without any attempt at verifying the reporter’s
identity and in less than 30 minutes, three
children were ready to be sold, possibly never
to return to their roots .
Culled from Thisday CLICK HERE TO READ FULL AND TOUCHING NIGERIAN CELEBRITIES BIOGRAPHY AND SCANDALS

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