With the resumption of a new US Secretary of State, Senator John Kerry in office, the Christian Association of Nigerian -Americans, CANAN, and several other US based groups are renewing the call for the US government to designate Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organization, FTO, Empowered Newswire reports.
The US groups also reacted to a recent report by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) that the Nigerian government has not been prosecuting perpetrators of religious violence, but wants the Commission “to make its concern concrete by including a recommendation to the US State Department to designate Boko Haram as a Foreign Terrorist Organization”
According to a joint press release and petition issued yesterday in Washington DC, asking the US Secretary of State to designate Boko Haram an FTO “is the most logical next step in view of the current situation in Nigeria and USCIRF’s advisory role to the US Government. It should also recommend that US urge Nigeria to provide compensation and humanitarian assistance to victims instead of to perpetrators.”
Up until the end of last year, several US departments including the FBI, Justice Department and several US Congressmen have called for the designation of Boko Haram as an FTO. But the State Department which is empowered by the US government to make such a decision has refused to do so, instead designating only three leaders of the group as global terrorists.
CANAN officials said their hope is that with the assumption of office of a new Secretary of State, Senator John Kerry, the US government should update and review it’s policy decisions on the matter.
In the statement the groups also objected to the inaccurate chaterization of religious violence in Nigeria, by a statutory commission recently.
According to the press release, CANAN and the other US groups including Justice for Jos, Jubilee Campaign, Institute for Religion and Democracy, Westminister Institute among others commends the statement of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) “criticizing the absence of meaningful prosecutions 2 years afterwards, we are concerned at the dangerous moral equivalency expressed in a press release issued by USCIRF alleging “Ongoing attacks and retaliations by Muslims and Christians in Nigeria’s…Middle Belt.”
According to the US groups, “The data is clear that Christian villages have overwhelmingly been targets of multiple midnight massacres — 36 in
2012 alone — resulting in hundreds of deaths of Christians in the last couple of years. Blaming the victims, who by far come from the Christian community, is grossly unfair. ”
The release explained that what has been deemed a reprisal attack by the Commission was an uncoordinated defensive action forced by the failure of the Nigerian government to provide security of lives and property.
Said the press statement: “The rare instances where villagers were able to engage in defensive action in a context of state security failure have been broadly termed “reprisal attacks” without acknowledging that Christians have exclusively been at the receiving end of systematic genocide in Plateau State of Nigeria.
According to the US group, the USCIRF has been rehashing Boko Haram’s unsupported claim that it attacks Christians in retaliation for attacks by Christians “but Boko Haram has unequivocally stated its goal is to exterminate Christians in the north and impose Islamic rule in Nigeria. It has consistently bombed churches and killed Christians to this end, with occasional collateral damage to or targeted assassination of Muslim critics. ”
CANAN and the other groups then added that the USCIRF moreover undercounts the number of churches attacked in 2012, even though available data shows that more Christians were killed in Nigeria in 2012 than were killed in the rest of the world.
Calling the commission to be alive to its responsibility, the US stated that “It is hoped that USCIRF which has generally fared better in fulfiling its statutory reporting requirements than the State Department is not regressing following last year’s reorganization of the commission.”