Paris and Maiduguri

The shocking events in Paris, the murder of journalists, cartoonists, in the editorial office of Je Suis Charlie Hebdo, and then the murder of four in a kosher supermarket was widely discussed front page news for some days. At about the same time the news of an explosive belt strapped to a ten year old girl that was exploded in a market in Maiduguri, North-East Nigeria, killing at least 16 was relegated to a brief article further back. We know a good deal about Paris, about Islamists, about French tradition of liberty, free speech. We know very little about Maiduguri. A city of over a million, the capital of North-East Nigeria, a university centre. We also know little about the perpetrators of this atrocity, Boko Haram. We know that they had abducted 200 school girls, most of whom disappeared without trace. But we don't know what drives Boko Haram, It hasn't been around very long. It was founded in 2002. Its founder was Muhammed Yusuf, and it appealed to the impoverished Muslim underclass of the territory that was once the Bornu Empire before the British took it over. Over recent years Boku Haram murdered an estimated 5000 people. But what sort of mentality would condone using a ten year old girl as a walking suicide bomb. This is surely not part of the teaching of the Prophet. Abducting children is more akin to the practices of Joseph Kony, founder of the Lord's Resistance Army that spread from Uganda to South Sudan then to the Congo. Kony's teachings were a mixture of tribal mysticism. He was certainly no Islamic fundamentalist. The Simbas of the Congo, a leftist rebel group inspired by Maoist ideals were similarly renowned for indiscriminate brutal murder and the abduction of children. So is the underlying issue in Maiduguri Islam or a deep seated African indifference to human life? Is the conflict in France one between the ideals of the Humanist tradition of liberal Europe and its perversion that the cause justifies the means? Does it say that freedom has its price? The price is that to attain individual freedom you have to compromise traditional values of exclusivity, and accept that tolerance extended to you is accorded to others. Let's not talk about Islamic fundamentalism as the root cause of the conflict. Let us see that it is cherished Western European values of freedom that are under attack, not just by extreme Islamists, but by all those who over the generations, put cause ahead of individual rights, African dictators, religious fanatics, the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Ceausescus.