Peoples Gazette
By Farooq Kperogi
Obviously, the Buhari regime rewards and celebrates homicidal outlaws.
AFP, the French wire service, reported on November 18 that “Hundreds of Nigerian Boko Haram jihadists who are being held in a camp after surrendering to the military rioted on Wednesday to demand the right to slaughter cows for meat” in the Gidan Taki outskirts of Maiduguri.
The terrorist protesters were part of the 18,000 Boko Haram terrorists loyal to Abubakar Shekau who “surrendered” to the Nigerian military after Shekau killed himself in a battle with a rival terrorist faction now known as ISWAP.
A Gidan Taki resident by the name of Usman Bunu told the AFP, “They still consider anyone not in their fold as an infidel, which is why they want to be allowed to slaughter their cow themselves.”
On August 1, 2020, I wrote a column titled “‘De-radicalization’ of Terrorists Doesn’t Work” where I warned about what is unfolding now. I have taken the liberty to republish it in hopes that people who make decisions about “reintegrating” terrorists to the communities they have devastated will pay heed.
The de-radicalisation, rehabilitation, and reintegration of so-called repentant Boko Haram terrorists have emerged as one of the centrepieces of the Buhari regime’s governance, which is not surprising given that Buhari had said in the past that government-sanctioned retaliatory aggression against Boko Haram terrorists was an attack on the North.
Every sober observer knows that de-radicalising, rehabilitating, and reintegrating remorselessly bloodstained mass murderers into the very societies they drowned in oceans of blood—especially without compensating and mollifying the people they displaced, widowed, and orphaned— is a singularly wooden-headed policy.
But it helps, nonetheless, to look at evidence from research— and from the experiential data of societies that attempted to de-radicalise terrorists. Since Nigeria isn’t the only country that grapples with the question of what to do with— and to—nabbed terrorists, what can we learn from other countries?
The UK has a program that it calls “Desistance and Disengagement Programme,” which works to de-radicalise terrorists. The US state of Minnesota, which has a large number of Somali immigrants and a fair amount of domestic terrorism, also has a “Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program” designed to jolt terrorists back from the precipice of fatal extremism. So do many countries in Europe and Asia.
The data from the UK is mixed, but it nevertheless provides a cautionary tale for Nigeria. For example, three past beneficiaries of the country’s “Desistance and Disengagement Programme” went on to murder 24 people between 2017 and 2019 in the aftermath of their “deradicalisation.” Other countries have similar experiences.
Deradicalisation of terrorists is not always a failure, of course. According to the Business Insider, “Between 2001-2012, Malaysia put 154 extremists through deradicalisation schemes. Of those, 148 had ‘successfully completed the de-radicalisation programme and were released, without later re-offending,’ the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR)wrote in a 2012 paper.”
However, an emerging consensus is that because terrorists are often animated by a single-minded, tunnel vision of society, it is often impossible to be certain that a deradicalisation program can reverse their predilection for violence. A 2019 research by the European Union’s Radicalisation Awareness Network, for instance, concluded that, “Even after the very best of prevention efforts, some individuals still go on to become (violent) extremists.”
The Center for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) also said there is “limited evidence about what supports positive change, which makes it difficult to determine if an intervention’s approach is likely to be successful.”
Similarly, the UK’s Christopher Dean, a psychologist who created a deradicalisation program called the Healthy Identity Intervention (HII), admitted that it’s difficult to be certain that a terrorist has been completely deradicalised. “People can get more reassured and confident about change and progress that people are making, but I think we have to be very careful about saying someone has totally changed or has been cured,” the Independent of the UK quoted him as saying.
I don’t know how Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorists are being deradicalized and rehabilitated—and I hope someone will systematically study this—but the result of their work stares us in the face. Many of the so-called deradicalised and reintegrated Boko Haram terrorists actually only reintegrate to their former terror cells from where they murder soldiers and civilians alike.
On July 26, for example, a soldier fighting Boko Haram in Borno sent the following social media message that tugged at my heart strings: “Good evening sir. I’m presently in Monguno. I’ve been wanting to hint you on the recent happenings. During the last two attacks June and July (in Monguno), some of the so called rehabilitated Boko Haram guys- Non State Armed Groups (NSAG) joined their former colleagues in attacking the community and ran back to the BUSH with them. This is to say that the whole rehabitation [sic] narrative is a sham.”
Ali Ndume, who represents Borno South in the Senate, told ChannelsTV on July 30 that a recently “de-radicalized,” “rehabilitated,” and “reintegrated” Boko Haram terrorist murdered his father, stole his father’s cows, and vanished.
“Some of them that returned…
