Borno state, Nigeria. (Wikipedia)
JOS, Nigeria (Morning Star News) – As U.S. officials and other global players try to help recover about 180 girls kidnapped from a majority-Christian high school in Nigeria’s Borno state last month, scores of similarly heart-breaking stories of Islamist abductions have gone unheeded.
One such case involved a Christian father of three girls from Chibok, the predominantly Christian town in Borno state where militants from the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped more than 230 high school girls the night of April 15 (about 50 have since escaped). Boko Haram – which has taken the girls deep into the forest between Nigeria and Cameroon and says it is selling them to be married to its militants – and other Islamic extremists have been kidnapping Christian girls for years. The father I met in Maiduguri in 2007 lost his girls to kidnappers after the death of his ex-wife, who had divorced him for converting to Christianity.
The death of his ex-wife led her Muslim relatives to persuade him to let their three girls visit their mother’s family home in November 2004 in order to mourn her. After a week the father, whose name is withheld for security reasons, went to collect the girls; he found a retired police officer had helped Muslim relatives take her to another house in Maiduguri, where they were held incommunicado.
All efforts by this Christian father to rescue his children from the Muslim relatives of his wife became futile. Father and children were separated and never saw each other. Muslim leaders in Maiduguri bluntly told him that because he was a Christian, an “infidel,” he could not be allowed to be with his three children. In an interview, he told me how government officials in Borno state and the state judiciary frustrated his efforts to reclaim his children. He had kept custody of them after his wife divorced him in 1996, and when she remarried in 2000 he had maintained custody. After her death, however, he had to obtain legal help to ask for an order to restrain Muslim relatives from keeping his children – ages 14, 12 and 11 when I spoke with him in 2007. He said he needed to have custody of his children to give them the fatherly love they required, especially since their mother had died.
Muslim leaders and government officials ensured there was a travesty of justice. The judge who presided over the case denied him custody of his children because he was a Christian. I wept as I read the judgment of the court. I still have a copy of this judgment. The judge stated that under Islam, a non-Muslim cannot be given custody of children unless he converts to Islam. The judge said his decision to deny him custody of his children was rooted in Islamic law and jurisprudence.
The most excruciating experience for him was that his children were not only forcefully taken away from him, but that they were forcefully enrolled into an Islamic school to receive instruction on Islam. I wrote an article that year about this incident, and I recall that it was published in some parts of the world by some online publications and news media. But that was all there was to it; no government official in Nigeria made any effort to rescue these Christian girls and reunite them with their father.
Because of the conspiracy of some powerful Islamic forces and those in positions of power in the government of Borno state, the kidnapping case went unheard. Now, seven years after the story of the kidnapping of those children and the forceful separation from their father, we are seeing terrorists abduct mainly Christians girls in Borno on a larger scale. The Nigerian government appears helpless in the face of this tragedy.
Chibok, along with Gwoza and Uba areas, provides Christians in Borno state with a Christian environment they inherited from previous generations. Christian missionary activities in Borno state were largely centered around these towns. Since the emergence of insurgency in Borno state and other northeastern states of Nigeria, Chibok and other Christian towns and villages have come under attack from Boko Haram, which seeks to impose strict sharia (Islamic law) throughout the country.
The kidnapping of the Christian girls, ages 16 to 18, is the height of the religious madness that has engulfed Nigeria. Most Christians in this part of Nigeria have been forced to flee their homes. Some of these Christians are now refugees in other countries like Cameroon, while others have been displaced to other parts of Nigeria. Christians in northern Nigeria are left with no other option than to lament over their plight; will other Christians across the world also look on without doing something about their plight?
The time has come for Christians in climates of religious liberty, who have the privilege to worship our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, to speak out against this evil and stand in the gap for persecuted Christians in Nigeria. Now is the time to join the global social media campaign, #BringBackOurGirls.
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