Boko Haram should move to the U.S. Here they would find journalists like Niraj Warikoo, Kari Huus, Eli Clifton, Adam Serwer and so many other anxious to do their bidding and portray their bloody deeds in a favorable light.
"Nigeria Islamists rule out peace talks, threaten media," by Ibrahim Mshezilla for Reuters, August 23 (thanks to Twostellas):
(Reuters) - Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram ruled out on Thursday holding peace talks with the government and threatened to strike media houses it said fight the group "with the pen".The local press and at least two foreign news organizations have reported that talks are going on between the government and the militants who have been staging an insurgency against it, citing unnamed sources.
Information minister Labaran Maku declined comment on Wednesday on the talks, citing government instructions not to discuss the issue.
Since launching an insurgency against the government in 2009 with the avowed aim of turning all or part of religiously-mixed Nigeria into an Islamic state, Boko Haram has killed hundreds of people in near daily gun and bomb attacks.
"We are telling the government to understand that if it is not ready to embrace sharia (Islamic law) and the Koran as the guiding book from which the laws of the land derive, there shall be no peace," the sect's spokesman Abu Qaqa said in a written statement in the northeast city of Maiduguri, the heart of the rebellion....
Qaqa also threatened media houses, recalling the sect's dual bomb attack on local newspaper ThisDay in the capital Abuja and northern city of Kaduna in April that killed five people.
"They should understand that for us there is no difference between those fighting with arms and with the pen," he said.
FAILED TALKS
A group of governors from Nigeria's largely Muslim north set up a committee on Wednesday tasked with trying to reach out to the Islamists. The committee is chaired by Bagangida Aliyu, the governor of Niger state, which has been plagued by insecurity.
It would aim to "get to the root of the security challenges and ... dialogue with any identified groups with a view to negotiating the way out of the menace," it said on Wednesday.
However, the outcome of any such initiative remains uncertain. Though Boko Haram's anger is directed towards the southern Christian-dominated central government, it also rails against the northern elites, whom it regards as corrupt and unIslamic....
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From the article: "Boko Haram's anger is directed towards the southern Christian-dominated central government..".
It should be noted that for nearly all of its post-independence history Nigeria has basically been ruled by Muslims, who have dominated and run the armed forces (the British colonial government, I gather, favoured the Muslims over the non-Muslims).
And that the *oil* from which Nigeria derives most of its income, lies under the ground in the *south* - which was never Muslim and which is populated overwhelmingly by Christians and animists - whereas the Islamised northern and rapidly-being-Islamised middle region has no oil and is steadily being desertified, as tends to happen everywhere that Islam prevails.
The South could split off - as southern Sudan has done - and survive on its own; but the Muslims of the north would have nothing to batten off, if they did. They have no intention of letting the south go, because the oil wealth has over the history of Nigeria been directed into the pockets of the Muslims who have historically dominated the army, **and the government**. It is a very new thing for Nigeria to have a 'southern-Christian-dominated central government'...and the Muslims are seething at the very idea.