By Ochereome Nnanna

FOLLOWING the recent retirement of military service chiefs, the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) threatened to take former Chief of Army Staff, Lt General Azubuike Ihejirika and six other unnamed officers to the International Criminal Court (ICC) over alleged extrajudicial killings by soldiers in Bama and Giwa Barracks in Borno State.

This threat stirred political dust and verbal exchanges between Professor Ango Abdullahi and Ihejirika’s kinsman, Senator Uche Chukwumerije. NEF said it set up two committees to “investigate” the alleged abuses and that it would take the end product of its probe to the ICC. Apparently, the NEF does not believe in the dictum that charity begins at home. If it did, it would have started by reporting the matter to our own National Commission on Human Rights (NCHR), which is entertaining a similar complaint over the shooting of alleged Boko Haram members in Apo, Abuja last year.

It would, indeed, be sad and unpatriotic if it is true that soldiers sent to crush the Boko Haram insurgency engaged in extra-judicial killings of innocent civilians, even though it will only follow in an ugly tradition that was rampant during the Biafra-Nigeria war. Northern soldiers regularly and freely engaged in the massacre of civilians. Some of them surrendered and accepted “One Nigeria” only to be lined up and shot simply because they were Igbos.

Northern elements in the federal armed forces did this in continuation of their revenge killings and pogroms which followed the first military coup. While these happened, none of these so-called Northern elders raised a voice of protest. If anything, most of them have been on record justifying this evil and boasting they would do it again if the circumstances presented again. In fact, they invoke this ugly episode in our nation’s dark history as an instrument of intimidation against those who call for true federalism, saying what they did to Biafrans during the war would be a child’s play for those calling for Nigeria’s “break-up”.

With the advent of the Boko Haram Islamic insurgency fuelled mainly by these disgruntled “elders” and their local and foreign financiers due to power shift to a Niger Delta president, and the coincidental emergence of an army chief who happened to be Igbo, these “elders” suddenly turned into “human rights activists” who would petition ICC with unproven cases documented only by them.

It was the same NEF under the late Alhaji Abdulrahman Okene who, during the bloody reign of General Sani Abacha, applauded when Abacha unleashed the Joint Task Force (JTF) on Ogoniland, killing hundreds and staging a kangaroo trial that led to the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders on November 10th 1995.

These were the same people who prevailed on the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua to order Major General  Sarkin Yaki Bello, as the Commander of the Joint Task Force on the Niger Delta, to exterminate Ijaw communities in an all-out war over their militant agitation for the control of their God-given resources just about four years ago. These chaps had also supported Abacha to declare war on Yorubaland and eliminate leaders of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) with sniper squads for mounting a campaign for the revalidation of the presidential mandate of Chief Moshood Abiola between 1993 and 1998.

Following the death of President Yar’ Adua, these northern “elders” after failing to prevent the installation of the then Vice President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, launched a feral campaign to snatch power back to the North by all means in 2010/2011. They warned that unless Jonathan stepped down to enable the North reclaim power, they would make Nigeria ungovernable.

When Nigerians ignored them and voted Jonathan into power in the April 2011 presidential election, from nowhere, a dead Boko Haram resurged across the North and started killing Christians and Southerners, mostly in churches through bombings and suicide attacks. Later on, the terrorists started killing everyone without discrimination.

Soon, the Al Qaeda Islamic terror network bought into the insurgency and expanded the attacks to government establishments, military facilities and crowded places. When the Jonathan administration started serious military operations and set the terrorists to flight, the NEF and vociferous pro-Boko Haram activists accused him of “declaring war against the North”.

However, majority of the patriotic Muslim population in the North started realising that, contrary to the rantings of the NEF and their cohorts, Boko Haram was, indeed, the enemy of Nigerians irrespective of religion and creed. They joined the war against terror and the insurgents fled into remote forests in the North East. The attacks tricked down to isolated incidents, and the economic, social and political livelihood across the North markedly improved.

President Jonathan and Ihejirika should be held as heroes of the North. They have helped to save the North from itself. They have risked a lot to contain the saboteurs in the military, the government and the political class, including some of these misguided “elders”, who are bent on destroying the North because they want “their power back” by all means.

I fully welcome the idea of approaching the ICC to look into the conduct of the Army under Ihejirika in the war on terror in the North. The whole world knows that Boko Haram is one of the deadliest terrorist groups operating today. We are waiting for the NEF to make a cast-iron case against Ihejirika and other military chiefs.

We will also be meeting the NEF and other past military chiefs of northern extraction who have carried out genocides against innocent civilians; from the civil war to Ogoni, from June 12 to Odi, from Zangon-Kataf to Zaki-Biam and from the Niger Delta to the Plateau. Let the ICC settle all these alleged human rights violations by the Nigerian military forces once and for all! We will be meeting the NEF and their collaborators with the details of the Oputa Panel and other reports.

On a more serious note, let us bear in mind that the Nigerian Army and the armed forces are there for our protection. Without the armed and security forces, Boko Haram would have overrun the North. The South, in self-preservation, would have taken up arms to keep them and their look-alikes at bay, thus fulfilling Major Gideon Orkar’s vision. Nigeria would thusly have disintegrated. We must be grateful and appreciative of the sacrifices of our now re-professionalised armed forces which are no longer under any ethnic or regional thumb.

We must expose all those enemy “elders” and “youths” in our midst who are promoting anarchy and bloodshed, pitting Nigerians against one another in their selfish pursuits to grab power at all cost. We must consign them to the trash bin of history and move on to build a united nation where no expired, frustrated and screaming “elder” can trouble us anymore.