‘Over 100 girls unwilling to leave Boko Haram’

ABUJA. — Nigeria’s government is negotiating the release of another 83 Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction two-and-a-half years ago, but more than 100 others appear unwilling to leave their Boko Haram Islamic extremist captors, a community leader said yesterday.The unwilling girls may have been radicalised by Boko Haram or are ashamed to return home because they were forced to marry extremists and have babies, chairperson Pogu Bitrus of the Chibok Development Association told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.Bitrus said the 21 Chibok girls freed last week in the first negotiated release between Nigeria’s government and Boko Haram should be educated abroad, because they will probably face stigma in Nigeria.

The girls and their parents were reunited on Sunday and were expected to meet with Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari yesterday or today, Bitrus said.President Buhari flew to Germany on an official visit the day of the girls’ release.

At least 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a school in north-eastern Chibok in April 2014. Dozens escaped early on and at least half a dozen have died in captivity, according to the newly freed girls, Bitrus said.

All those who escaped on their own have left Chibok because, even though they were held only a few hours, they were labelled “Boko Haram wives” and taunted, he said.At least 20 of the girls are being educated in the United States.

“We would prefer that they are taken away from the community and this country because the stigmatisation is going to affect them for the rest of their lives,” Bitrus said. “Even someone believed to have been abused by Boko Haram would be seen in a bad light.”

One Chibok girl, Amina Ali Nkeki, escaped in May. Chibok Parents’ Association chairman Yakubu Nkeki said the young woman has been reunited with her freed classmates, all of whom are being treated by doctors, psychologists and trauma counsellors at a hospital in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, run by the Department of State Security, Nigeria’s secret service.

Human rights advocates and the Bring Back Our Girls Movement have been asking if the girl is a detainee of the government and have been demanding she be allowed to return home, as she has requested.One father of a newly freed girl, Emos Lawal, said his daughter was “praying that let the rest of them have the chance to come out”. — AP.

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