WHEN the girls appeared on the screen, parents in the small room at the Government House, Maiduguri dissolved into tears, a New York Times reporter, who was present while parents of abducted Chibok girls, during the week, watched the Boko Haram video reported.
But after several of them finally saw their daughters’ faces again in the video, they said their relief quickly gave rise to anger: The girls were alive, but they were prisoners.
“Her face was frowning and unhappy,” said Bashir Wattai, a tall, solidly built farmer who said he had just seen his 17-year-old daughter Mairama in the video. “She looked sad. I burst into crying and weeping.
“The other people in the room, they were all weeping and crying,” Mr. Wattai said. “It was just tears.”
Mothers of the missing schoolgirls wailed in anguish on Sunday as they waited for a visiting dignitary in the burned-out ruins of the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok.
Four weeks of anguish have passed since the night when more than 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram from a state school in Chibok, an isolated village 80 miles from this state capital in northeastern Nigeria. But on Tuesday, at the well-guarded government compound in the heartland of the Boko Haram insurgency, an unwelcome window into their children’s forbidding new world was opened to the grieving parents.
“I saw her. Yes, I saw her,” said Habiba Yaga, the mother of Hawa Maina, 18. “I did not know she was alive. But when is she coming back home?”
To her mother, Hawa looked alien in the robes the Islamists had put her in. “They’ve changed her dress. She looked — uglier than at home,” Ms. Yaga said, hesitating.
Mr. Wattai, the farmer, concurred. The new dress was disturbing. “Her normal appearance was changed for me,” he said.
The militants released their video to news organisations on Monday, providing the first glimpse of the girls in what has become a global search effort, spurred by a grassroots outcry on two sides of the Atlantic. The girls, some 276 of whom remain missing, are now bargaining chips for Boko Haram, which is demanding that the Nigerian government release its imprisoned members in exchange for the kidnapped students.
But while much of the world saw the girls sitting passively and compliant in the video, many of their families had to wait. One parent explained that there was no electricity in their village to enable them to watch, a poignant reminder of how poor many victims in the conflict here often are.
By the end of Tuesday, 77 faces in the solemn crowd of girls, newly clad from head to toe in somber black-and-gray robes, had been recognized, the state governor’s office said in a statement. The robes, revealing only the schoolgirls’ faces, rendered some of them difficult to identify, some parents said.
The government had arranged a first showing of the video in Chibok on Monday to identify the girls, but it had to be halted abruptly when the parents were overcome with grief, demanding that the government’s identification process be moved to Maiduguri.
“The families became upset and they started crying ‘this is my child,’” a senior state official said Tuesday evening. “They started shouting. They had to stop the filming.”
Then on Tuesday, the state government organised a group of about 15 parents, relatives and girls who had escaped the Islamists to make the arduous journey to the state capital to watch the video. They were guarded by rifle-bearing militia members from the village in red uniforms because the road is still preyed on by Boko Haram.
The group, along with teachers, officials and security operatives, packed into the room at the government complex and locked the door. When the parents emerged, their universe of anxiety had shifted. Some appeared dazed and perturbed as they slumped in plastic chairs on the grounds of the state-run hotel.
“She’s not feeling O.K.,” said Lawan Zanah, who had just seen his daughter Ayesha, 18, in the video. “The way she is sitting. She doesn’t even know where she is. She seemed sad. Sad.”
The girls had come to the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School to take their final exams, and many were staying overnight there. Armed and uniformed men rounded them up, loaded them into trucks and drove off with them. Although about 50 escaped, not a single one of the remaining girls has been found.
Ms. Yaga conveyed the shock, four weeks later, of going to fetch her daughter and not finding her there.
“My daughter was living in the school,” she said. “When I went in the morning to see her, she wasn’t there.”
Further identification by parents, Saturday Tribune was informed, could not hold on Friday due to the planned visit of the president which was cancelled at the last minute.
However, Special Adviser to the State Governor on Media, Isa Gusau told Saturday Tribune that the exercise would resume shortly. He was not specific due to what he called security reasons as the parents would be made to be in the state capital.
The video may have provided some relief to the parents, but on Tuesday, there were no indications that the girls were any closer to being located. The Islamists are likely to be holding them in a vast forest of low trees that abuts Chibok, but so far Nigerian military efforts have been unsuccessful.
Gen. David M. Rodriguez, commanding General of the American military’s Africa Command, visited Nigeria on Monday and Tuesday to discuss assistance for the search, including surveillance aircraft and satellite imagery, as well as broader security cooperation with Nigerian officials, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, said.
“It’s certain General Rodriguez reassured the Nigerians that the United States is committed to supporting their efforts to find the kidnapped schoolgirls,” Colonel Caggins said.
The General arrived on Monday on a previously scheduled visit for talks with his Nigerian counterparts that also included senior American policy makers and diplomats, including Sarah Sewall, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights, Colonel Caggins said.
The international effort, expanding last weekend as the plight of the girls captured the global imagination, appeared to be of some comfort to the parents who came here Tuesday.
Yet uncertainty and longing prevailed. “I just want my daughter to be back,” Mr. Wattai said.
Source: Tribune
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