What happened?
Nigeria has a missing persons problem that is directly linked to insurgent activities as well as the Nigerian military.
In a ten-month-long investigation, we sought to independently pursue the claim of the country having the highest number of missing people in Africa, especially in connection with the insurgency in the northeast. This time, we penetrated the issue through killings and enforced disappearances by the Military. It was an extension of our missing persons project.
We established mass grave sites where victims of extrajudicial killings were buried, through a geospatial information system and visited the locations ourselves. We retrieved hospital records that showed that hundreds of dead bodies had been deposited over the course of months by military forces. We also spoke to families of more than two dozen people who had disappeared or been killed by state forces. Many of these findings were in violation of international laws.
Why does it matter?
For transitional justice and restorative justice, and even for human dignity, the families of many young people, especially young men, are required by law to know when state forces have taken them or killed them. But for thousands of families in the northeast, they have been left with no form of information at all.
This has created a deep sense of resentment against the state, legal troubles emanating from an inability to gain access to the use of properties left behind by the missing or killed people, and an unfathomable amount of untreated trauma for thousands of families and their generations.
What can be done?
There needs to be closure for the families that have been wronged. The Nigerian military needs to acknowledge that they made a lot of mistakes and errors in judgment that have translated to great loss for innocent people. They also need to contact the families of those they have in custody and inform them of their imprisonment and the reason for it.
They need to try them in courts for the alleged offences they are being held for, to release the names of those who may have died in detention, and all those who have disappeared.
Bodies of those who have died or been killed should be released to their families wherever possible. We have a database of some of the missing persons and can facilitate linkage between state forces and their families.
