Nigeria’s government has in the last week held its first indirect
peace talks with Islamist sect Boko Haram, meeting mediators to discuss a
possible ceasefire, political and diplomatic sources told Reuters on
Thursday.
The P.M.News had reported that the group had given
conditions for the discussions, some of which are the release from
detention of its members and concrete guarantee that the members would
not be harassed after peace talks.
Reuters said two persons close
to Boko Haram have been carrying messages back and forth between the
sect’s self-proclaimed leader Abubakar Shekau and government officials,
the sources, who asked not to be named, said.
It was not clear
whether any mediators met with President Goodluck Jonathan himself. A
presidency spokesman said he could not immediately comment.
Boko
Haram has said it wants to impose sharia, or Islamic, law across a
country split equally between Christians and Muslims. The group has
killed hundreds this year in bomb and gun attacks, mostly in the
majority Muslim north of Africa’s top oil producer.
“BH (Boko
Haram) has mentioned a conditional ceasefire but it wants all its
members released from prison. The government sees this as unacceptable
but is willing to release foot soldiers,” a traditional leader and civil
rights activist involved in the talks told Reuters, asking not to be
named.
“It is the first time a ceasefire has been mentioned, so it
is a massive positive, but given the lack of trust a resolution is
still a way off,” he added.
Jonathan’s national security adviser,
General Owoye Andrew Azazi, told Reuters in January that Nigeria was
considering making contact with moderate members of the shadowy Boko
Haram via “back channels”.
A source at the presidency confirmed
that efforts are being made to reach out to the sect’s negotiators, but
that direct talks had not yet begun. A well-respected Islamic cleric has
been contacted to reach out to them, he said.
Shekau has appeared
in two video tapes posted on YouTube in January claiming leadership of
the sect and making bellicose threats against security forces.
Since
then, however, Nigeria’s military has made some key arrests and senior
members of the sect have been killed, while the sophistication and scale
of its attacks have fallen since a wave of deadly strikes from November
to January.
Two security sources said one of the people involved
in the negotiations was a close ally of Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of
Boko Haram who died in police custody in 2009, triggering a widespread
violent uprising by the sect. They were both members of a group called
the Spring Council of Sharia.
Shekau has not said the group was
interested in dialogue in his videos and neither has the group’s
spokesman, Abu Qaqa, who holds sporadic telephone interviews with local
media in the sect’s heartland of Maiduguri.
But they have not ruled them out completely either.
DIFFERENT FACTIONS
Jonathan
told Reuters in January that the government was open to dialogue but
said sect members were hidden and therefore direct talks were unlikely.
He
noted that talks to resolve the conflict in the oil producing Niger
Delta, that ended with an amnesty in 2009, were different in that
officials knew who the militants’ leaders were and how to contact them.
Jonathan
had previously drawn fire for treating Boko Haram as a purely security
matter, rather than as a problem requiring a political solution that
would address northern grievances.
The military’s efforts to stem
the sect’s insurgency have had mixed results in the past, with human
rights groups saying heavy-handed tactics have worsened resentment of
authorities.
But more recently there have been arrests of senior
figures and some have died in clashes with security forces, security
sources say. They include Abu Qaqa, Nigeria’s secret service have said,
although a man claiming to be him phoned journalists to say it was
another senior figure.
The security services paraded five
suspected members of Boko Haram on Wednesday before the press, who they
said were behind the kidnapping of a Briton and Italian in May, adding
that the ringleader had died in custody.
The group has not managed
to launch a wide scale, coordinated attack since one in Kano that
killed 186 people in January, reverting to crude bomb attacks and drive
by shootings.
“I wouldn’t say the back has been broken on Boko
Haram but certainly these high profile arrests and deaths will have
weakened its position,” a foreign security expert in Abuja said.
“The most telling sign is that we haven’t seen the more sophisticated, coordinated attacks for some time.”
The group’s factional nature means it will be difficult to negotiate any ceasefire deal with all elements.
“The
difficulty is: who do they actually represent? Boko Haram is a big
label for many different command groups. Are they all being represented
at these talks or just some of them?” said Peter Sharwood-Smith of
security consultants Drum Cussac.
“It’s just really hard to know who’s who … and if these talks are going to achieve much.”
Shekau is believed to be in command of units carrying out the majority of attacks, most of which occur in the northeast.
“Even
though dialogue is going on with just one faction of the group, it
looks like the most high profile one,” a foreign diplomat specializing
in security in northern Nigeria told Reuters.
“Even some sort of peace deal would ease the pressure and allow the military to mop up more of the breakaway groups.”
(Additional reporting by Tim Cocks in Lagos and Felix Onuah in Abuja; Editing by Tim Cocks)
Culled from PM News
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