U.N. Refugee Agency Says Thousands Fleeing Nigeria Region

[theHandpuppet]

One thing mentioned on NBC News this morning that you won't find in this article -- some 80% of the Nigerian refugees fleeing into Cameroon are WOMEN.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/world/africa/nigeria.html?_r=0
the New York Times
U.N. Refugee Agency Says Thousands Fleeing Nigeria Region
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCEMAY 9, 2014

GENEVA — As international support builds for the search for more than 200 abducted Nigerian schoolgirls, the United Nations refugee agency expressed alarm Friday at the swelling tide of people fleeing their homes in northeast Nigeria to escape attacks by Boko Haram insurgents that it said were unprecedented in their brutality and frequency.

Up to a thousand people are crossing the border into southern Niger every week from fear of attacks by the Islamist insurgent group and counterattacks by the Nigerian armed forces, and smaller numbers have arrived in Cameroon and Chad, Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the refugee agency, told reporters.

Refugees are providing accounts of grenade attacks on markets killing villagers and livestock, summary executions and whole villages and their crops being burned to the ground.

“Some have witnessed friends or family members being randomly singled out and killed in streets,” Mr. Edwards said, while others had spoken of arbitrary arrests on suspicion of belonging to insurgent groups.... MORE

[RobertEarl]

1. Awful. History repeating?

From what i have casually gathered over the years abt Nigeria and the history of land grabbers, it seems we've heard all this before.

Nigeria had a large oil spill a few years ago, the largest ever, iirc.

Nigeria pumps more oil than anywhere else, i've read.

True to capitalist forms, any time there is capital to be hoarded, the hoarders lose all sense of humanity in launching their quest to hoard.

This is why i hate having any dependency on oil. It's usually mixed with a lot of blood.

I live in a place where gold was the reason 200 hundred years ago for a similar removal of the native people from their ancestral lands by the hoarders. It is weird that now we the sons and daughters of that history, have to contemplate our history repeating in a distant land, and wondering what can be done.

Do we send in troops? Whose side will they be on? Will they be the Big Oil side, or the natives?

Bloody f'n oil and bloody f'n gold. Oh, yeah, bloody f'n nukes - the modern day mistake, eh?

[William769]

2. ...

[SoCalDem]

3. Sadly, they will not be much safer wherever they end up

Women & girls are little more than property or a commodity in many places in the middle east & Africa.