Until now I have said nothing on the horrific kidnap of hundreds of young girls from their boarding school in Nigeria. No comment can truly communicate its barbarity. Plenty have tweeted to bring back our girls – including Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.
If only we could do something more than tweeting? If only there was some woman in power somewhere who could have done something substantial to make an impact on this horrific group Boko Haram that like to kill Christians, and kidnap their own people and girls to be sold in slavery and sexual violence. If only women were in positions of real power this would not happen. Hang on…
It turns out there was once such a woman, and her name was Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton could have placed Boko Haram on the US official list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011. But the Daily Beast has reported that she “fought hard against” it for two years.
Placing Boko Haram on such a list would have had a significant impact as it “enables the government to use various investigative tools for law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering purposes. It also squeezes the organization by criminalizing the provision of material support to it and the conduct of business with it.”
So you get a lot more done by flexing your muscle as Secretary of State than tweeting. But Hillary Clinton dropped the ball and refused to do so and this refusal came “despite the urging of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and over a dozen Senators and Congressmen.”
Finally, only after John Kerry replaced Clinton, and after a series of jihadist bombings against churches and other targets, did the State Department finally relent and add Boko Haram to the terrorist list in November 2013.
But it is tragically all too little too late. There are numerous reports saying that, instead of relying on keyboard warriors to rescue these girls, the US might send in actual warriors in the form of Special Forces to save them. I hope Nigeria accepts the help. But in meantime Mrs Clinton should be subject to rigorous scrutiny as to why she refused to list this group of Islamists for so long.
