WASHINGTON—Targeted sanctions against the Nigerian government for allowing mass slaughter should be a Congressional agenda, according to a celebrated French war correspondent.
Bernard-Henri Levy, renowned French philosopher and rights advocate was on Capitol Hill recently to stir the conscience of the West regarding genocides past and present, chief among them, today’s war on Nigerian Christians.
“ Nigerian government is not only tolerant but complicit in the violence in Nigeria,” he told a press conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Oct. 27.
“Were I a Congressman in the United States, I would study targeted and well-proportionate sanctions against the regime which encourages such crimes.” He added: “I accuse the regime of [Muhammadu] Buhari of complicity of the Islamist Fulani’s,” referring to the ethnic group linked with wiping out and displacing hundreds of towns occupied by Nigerian Christians.
“ killers have friends in the top levels of the State. People are persecuted not because of what they do, but because of who they are, and what they are is Christian. And for me this was unbearable,” Levy said. “That is a scandal.”
In more than 30 books and 45 years of on-sight reportage Levy has decried scandal, ranging from Bangladesh to Libya, to Sudan, Northern Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria in 2019.
Known as a commanding figure for four decades in the war of ideas against Marxism and anti-Israeli hate, the 73-year-old Levy is on a book tour to promote what he calls a manifesto for democracy to take responsibility for forgotten wars against helpless minorities in faraway places. His latest book and film by the same title, “ Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope.”
“We are in a tempest, and this book is a sort of map for whoever wants to guide the world through this tempest,” Levy said.
Hosted by the International Committee on Nigeria, Levy has taken his case to members of the U.S. Congress, to scholars gathered at Hudson Institute and to rights activists meeting for a showing of his film at the French Embassy.
“It’s true that the world has accepted so many genocides, starting with the Armenian genocide early in the 20th Century,” according to Levy. “Right up until 1994 in Rwanda. Many people were concerned about Rwanda, but only after it was over, and then there were only bodies to count,” Levy told the press event Wednesday.
“ new genocide is in Nigeria. I wrote about it in Paris Match and in the Wall Street Journal. My reportage was published all over the world. As far as I know, the killings did not stop. re still is a will to kill,” he said. Yet in the case of Nigeria, the Western world has an opportunity to step in while there is still time to prevent a blood bath as devastating as the Rwanda genocide of 1994, he argued.
“We have to escalate more the means in the West to resist. We have to act, to do, but the third thing is we have to see.”
“My project is to bring the Nigerian question to the highest levels of the U.S. government and to the United Nations,” Levy said.
Asked by the Pezou why the conflict has been portrayed as a clash between farmers and herders, he replied, “To say this is simply a farmer-herder clash is absolutely absurd. What was that phrase so popular during the Clinton Administration? Oh, it’s the economy, stupid! United States thinks ‘It’s the oil, stupid!. Which means keep the business and economic arrangements.’”
tasks ahead are multiple, he said, pointing out that civil society in the United States could do much to remediate the crisis in Nigeria.
“In this country you have a lot of vibrant churches. y care greatly about Christians in the Middle East, but they should care exactly the same about the churches in Nigeria. If I were a member of one of these Christian churches, I would go with my buddies to Nigeria and rebuild a little church. This could be a task of civil society,” he said referring to the thousands of churches that have been burned by the ISIS insurgents and by radicalized Muslim mercenaries who destroy churches and massacre unarmed farming families to make room for grazing routes.
re are signs that mainstream U.S. media is taking notice of what Levy has called Nigeria’s forgotten conflict. His book and film come on the heels of Fox News Corporation’s 38-minute documentary produced by war correspondent Lara Logan and streaming on Fox Nation since Sept. 27. “Radicalism in Nigeria,” her close study of the testimonies of citizen journalists in the killing fields of Plateau state, drew similar conclusions as Levy’s film regarding the malevolent actors in Nigeria.
Islamic State-linked insurgencies known as Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa have killed thousands of unarmed farmers as well as Nigerian soldiers, yet the more deadly force in recent years have been organized militias of paid radical mercenaries who raze villages and kill scores of people without intervention of police or the Nigerian military. Both Logan and Levy observe that the goal of the insurgency and the Muslim mercenaries is the same: the complete Islamization of the country.
In Levy’s telling, at a time when the world was ignoring the plight of the forgotten, he felt called to investigate in person. “I went as a personal challenge and a moral duty when everyone else has turned his back I decided that I had to go to Afghanistan and to Nigeria, a country full of secret police.
“When half of the world is thrown out of the boat and the world can’t care less, to me that is a scandal. When I saw the West turning its back on the Kurds, I saw it as a shame. It was a physical challenge and a moral duty. When I saw everyone else staying in his own neighborhood, in his own apartment, because of the pandemic, precisely because of the pandemic I decided I had to do it.”
Pezou : West Should Sanction Nigeria’s Genocide: Bernard-Henri Levy