[guest post by Dana]
You know the world has gone mad when a terrorist organization responsible for murdering school boys and kidnapping school girls comes close to getting a pass because Climate Change:
Instability in Nigeria, however, has been growing steadily over the last decade – and one reason is climate change. In 2009, a UK Department for International Development (Dfid) study warned that climate change could contribute to increasing resource shortages in the country due to land scarcity from desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures.
A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace confirmed a “basic causal mechanism” that “links climate change with violence in Nigeria.” The report concludes:
“…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.”
Unfortunately, a business-as-usual scenario sees Nigeria’s climate undergoing “growing shifts in temperature, rainfall, storms, and sea levels throughout the twenty-first century. Poor adaptive responses to these shifts could help fuel violent conflict in some areas of the country.”
No explanation was given for what motivated other past crimes against humanity before “climate change” became the go-to. Furthermore, it’s not only climate change that’s at the root of Boko Haram, but U.S. greed for oil. Of course.
According to Prof Jeremy Keenan, a leading Algeria expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies who advises the US State Department, European Union, and Foreign Office on regional security issues, AQIM’s expansion across north Africa has focused on oil-rich regions – particularly Algeria, Niger Delta, Nigeria, and Chad; the latter three precisely where Boko Haram has reportedly received terrorist training.
Over a decade ago, Keenan reports, these countries signed a “co-operation agreement on counter-terrorism that effectively joined the two oil-rich sides of the Sahara together in a complex of security arrangements whose architecture is American.” The agreement evolved into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, which was eventually absorbed into the US Army’s African Command (AFRICOM).
Keenan argues that the west’s oil and gas greed has caused our governments to turn a blind eye to the role of oil states like Algeria in fostering regional terrorism – instead exploiting the resulting chaos to legitimise efforts to consolidate access to remaining African energy reserves.
If this analysis is correct, then the hundreds of innocent girls kidnapped in Nigeria are not just victims of Islamist fanaticism; they are also victims of failed foreign, economic and security policies tied to our infernal addiction to black gold.
It goes without saying that third world countries rife with corruption and nearly non-existent economies facing drought and famine drives people to do whatever they need to survive. The author writes that 200,000 farmers and herdsman had lost their livelihoods and, facing starvation, crossed the border to Nigeria where some of those were lured in by Boko Haram. (The author, however, does not speak to those hundreds of thousands facing the very same drought and famine conditions not participating in such atrocities…)
So, at what point do we simply let those who are guilty be guilty? What compels some to find something to explain heinous crimes, to add a sympathetic layer, to make the brutality human? Because if some are now blaming Boko Haram’s behavior on an external, non-direct, still debatable circumstance like climate change (only recently being discussed in the public square), what other abhorrent behaviors will we see blamed on it?
And why not entertain the far-fetched: If this line of thinking were to grow and evolve, it wouldn’t be surprising to see climate change eventually used as a defense in a crime. After all, climate change apparently impacts the entire world, to one degree or another. Who is to say what crimes could or could not be, at least in part, charged to it?