One Year Later, Nigerian Schoolgirls Remain Missing

[Stephan Bobb]

One Year Later, Nigerian Schoolgirls Remain Missing

The "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign still hopes to find the girls alive.

Parents of missing Chibok schoolgirls gather on Tuesday to mark one year since 219 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in the northeastern Nigerian city of Chibok.

By Gabrielle Levy and Teresa WelshApril 15, 2015 | 7:30 p.m. EDT+ More

Two schoolgirls who were among hundreds kidnapped by the Nigerian terror group Boko Haram were at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday pleading for renewed attention to their fellow students still missing a year later despite an international "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign.

Saa, 19, and Patience, 18, who managed to escape from the Islamist extremists, recounted the experience of being taken in the middle of the night from their boarding school in Chibok before jumping out of moving vehicles and fleeing through a forest. They begged a shepherd for help, and eventually made their way home. Patience, who was injured in the escape, spent the next two months on crutches.

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“Here am I now, free. … But my colleagues are still in the hands of the terrorists,” Saa said. “I’m pleading everybody all over the world and I’m pleading the international community to do all our best to try to and bring those girls back to school.”

The pair, who were among 50 or so girls to escape, spoke with lawmakers and supporters as part of a series of events and rallies around the country meant to draw attention back to the kidnapping. Momentum behind the movement, which generated a social media campaign that famously featured notable people like first lady Michelle Obama in photos appealing for the girls' return, has stalled in the year since their disappearance.

The Nigerian government of President Goodluck Jonathan floundered in attempts to find the girls, 219 of whom remain missing amid varying reports they have been killed or forced into marriages arranged by the militants. Jonathan was widely criticized for not commenting on the kidnapping publicly until three weeks after it happened and for dismissing the "Bring Back Our Girls” campaign as politically motivated.

"Wherever these girls are, we'll get them out," Jonathan said last May, but his government has shown little progress.

Jonathan was defeated last month in a presidential election by Muhammadu Buhari, who said his government will have a new approach to finding the girls, one that beings with “honesty.”

"We do not know if the Chibok girls can be rescued. Their whereabouts remain unknown," Buhari said. "As much as I wish to, I cannot promise that we can find them."

Buhari, a former military ruler of Africa’s largest nation, won election in part because he was widely seen as more capable of combating the threat from Boko Haram.

Emmanuel Ogebe, a human rights lawyer and special counsel to the World Ebony Network, which has brought 10 of the escaped girls to the U.S. and placed them in schools, agreed. Ogebe said Buhari – a Muslim and a former military man who hails from Boko Haram's stronghold in the country's north – gives him the political capital to more successfully locate the missing girls.

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"He should begin working now, well within his own network and contacts to encourage people to help locate the girls," Ogebe says. "What he has is a northern network that [Jonathan] did not have."

Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., is also banking on more cooperation from Buhari. Wilson, who helped organize the Capitol Hill press conference, said she didn't think Jonathan "had the political will to find these girls."

"I think that the new president has the political will,” she said. “We will continue to hold the government of Nigeria accountable.”

Wilson, along with Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, Barbara Lee, D-Calif. and Karen Bass, D-Calif., called on their colleagues in Washington to continue to exert external pressure on the Nigerian government to do more, and for the U.S. to assist where it could.

Several pieces of legislation are in the works on the Hill, including a resolution to urge the return to Nigeria of nearly half a billion dollars stolen by former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that is now under U.S. control. Another proposal would appropriate Pentagon or foreign operations ​​​​​​​​​​funds to target ​aid directly toward battling Boko Haram. ​

Ogebe says the Nigerian government has the intelligence and military resources, combined with aid from Chad and Cameroon, to find the girls who are missing and to stop Boko Haram's epidemic of violence and destruction.

Saa agreed the government could be doing more.

"They always say they are trying their best to bring the girls back, but I'm not sure if they are doing their best," Saa said.