In Pursuit of Disobedient Women by Dionne Searcey

Author:Dionne Searcey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

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SHEHU HAD HEARD the military recently had been going through villages in the countryside and evacuating everyone, torching homes, Boko Haram–style, and rounding up people into camps near major towns. Clearing the countryside of regular people, the thinking went, would make it easier to spot and kill the bad guys even if it meant uprooting the slim part of the population that had felt safe enough to stay in their homes. I knew the military had a poor track record when it came to human rights, but how could they think that this strategy was going to win the war?

We were staying at a brand-new U.N. base camp, nicknamed “the Red Roof,” a smattering of empty buildings with red metal roofs, large white tents and giant containers that looked like the bases the U.S. military contractors had set up in Iraq.

The small tent city was fancier than any U.N. refugee camp I had seen. The floors were concrete and the units were outfitted with IKEA furniture. They were even better than the hotels in the city with their old shag carpet that trapped visible chunks of dirt. At those hotels, the electric outlets sizzled when I plugged in my laptop, and the rooms were coated in toxic mosquito repellent that left a fake citrus smell I could almost taste, as if the humid air was so saturated it couldn’t absorb the droplets.

I was happy to tag along with the U.N. and see what they wanted to show me, but I also was bent on finding members of Boko Haram. Shehu thought one of our sources might have a lead.

While he worked on that, we went with other reporters to the U.N. headquarters in town where an Irishman named Darren, the head of media relations for the agency that invited us, pointed us to a room set aside for the working press.

“You can file your stories from here,” Darren chirped, proud of having cleared a space for busy journalists with deadlines.

All the reporters looked at one another. No one had the heart to tell him that beyond some kind of catastrophic attack that killed dozens, no news organization in the world would take breaking news updates from the front lines of the nearly eighth year of the war with Boko Haram.

We were herded into a room for a security briefing. U.N. officials told us about their efforts to build relationships with the Nigerian military. They had hired a retired general as a liaison between the U.N. and the military and had arranged briefings for us with high-ranking commanders. They told us soldiers were carrying out humanitarian missions even when that wasn’t their job. One commander had managed to find a copy of a Tom & Jerry cartoon in the local language and arranged a screening for kids in a camp for people who had been uprooted because of the war.

In the initial years of the war, the Nigerians had refused the help of the United Nations. By the time the country agreed to let the U.

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