Crocodile tears for Baga

“May you never witness the tears of a fish” -An ancient Chinese prayer Most fishes found in a distressed state of extreme discomfiture in Nigeria, must have been a smoked one, likely caught and dried in the banks of Lake Chad Basin and most probable, originating from the most famous, now turned infamous town of Baga. It is said that every congregation is communal, from the little union of a single wife and her husband, to the greater family relationship having the presence of sired children, to the compact block of a village, district, local government and a federating state, up to the level of a recognized nation state, continental union and the greater world stage at last. For somebody who has lost one or two close relations to the grim reaper, what always fascinates me every time a death occurs is the appearance of a group of women, who offer their services of crying for the deceased, for quite a handsome fee of payment, even though they might not have known the dead person while alive or even cared much for the bereaved family, theirs is just a business enterprise of sharing grief with the family which lost someone very dear to it. At such a moment, everybody is expected to understand and appreciate such mercantile business arrangement, because what is important at such an epochal time is giving the dead a befitting burial, it seems this is exactly what happened with the victims of Baga military massacre, where despite the African cultural refrain of never speaking evil of the dead, their northern kiths and kin mourned them loudly with an ostentatious hypocrisy, while the southern segment of the national divide, saw them as nothing more than a mere collateral damage, who are as guilty of complicity as the terrorist, in shielding and hiding the insurgents, from the long arms of the Nigerian Security Forces. The question demanding an immediate answer is could most Nigerians honestly say the massacre took them unawares, because, to have inferred that it would have meant that nobody had expected what occurred to have happened. But, if history is a mirror of the past which foretell the future and a human being is a creature of habit, who always follows the set precedence of others, then, it is highly disingenuous to express a surprise on a notorious fact that such tragedies have been happening, since the advent of our nascent democracy, from the ungodly destructions of Zaki Biam to the mass murder which occurred in the town of Odi. Where leaders both military and civilians, allowed a bout of emotions to rule their heads and judgmental decision making capacity, because of an evident murder of their security officers, the path of retaliation was chosen over the route of the rule of law. Unfortunately, if such reckless action was taken to send a message, to a citizenry who are infamously known for lawlessness, it seems the state sponsored violent admonishing of a population, never made anyone to fear acting their usual irresponsible self, confirming the general wisdom about the rule of law that it is never about punitive sanction, but about a corrective sentencing to reform an individual in a most humane manner, to change a character trait from undertaking any deviant behavior again. A lot of Nigerians have often pondered and indeed subtly justified the actions of the soldiers, on whether such a military action, could enjoy protection under the formal concept of state or its agents in uniform who do no wrong, insofar as they acted on lawful orders, while any loss of lives resulting fell under the term collateral damage that is acceptable in every military engagement, which requires the use of heavy weaponry and gunfire. The applicable principle is that even persons participating in military warfare, have an officially sanctioned rules of engagement, which requires and expects an officer in a certain combat manner, even if they are provoked or threatened with a serious conflict as in a war situation. There are a codified set of rules and regulation, usually issued by the army chief in conjunction with a Joint Military Board, to guide the actions of officers and men in military engagement. Under such issued orders, preservation of lives and properties of third party civilians, who are not involved in the conflict is of paramount interest, because, wars are never won with the conquest of a people with pure force of arms, but, rather the eventual defeat of men with weaponry, while the general mass of the citizenry are brought under the power of vanquishing authority, through winning their hearts and minds, as to the reason why they are the ones chosen to be elevated into the glory of the winning team. The important question here is whether what happened in Baga, deviated from the normal applicable tradition of best practices in military engagement rules and regulations in civil armed conflict or rather the inhuman tragedy of the death of hundreds of people, could easily fall under the military necessity of a collateral damage, whenever the exchanges are that of heavy gunfire and massive conflagrating bombs. The applicable rule were a non combatant civilian death to become a collateral damage is an open declaration of war, meeting the international laws of war enshrined in the Geneva Convention, on an invoking of a state of war, which in the case of Nigeria falls under the powers of the National Assembly, to declare a state of emergency, as a proclamation that announces to the world what is happening in the area. Unfortunately for the people of Baga, they did not enjoy such necessary constitutional notice as such they never knew they are in a war situation, despite the fact that they see the presence of military fighting force amongst them.