The Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Farouk Yahaya has said that the allegations by Reuters’ that the military had aborted 10,000 pregnancies ,massacred children and engaged in sexual and Gender based violations were meant to rubbish Nigerian military.
Farouk challenged the international news agency who made the allegations to bring evidence to substantiate it.
He said the allegations were aimed at discrediting the achievements of the military in its fight against the insurgents in the country.
COAS stated this while testifying before the 7-Member Special Independent Investigative Panel on Human Rights Violations in Counter Insurgency Operations in the North East headed by Justice Abdu Aboki (rtd).
He said that ” Reuters is acting a script to rubbish our successes in the North East.”
Referring to the report, he said “some people are gifted in writing just like in novels, describing what they never witnessed forgetting that in the military if you waste any ammunition you will be court martialed. We are not a mercenary Army, we are a professional Army”, he stated.
The fact is that he continued : “We are succeeding and not many are happy that we are succeeding, they cannot reverse our successes therefore they rubbish it. Sometimes, they are playing other peoples script. We are not Boko Haram terrorists, we are trained to be professionals and the training is continuous”, he added.
General Faruk said: “May be they don’t know we are operating under the government. The National Human Rights Commission follows what is being done in the military and what we are doing is internal operation; we are operating in our country. The Army is Nigerian Army and we are not like Boko Haram that that does not operate under code of conduct”.
Faruk who was the former Commander 29 Task Force Brigade, Nigerian Army said that their major concerned in fighting the insurgency is to restore peace in the North East and the military would not have abandoned this noble cause to engage in abortion of 10,000 pregnancies.
According to him, “caution is planted in our head that the people you are fighting are Nigerians and there is no policy like that, rather the policy we have is respect for human beings, we are not more Nigerian than the people, that is why is Nigerian Army, the allegation is just grammar our business is to defeat the insurgents”, he stated.
The witness said that while the military is buying arms to fight the insurgents one would have expected Reuters to support the efforts instead of adopting this “textbook solution” that does not reflect the reality of the situation in the North East.
Asked by the panel’s secretary, Mr. Hilary Ogbonna to explain Reuters’ claim that that soldiers massacred many children perceived to have been fathered by Boko Haram, he retorted, “This is laughable because even if there is stigma attached to such children, is it the Army that will stop the stigma”?