Attachments
A group of approximately 230 internally displaced women (known as the Knifar movement) and their children risk starvation as authorities have stopped supplying food to the IDP camp they have been living in since 2017. Food was last delivered to the camp on 18 April and it did not even last one week. There has been no communication from camp authorities on why the supply stopped. Women and their children have been left with no alternative means of getting food.
Earlier that day, officials of the State Emergency Management Agency in Borno state (BOSEMA), North east Nigeria told the women that they would no longer receive food assistance. The BOSEMA officials had also told the women and their children that they would have to return to their former homes in Bama. The women expressed their desire to remain at the IDP camp in the state capital of Maiduguri as it is relatively safer than Bama and it also allows them the chance to continue their fight for justice. The officials have allowed them to stay at the IDP camp.
However, Amnesty International is deeply concerned that the government’s decision to discontinue food supply to the internally displaced women and their children is a strategy to silence the women as a first step in the plan to return the women and their children back home and to also keep the women from continuing to seek justice for their husbands. Since 2017, when the women moved to the camp, they have been calling for the release of their husbands who are unlawfully detained by the Nigerian military in the context of the government operations against the Boko Haram. The men were detained in mass arrests as they fled their homes during attacks by Boko Haram The authorities have yet to provide any proof that the men are involved with Boko Haram or even where they are detained.