ICC Note: In an interview with Wolfgang Bauer, Deutsche Welle exposes the daily realities for those living life after captivity at the hands of radical Islamist group Boko Haram. August 27, 2015 marked 500 days since the abduction of the more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls in Nigeria. As the interview reveals, even after captives escape from the grips of Boko Haram, life is anything but easy.

By Jan Philipp Wilhelm and Wolfgang Bauer

08/27/2015 Nigeria (Deutsche Welle) – Wolfgang Bauer reports reguarly for the respected German magazine Zeit.

DW:You were recently in northern Nigeria where you spoke to women and girls who had been exposed to the horrors of captivity under Boko Haram. What impression did they make on you?

Wolfgang Bauer: I interviewed these women and girls for two weeks. It was, of course, far more demanding for them than it was for me, but afterwards I, too, was exhausted. The cruelty in all its variations was something I found difficult to fathom. There are very few parts of the world which experience such massive, systematic cruelty as is the case as in northeastern Nigeria.

Boko Haram doesn’t only spread hate and violence, but mistrust as well. This mistrust is felt in particular by those women and girls who were able to escape the clutches of Boko Haram only to be ostracized by their own communities on their return. To whom can they turn to for help?

They can really only approach their own family, assuming their family trusts them. Families were split apart, some family members were kidnapped, other were not. There is a lot of mistrust between those who were abducted and those who were not. But self-help groups, as it were, do form spontaneously within families. Family members do support one another and hardly rely at all on any sort of outside help. One of the biggest problems in Nigeria is that it is very difficult to gauge within the family whether somebody is not just a victim of Boko Haram, but perhaps a culprit or perpetrator as well. Was this or that family member perhaps originally a victim who turned perpetrator? Boko Haram victims are brainwashed and many of the girls who blow themselves up almost daily on crowded squares in Nigerian towns and cities were kidnapped. They were kept incarcerated by Boko Haram for long periods. Some were forced to wear the suicide vests which were then detonated, others went to their deaths apparently believing in what they did. It is not just buildings that are being destroyed in Nigeria but trust as well. Relations between the ethnic groups have also seriously disrupted as far as I was able to judge.

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