Amidst the hearings on reports of a mass, army-run forced abortion programme in the North-East by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), two more women have disclosed that they underwent abortions in military custody without their consent.
The two women, Binta Yau and Rabi Ali, revealed that they met about a year ago and later discovered they had a painful experience in common – both had been captured and impregnated by Islamist insurgents.
Yau said she was about 25 when she was kidnapped and forced to marry a fighter named Abubakar.
Ali said she had been happily married for 10 years and was raising two children when militants seized her about three years ago from her village and took her alone to Tumbun Gini, a town close to the borders with Chad and Niger.
There at the camp, Ali said, Islamist fighters gathered the women and told them that their husbands had been killed and they must remarry, adding that she was forced to marry a fighter named Mustapha.
Both women said they escaped on foot during gun battles between the insurgents and Nigeria’s military, only to be taken into custody by Nigerian soldiers.
They revealed they lost their pregnancies after they were loaded into army vehicles and taken to places where they were given unidentified pills and injections.
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The accounts of the two women, who said they met by chance at a wedding outside Nigeria, buttress the testimony of more than 30 other women and girls who told Reuters they endured forced abortions during the government’s nearly 14-year war against Islamist insurgents. Their stories also align with accounts of soldiers and health workers involved in the clandestine army scheme.
Reuters revealed in December that at least 10,000 pregnancies had been terminated among women and girls impregnated by Islamist insurgents since 2013.
“I began to feel like we were sisters,” said Yau, who, like Ali, said she is about 30.
She said she wants their stories to be told.
“If the world hears what happened to us, and there is a possibility of human rights or other organisations stopping the bad things that the Nigerian military did to us, maybe it won’t happen again in the future,” she added.
The women’s accounts are strikingly similar to those of the 33 Nigerian women and girls Reuters interviewed in the December report.
The women had said many of the abortions were done without their consent or even their knowledge at the time.
According to Reuters, some were as young as 12 years old while women and girls were tied down, drugged into submission or made to undergo the procedures at gunpoint.
The report also drew on military and hospital documents, as well as interviews with five civilian health workers and nine soldiers and other security officials who participated in the programme.
Most of the witnesses spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from the military.
But Yau and Ali, who now live outside Nigeria, agreed to be named, as did two other women in the December story who had left the country.
The accounts of Yau and Ali are coming to light as a panel of the government-appointed NHRC investigates a series of stories by Reuters that exposed the abortion programme and a pattern in the military of targeting and killing children, from infants to teens, in combat operations.
Among the rationales cited by soldiers who participated in these operations was the belief that children in the region were related to, or working with, Islamist insurgents. The abortion programme was driven, in part, by a notion within the military that children of insurgents were destined to one day take up arms against the Nigerian government.
Brigadier General Tukur Gusau, a spokesman for defence headquarters, declined to comment and directed all inquiries to the NHRC panel, citing the ongoing investigation. The NHRC did not respond to requests for comment.
Nigerian military leaders previously have adamantly denied the existence of the abortion programme and the deliberate killing of unarmed children.
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“Not in Nigeria, not in Nigeria,” said Major General Christopher Musa, then the top commander of the counterinsurgency campaign in northeast Nigeria, in a November interview with Reuters that addressed the abortion programme. “We respect families. We respect women and children. We respect every living soul.”
Asked about the military’s comments on the programme, Yau replied: “This happened to me, and they are denying it. Honestly, I feel like they have some wickedness in their hearts, to be denying what they’ve done to us.”
Ali, who was interviewed separately, responded similarly. “I know the Nigerian military did these things, because it happened to me. I am sure that I lost my baby because of the abortion they gave me, and the treatment they gave me. Also to my friend Binta.”
Yau said her abortion was done about three years ago at Giwa Barracks, a detention centre in Maiduguri, the largest city in Nigeria’s northeast and the command centre of the government’s war on Islamist extremists.
Three other women were forced to have abortions in the same room with her, Yau added.
Yau’s account is consistent with those of other women and health workers who told Reuters abortions were done in groups, from a handful to 50 or 60 at a time.
Four of the almost three dozen women interviewed by Reuters said their abortions took place at Giwa Barracks.
The abortion programme has taken place in the northeastern states of Yobe, Borno, and Adamawa, where the Nigerian military has been fighting Islamist insurgents for nearly 14 years.
The satellite image shows the location of sites in Maiduguri where abortions were performed.
The details of Yau’s abortion were corroborated by another woman who told Reuters that she was among those in the room with Yau at Giwa Barracks.
She said army doctors gave Yau multiple injections.
Ali said her abortion occurred about five years ago, when she was about three months pregnant, in a Maiduguri hospital whose name she could not recall. She said she had been in too much pain to notice whether other women around her also had the procedures.
Initially, the military rejected calls to investigate the Reuters abortion and child killing reports. But amid a growing international outcry, including from U.S. and United Nations officials, the Chief of Defence Staff, Lucky Irabor, relented later in December and agreed to cooperate with an inquiry by the NHRC.
The NHRC, described on its website as an “extra-judicial mechanism for the respect and enjoyment of human rights,” has a 16-member governing council nominated by the president and confirmed by the senate.
The commission appointed a separate panel to look into the Reuters findings and make recommendations.
The seven-member panel launched its inquiry in February; the timing of its determinations is unknown.
Yau said that she had not heard of the NHRC investigation, but that she would be willing to testify “at any time.”
Other women and girls who spoke to Reuters before the December series ran said they were traumatised and fearful of coming forward. Some said they had been threatened with beatings or death if they disclosed what happened to them.
Abortion is against the law in Nigeria, for women and providers, except to save the life of the mother. In addition, the topic is taboo in many circles in the culturally conservative country. Some women kept their experiences secret even from family members.
The insurgents have kidnapped thousands of women and children over the course of the war, often forcing the women to become insurgent fighters’ “wives,” and sometimes using them or kidnapped children as suicide bombers.
