Parents of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by the insurgent group, Boko Haram, in April 2014 said they were appealing directly to the United Nations for help after losing hope that the Nigerian government would rescue them.
A group lobbying for government action on behalf of the parents met with United Nations Women, the head of the UN representation in Nigeria, and with officials of the UN Office for West Africa in December 2014. The group had also appealed to UNICEF, campaign spokeswoman, Bukola Shonibare, told Reuters.
UN officials were not immediately available for comment.
“If the government cannot take action, we are asking for the UN to come in and help and if they reject, we just don’t know what to do,” leader of the parents, Reverend Enoch Mark, told Reuters. Two of his daughters were kidnapped.
It is not clear what any UN agency could do without Nigerian government approval.
More than eight months since the abduction of the girls from Chibok, in remote north-East Borno State, parents said they were still in the dark about what the government was doing.
A presidential spokesman said efforts to free them continued but that details of the missions were too sensitive to publish.
On April 14, Boko Haram militants raided the school where the girls were taking exams. They loaded 270 of them onto trucks. Around 50 escaped shortly afterwards.
Boko Haram, which is fighting for an Islamic state and whose name means “Western education is sinful,” had been kidnapping children for more than a year, but the scale of this attack shocked the world and sparked a #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign that drew in celebrities including Michelle Obama.
The five-year old insurgency has killed thousands of people, displaced more than a million and raised fears voting in presidential elections on February 14, 2015 will be impossible across stretches of the northeast.
“The Chibok community is pained, we cannot take this anymore,” spokesman for the Chibok community in Abuja, Dauda Iliya, said at a New Year’s Day rally of parents, adding that they had written to the United Nations to “protest this neglect and nonchalance by the government.”
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