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West Africa's Lake Chad region is the world's most neglected humanitarian crisis, where poverty and desertification have been compounded by violence caused by Boko Haram, the U.N. aid chief said on Tuesday at the World Humanitarian Summit.
The gap between the suffering and the humanitarian response may be bigger than in Syria, Iraq or Yemen, a senior Red Cross official said.
Violence has forced more than 2.4 million people to flee their homes in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, according to the United Nations. Many families have been displaced several times. Up to 90 percent are sheltering in host communities.
Both the displaced and their hosts need emergency aid where farming has been curtailed by the violence, deepening food shortages and hunger, U.N. officials said.
More than 480,000 children could die unless they urgently receive food aid, they added.
"Lake Chad Basin ... at this stage is the most under reported, the most underfunded and the least addressed of the big crises we face," U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien said.
Climate change and lack of resources have already caused terrible suffering, and this has been compounded by the brutality wreaked by Boko Haram, he added.
Both the displaced and their hosts need emergency aid where farming has been curtailed by the violence, deepening food shortages and hunger, U.N. officials said.
More than 480,000 children could die unless they urgently receive food aid, they added.
"Lake Chad Basin ... at this stage is the most under reported, the most underfunded and the least addressed of the big crises we face," U.N. aid chief Stephen O'Brien said.
Climate change and lack of resources have already caused terrible suffering, and this has been compounded by the brutality wreaked by Boko Haram, he added.
"We have humanitarian needs now in that part of the world on a scale which is unprecedented," said O'Brien, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
This year, the United Nations has appealed for $535 million for the region. Last year's appeal was just over 40 percent funded.
Some 3 million people face severe food insecurity in the region, the majority in northeast Nigeria. In the far north of Cameroon, the number urgently needing food aid has quadrupled in the last year, according to U.N. figures.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said it was rapidly scaling up its response to avoid a "famine-like situation".
"Across Lake Chad, where farming is possible but not practical because so much insecurity exists, the crisis disrupts trade, and the pastoral and agricultural lean season has come two months early," said WFP head Ertharin Cousin.
POVERTY IS CAUSE OF "MADNESS"
Yves Daccord, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said: "Normally I don't like to compare suffering, but if I look at all our operations ... what we see - in terms of levels of violence, of suffering and most importantly, the gap between the humanitarian response ... and what (it) should be - is possibly the biggest gap we have right now."
He was comparing ICRC's operations in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines with those in the Lake Chad Basin.
Boko Haram has killed more than 15,000 people across the region, during a seven-year campaign to carve out an Islamist caliphate.
Kashim Shettima, governor of northern Nigeria's Borno state, said poor literacy, destitution and joblessness need to be addressed to end what he called the world's deadliest insurgency.
The conflict, centered on Borno state, hit the headlines when more than 200 girls were kidnapped from a school in Chibok in 2014.
"The root cause of this madness, this insanity, is extreme poverty," he said.
"(When) we create jobs, engage the youth, this madness will certainly evaporate."
O'Brien, who traveled to the May 23-24 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul via Niger and Nigeria, said the region, more than any other, epitomized the many overlapping issues the summit was trying to tackle.
"We've never had a conference like this. This is about generating will, the most difficult thing to bottle up and to get going," he said.
"It's about putting people affected by crisis through no fault of their own at the heart and center of everything we do."
(Reporting by Alex Whiting, Editing by Emma Batha.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change.
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There was huge relief after one of the missing Chibok girls was found. She is one of the many captives who have been set free from Boko Haram. But those freed face a tough time of re-integrating back into society.
The last few days seem to have been a bag of good and bad news for the Nigerian military. First, the army received a major morale boost after they paraded one of the missing Chibok girls who was found by a vigilante group roaming the vast Sambisa forest.
The news was quickly followed by another girl being freed, alongside many other women and children rescued from Boko Haram's captivity by Nigerian troops, who are carrying out "Operation Sambisa Crackdown."
The army then said she was another Chibok girl, but it turned out she was not. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people who for a period of time lived under the shadow of what has been described as the world's deadliest terrorist group. An unknown number of people, including the more than 200 Chibok girls, are still being held by the Islamists.
This year, a report by the global children agency UNICEF, warned that freed Nigerian women and their children who were under Boko Haram's control are being rejected by their communities.
The women and girls, who in most cases were raped by Boko Haram militants, forced to marry the fighters or work as domestic workers, return home only to discover they have now been labeled "annoba," a Hausa word which roughly translates to "epidemics" or "Boko Haram wives."
Fears of radicalization
Many residents fear that these women may have been radicalized by Boko Haram. They base their arguments on the rising numbers of suicide bombings that have been carried out by women and girls in recent months. Their rejection by the community is among several unintended consequences of the military's recent successful bid to liberate territories previously held for months by Boko Haram.
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Cameroonian Yeguie Issa says he has not seen his only brother since they were contacted a year ago by visitors to their village and were offered $500 per month to join Boko Haram.
Issa, 29, did not accept the offer and now takes care of his poultry farm in Cameroon's Zamai village, near the northern town of Mokollo. He got started with the help of chickens provided by the government and farming advice from U.N. staff.
As a result, Issa said, he is financially and physically more stable, and he can provide for his wife, three children and 72-year-old mother — and peers no longer jeer at him for being unable to take care of his familyIssa is one of several hundred people who have benefited from the U.N. initiative to steer youths away from Boko Haram, which has frequently attacked northern Cameroon over the past three years.
The coordinator of the U.N. system in Cameroon, Najad Rochdi, said the goal of the initiative is help the area's economy grow despite the continued violence.
"Because the region was tragically and dramatically impacted by insecurity on the one hand and extreme violence on the other hand, it was very important to provide the enabling environment for the revival of the local economy, capitalizing on the know-how of the people in the region," Rochdi said. "Obviously, the know-how here is about agriculture, handicraft, agropastoral activities."
Japan contributes
Cameroon has provided $4 million in emergency funds to create jobs for youths on its northern border with Nigeria, where the unemployment rate is over 90 percent. Japan has contributed $2 million to the U.N. for the second phase of the project, focused on the entire conflict zone in Cameroon.
Ibrahim Hamaoua, traditional ruler of Zamai, said the assistance has reduced delinquency among the 30,000 people he leads.
Hamaoua said he was grateful to the U.N. Development Program and the government of Cameroon for initiating the resilience project and constructing a livestock market to supply protein to both internally displaced persons and refugees. The project has boosted the local economy and improved the living conditions of the population that grow livestock, he said.
About a hundred meters from Issa's poultry farm, Hamza Falama waters his one-hectare garden. He said the produce villagers grow — maize and sorghum during the rainy season, carrots and cabbages during the dry season — enables them to send their children to school, take care of their health needs, feed their families and save for difficult moments.
Cameroon hopes to see more gardens grow, and fewer difficult moments in the north, in order to weaken Boko Haram.
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The war against Boko Haram lent added significance to Cameroon’s annual National Day celebrations Friday. There were the usual military parades and speeches, but citizens also mobilized to honor and help the troops.
Hundreds of youths sang in front of President Paul Biya. If it weren’t for the military, they sang, their country would have been seized by Boko Haram.
Cameroon has deployed more than 8,000 soldiers to the north to fight the Nigerian terrorist group.
In hospitals around Yaounde, people donated blood all week for wounded soldiers. Among them was university student Julienne Njock, 19. She said she could not go to the front but could make this modest contribution. The teenager said she was moved when she saw wounded soldiers, some who had lost legs to amputation.
Cameroon said it needs at least 400,000 pints of blood and that shortages have forced medical staff to stop work to give blood for urgent cases.
Alvine Mvogo, 60, could not donate for health reasons. She said she was instead praying for peace to return and soldiers to come back healthy. She said Cameroon has been losing too many people.
Boko Haram began attacking northern Cameroon in 2014. Suicide bombings and raids continue.
The military said it has been struggling to meet the needs of both the soldiers and the over 200,000 displaced people who have sought refuge at camps and host communities in the north.
Military spokesman Colonel Didier Badjeck said support from the population motivates the troops. He said that even poor villagers had contributed bunches of plantains, that pastors and imams had prayed for the soldiers, and that all political parties had come out to support them Friday.
VOA
The government said it had also received over $6 million in donations from the population in the past two years to support the fight against Boko Haram.
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Several African leaders are attending the summit along with French President Hollande and top US and UK officials. The talks aim to hammer out a regional response to the group's bloody insurgency.
Leaders of Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, along with French President Francois Hollande, US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, gathered in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Saturday to discuss ways of combating a nearly seven-year insurgency by the extremist group Boko Haram.
Also invited were delegations from West African and Central African blocs, and the European Union.
Hollande's presence at the summit reflects Paris' traditional interest in its former colonies surrounding Nigeria. France and Nigeria recently signed an agreement on closer military cooperation.
Some 20,000 people have died and 2.1 million have been made homeless in the insurgency by the radical group, which is trying to set up an Islamic state in the region.
The summit is the second such high-level gathering following a first meeting in Paris two years ago to discuss strategies against the group.
Tackling humanitarian crisis
Among the topics expected to be discussed at the meeting, hosted by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, is the formal deployment of an 8,500-strong regional force, including soldiers from Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The African Union-backed force was supposed to have begun combating Boko Haram by July last year.
The meeting is also likely to focus on ways to alleviate the humanitarian fallout from the conflict, with the state of Borno being the worst affected region. The government there has spoken of a "food crisis" among those who have been displaced, and calculated that $5.9 billion (5.1 billion euros) was necessary to restore infrastructure shattered by the violence.
Buhari had vowed to defeat Boko Haram before the end of his first year in office, but with only this month to go, that pledge is beginning to seem too optimistic. However, the Nigerian military says that the group has now been contained largely within strongholds in the Sambisa Forest, with dozens of fighters surrendering owing to shortages of food and ammunition.
US Deputy Secretary of State Blinken told reporters in Abuja on Friday that Washington did not yet consider Boko Haram to have been defeated, but conceded that the group had been "degraded."
Military operations against the group have so far been hampered by a lack of coordination between armies operating in the border areas on and around Lake Chad, where Boko Haram is known to be active. The huge lake forms the border between Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
Links to 'IS'
Ahead of the summit, the United Nations Security Council issued a statement approved by all 15 members that condemned violence against civilians perpetrated by the group, which operates mainly in Nigeria.
The statement deplored the "killings and other violence against civilians, notably women and children, abductions, pillaging, rape, sexual slavery and other sexual violence, recruitment and use of children, and destruction of civilian property."
The Security Council also demanded the unconditional and immediate release of people abducted by the group, including the 219 schoolgirls kidnapped from the northeastern Nigerian town of Chibok in 2014.
The council members expressed alarm at links between Boko Haram and the "Islamic State" ('IS') group, with the Nigerian extremists pledging allegiance to "IS" last year. Western governments fear that "IS," which currently operates mostly in Syria, Iraq and Libya, could be considering extending its activities to the vast and lawless Sahel region with the aid of its African allies.
This comes amid reports that Boko Haram rebels have been fighting alongside "IS" militants in Libya.
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Fighting Boko Haram: Paul Biya Returns To Abuja Alongside French President To Attend Security Summit
The Cameroonian Head of State left Yaounde Saturday, May 14, 2016 to Abuja, the political capital of Nigeria. The President of the Republic responded to an invitation from his Nigerian counterpart who is organizing a regional summit on security issues in the central/west African area.
For over five years, members of the Commission of the Lake Chad Basin (LCBC), namely Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger, have been victims of the atrocities of Boko Haram. These countries affected had decided to pool their forces together to eradicate the Islamic sect from Nigeria and to combat terrorism in all its forms.
In the search for ways and joint strategies towipe out the terrorist threat from Boko Haram, the LCBC countries have been gaining support from "friendly countries" and partner organizations. After a first summit hosted on May 17, 2014 in Paris, France, the Heads of State of Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Niger, Benin and French are meeting once again this Saturday, May 14, 2016 in Abuja .
The main topics to be discussed at this summit will be the assessment of progress after the first summit in Paris and the present situation on the field in the fight against Boko Haram.
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