Aside from the killings, Nigerian soldiers also reportedly tortured and unlawfully detained many children. Others watched as their loved ones were gunned down.
Zainab Yakubu’s father and three siblings were killed by soldiers who unleashed an attack on the residence of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) on Dec. 13, 2015 during the Zaria massacre. She witnessed the gruesome incident.
Her mother, Sherifat, told HumAngle Zainab developed a psychological disorder after seeing multiple corpses, including those of her relatives, and the brutalisation of innocent members of the Shia Muslim community.
Zainab, who was at the time just 11, has found the last seven years of her life depressing and her academics truncated due to trauma.
The trauma began weeks after the killings. According to her mother, Zainab woke up from nightmares, trembling and crying on several occasions. She was always seeing her siblings and father in dreams wearing blood-stained white garments, she said.
“We thought she was going to get over the trauma after some time but that never happened. There were days she came to me that she heard the sound of gunshots from sleep and also narrated seeing her deceased father in the dream,” Sherifat recalled.
The condition has deteriorated to the level where she now struggles with schooling. Sherifat tried to help her daughter to develop ways to cope with the anguish by cuddling her and making her feel loved, but that did not help much.
To find a lasting solution, she now visits the Psychiatry Department of Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital for medical care. Her mother told HumAngle that medical practitioners affirmed that her illness was a result of severe past experiences.
Violence against children
Zainab’s challenge is one out of many instances of Nigerian children who have got their lives affected by violence.
Giving legal consent to both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, Nigeria adopted the Child’s Rights Act in 2003. The Act is expected to protect children against all forms of attack and inhumane treatment.
This was, however, not the case as IMN members claimed that almost 200 children were killed during the Zaria massacre. Those who survived death were not out of danger either.
Though an eight-year-old girl when the massacre occurred, Nargis Abdullahi said she was abused by the soldiers. She still battles with the trauma many years later.
“Seeing people being killed in my presence was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I saw no fewer than 10 people losing their lives before me and by the evening of Saturday, Dec. 12, children and women were separated from men.
“I was brutalised alongside many other children of my age bracket. By Sunday afternoon, a soldier asked me where my mother was. Before I could respond, he slapped my face with his two hands and I became deaf for hours,” she recalled.
She was later arrested and driven to the military barracks where she saw hundreds of women including her mother tied with rope and paraded as ‘terrorists’.
“Seeing my mother molested made me really sad. There were over 300 women and children arrested. The soldiers threatened to kill us when they were taking us to the Police Criminal Investigative Department in Kaduna but we begged them,” Nargis narrated with unsettling emotions.
The teenager’s eyes were wet with tears as she explained the inhumane treatment they were subjected to while in police custody for five days. “It was a cold period. I was sleeping in my mother’s hijab. The police subjected us to emotional torture and asked us to denounce our membership with the IMN.”
Many years after the bloody incident, Nargis battles trauma as a result of witnessing long hours of gunshots. “I feel a great wrench of sadness anytime I remember the injustice against my people and I don’t think the authorities are ready to dispense justice.”
Sources: Human Angle.org
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