•United States President Barack Obama
meets with bipartisian congressional leadership in the Old Family
Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on Friday, November
7, 2014. From left to right: U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
(Democrat of California), Speaker of the U.S. House John Boehner
(Republican of Ohio), President Obama, current U.S. Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (Democrat of Nevada), future U.S. Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (Republican of Kentucky), and U.S. Senator
Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York). Also visible at left is John
Podesta, Counselor to the President.
United
States House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday reaffirmed
Capitol Hill’s support for finding the 219 schoolgirls who were abducted
two years ago.
Alongside fellow members of Congress and
girls who had escaped the 2014 kidnapping, Pelosi (D-Calif.) they
repeated pledges to locate the girls and bring them to safety.
“We must and we will bring back the
girls,” Pelosi said during a news conference outside the Capitol to mark
the two-year anniversary.
“They are not forgotten,” she added. “On
a regular almost daily basis, they are remembered in the Congress of
the United States,” Pelosi, a former House Speaker said.
This week, CNN released “proof of life”
video footage of 15 of the girls taken last December, in the first
public images of them since being captured in the dead of night by
militant Islamist group Boko Haram.
Fifty-seven girls managed to escape or were let free.
One, who for protection goes by the pseudonym Saa, jumped from the back of a truck. Now she is attending a college in the U.S.
When she saw the video of her 15 classmates this week, she “started crying,” she told reporters on Thursday.
“I just wish I could talk to them. I just wish they could hear me,” she said, as she began to choke up and held back tears.
“I just wanted to tell the world that let’s not give up. Let’s not forget about this course.”
Rep. Frederica Wilson who has repeatedly
drawn attention to the girls’ plight, said that she believed Boko Haram
“is smart enough” to keep the girls alive, if only as a bargaining
chip.
“I know that they are holding those
girls for the expressed purpose of bargaining,” she said. “I believe
that’s true because I have not seen or heard of a mass grave where all
of them could be, and I have not heard or seen a little Chibok girl who
has come to anyone and said ‘I am a Chibok girl, I am one of the ones
who was kidnapped.’”
The schoolgirls are among the thousands
of people who have been killed or kidnapped by Boko Haram in recent
years. The group is now considered the deadliest terrorist organisation
on the planet.
“The Chibok girls have now come to
represent the hundreds and maybe even thousands of young women and girls
who have been kidnapped since by Boko Haram,” said Rep. Chris Smith
(R-N.J.), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa.
Yesterday, Smith suggested the U.S.
ought to provide better assistance to Nigerian security forces to help
them fight the organisation’s growth.
“They need capacity, capability, night
vision goggles, to take this to Boko Haram,” Smith said. “We’re doing
some. I would suggest we’re not doing enough.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told reporters
that Washington ought to support tougher and more proactive negotiations
between Boko Haram and the Nigerian government in Abuja.
“It has to be a point where there is no
stopping in the intensity of negotiation, no pause and no let-up on
Nigeria, but you help them with resources so they can be in the
forefront of getting these girls back,” she said.
Jackson Lee has also pushed for the U.S.
to create a $458 million fund for victims of Boko Haram’s violence,
which would use money forfeited by former Nigerian military leader Sani
Abacha.
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