Group says Amnesty International lied against Nigerian Army

The stance of NICREL came following a panel set up to investigate claims by AI that the Nigerian Army had been engaging in human rights abuses in the fight against the Boko Haram sect in the north-east of the country.

At the panel sitting, most of the claims by AI was punctured as lies aimed at tarnishing the image of the military in the fight against the insurgents and NICREL has also labeled the AI blatant liars.

The Executive Director of the group, Steven Onwu, who spoke at a press conference in Abuja on Monday, November 6, 2017, said that as a group, they will continue to applaud the efforts of the Nigerian military aimed at placing the interests of humanity above other considerations.

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Onwu said NICREL has been following proceedings of the Presidential Investigation Panel to Review Compliance of The Armed Forces with Human Rights Obligations and Rules of Engagement given the crucial role that the exercise would play in deepening full observance and compliance with human rights requirement.

Part of the statement from NICREL reads:

"The dedication with which we have followed the proceedings was informed by our understanding and acknowledgment that the issue of human rights in conflict situations is multifaceted.

The trend prior to the sitting of this panel, has been for the focus to be on the rights of the aggressors who despite possibly committing heinous crimes, have international organizations and their domestic branches canvassing the rights of groups and persons that engage in acts of terror, kidnapping, intimidation, extortion and other forms of harm to the civilian population and attacks on military and security personnel deployed to counter them.

Nowhere in the rendering are the rights of the victims, local populations and the security operatives that are killed, get mentioned.

NICREL has had a course in the past to question the intentions of these fifth columnists pretending to be human rights monitoring organizations.

Our concerns at those times stemmed from the impact that their lies have on international support for counter-terrorism war in Nigeria and the negative pull they have on the morale of soldiers that are sacrificing their lives to keep the rest of the citizens safe.

A front liner among these fifth columnists is Amnesty International which, most recently, centered its existence on Nigeria.

It ran a campaign of attrition against the Nigerian military and even took the unprecedented step of awarding media contracts to defend its reports, which have been found out to be nothing but a pack of orchestrated lies aimed at damaging the fighting capacity of Nigerian soldiers.

While NICREL had always been confident that its summations on AI captured the exact state of the sitting of the Presidential Investigation Panel to Review Compliance of The Armed Forces with Human Rights Obligations and Rules of Engagement, has finally exposed the international organization for what it is, a massive scam that was contrived to undermine countries like Nigeria.

This is despite the fact that AI had always boasted about sending soldiers and their commanding officers to the International Criminal Court [ICC] for crimes against humanity.

It was therefore surreal that the same Amnesty International had its fifteen minutes of fame before the Presidential Panel but fortunately left no one in doubts that all it had ever done in the past was misleading the entire world.

AI's representatives before the panel had expected the usual practice where they are able to get away with lying with Power Point presentations that are produced from doctored pictures and videos.

But the panel in this instance expressed the need for concrete evidence. This was evidence that Amnesty International is short of as it could not even point to the physical locations of the mass graves for which it had earlier claimed to have coordinates and satellite imaging.

Amnesty International’s poor performance at the panel where, it agreed to appear for the first time, to defend its numerous allegations against the Nigerian military is condemnable and completely irresponsible.

It is one thing to have insistently aver that AI was lying but it is totally gutting as there is no justification for an organization that claims international pedigree to lie without remorse on this scale.

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NICREl can confidently, on the strength of the presentations made before the panel, which it monitored, declare that Amnesty International lied against the Nigerian authorities in all its previous reports and statements as the military has continued to monitor and discipline their own officers and personnel where the leadership gets any report of infractions.

We believe the military leadership under the current dispensation should be rather applauded by Amnesty International on the strength of the information at their disposal which is at sharp variance with the misleading reports they have repeatedly published but are now unable to prove before the panel."