Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka said Friday
that trying to end a deadly insurgency by Islamist extremist group Boko Haram
through dialogue would amount to "abysmal appeasement."
President Goodluck Jonathan earlier
this year encouraged the Islamists, blamed for hundreds of deaths since 2009,
to publicly state their demands, and his government has confirmed that
"back-channel" talks with the group are ongoing.
"When I say, 'don't talk to
murderers,' that is exactly what I mean," Soyinka told foreign media at an
international conference in Lagos.
"Don't talk to mass murderers.
Don't talk to those who have made the killing of innocent people their
philosophy," he added.
Soyinka described the violence blamed
on the Islamists, which has included attacks on security forces, government
officials and Christians in church, as "completely out of control."
"Then you, the assaulted, say,
'please, come and talk to us. Please, we don't know what you want' ... What
kind of language is that? That is the language of abysmal appeasement," he
said on the sidelines of the Kuramo Conference on development.
Nigerian security forces have so far
been been unable to stamp out the violence and have themselves been accused of
massive abuses in combatting the Islamists.
Amnesty International has charged the
military with carrying out summary executions, particularly in the northeast
where Boko Haram is based, and Human Rights Watch has said the military could
be guilty of crimes against humanity in combatting the group.
"There has been the condemnable
scorched earth policy of the military," Soyinka said, adding that he
believed that such killings had occurred.
Africa's first Nobel literature prize
winner however described the insurgency as a "security issue" that
posed a new kind of challenge for Nigeria's military.
Violence linked to Boko Haram is
estimated to have claimed 2,800 lives since 2009, including killings by the
security forces, with the worst violence concentrated in the mainly Muslim
north of Africa's most populous country.
The group has said it wants to create
an Islamic state in the north, but its demands have continuously shifted...AFP