THE participants of the 17th two-day meeting of the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR), which ended last Wednesday, took a stand with the people of Nigeria and have strongly condemned the kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls.

The militant Islamist group which kidnapped the girls from their school in Chibok in the north-eastern state of Borno on April 14, Boko Haram, headed by Abubakar Shekau, has promised to sell the girls and marry them off. Some 53 of the girls have since escaped their captors. The captive girls are thought to be held in a remote and forested area of the state close to the border with Chad and Cameroon.
A joint statement from the 17th COFCOR meeting also made clear the Community’s condemnation of the recent bombings that caused a large number of innocent civilian casualties.
They also acknowledged that terrorism is a transnational concern and, noting the commitment of the Nigerian Government to address the terrorism threat, welcomed the international support for the efforts to help find and rescue the abducted schoolgirls.
The Council’s Foreign Ministers endorsed the May 9th statement from the United Nations Security Council, which condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attacks and the abductions of schoolgirls committed by Boko Haram.
The meeting took place at the CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, under the chairmanship of the Honourable Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Guyana.
The latest report on the incident, according to AFP (Agence France-Presse – the international news agency), indicated that African leaders in Pretoria, for President Jacob Zuma’s inauguration, held informal talks on the security situation in Nigeria last Saturday.
Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan, is among more than 20 heads of state gathered for the event.
According to the report, South African Government spokesman, Clayson Monyela, said the group will discuss security in Nigeria, where the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls has laid bare the government’s inability to tackle an insurgency by the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram.
The talks follow a spate of attacks in Nigeria, which is under growing international pressure to tackle the increasingly bloody uprising.
The Nigerian President was greeted with shouts of “bring back our girls” when he arrived at the Union Buildings, where Zuma was inaugurated.

(By Vanessa Narine)