E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

At Least 9,000 Flee Northern Nigeria Violence
[An Nahar] At least 9,000 people have fled violence in northern Nigeria and crossed into neighboring countries as a government offensive aims to end a four-year Islamist insurgency, the U.N. said on Tuesday.

In addition to those refugees, a local official in northeastern Nigeria, where the violence has been concentrated, has said some 19,000 wheat and rice farmers have been chased away from fields, raising concerns over potential food shortages.

The United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
 said aid workers had found more than 3,000 people along the border inside Cameroon, which neighbors northeastern Nigeria, where the violence has been concentrated.

The number of those who have fled to neighboring Niger was recently put at more than 6,000.

"Most of those who have arrived so far are women and kiddies," Adrian Edwards, front man for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees, told news hounds in Geneva of the refugees in Cameroon.

"They are being hosted in churches and schools, and relying on food from the churches and local population,"

Those who have fled to Niger include Nigerians as well as citizens of Niger and Chad, Edwards said. The U.N. refugee agency has sent an aid convoy to the area of Niger where the refugees are located.

The Nigerian government imposed a state of emergency in three northeastern states in May and launched an offensive in an effort to crush the insurgency by Islamist Death Eater group Boko Haram
... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
The U.N. human rights
...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
 office has in the past sounded the alarm over the impact of the conflict on civilians, who have fallen victim to abuses by both the hard boyz and the military.

Posted by: Fred 2013-06-19
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=370527