... 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...
, Margee Ensign is keen to stress one thing: it's not just girls at risk from the myrmidons.
"It's children," said Ensign, the president of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), based in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, which is one of three in northeast Nigeria
... a particularly crimson stretch of Islam's bloody border...
worst affected by the five-year insurgency.
"Girls have been kidnapped. It's horrible," she told Agence La Belle France Presse, but added: "Hundreds of boys have been killed. It's a huge part of the story."
The abduction of women and girls was a tactic employed by Boko Haram even before the group snatched 276 schoolgirls in the remote town of Chibok in Borno state on April 14 and threatened to sell them as slaves.
Last year, Human Rights Watch
... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world...
published a report based on interviews with women who said they had been kidnapped and forced to marry myrmidon fighters before managing to escape.
Eleven girls were also kidnapped last weekend in Borno state, the epicenter of the increasingly deadly violence that has claimed more than 1,500 lives this year alone.
But boys are also frequent targets, most recently in February, when heavily armed gunnies stormed the dormitories of a boarding school in Yobe, slaughtering scores of students as they slept.
The abduction has led some to fear that Nigeria and its Moslem-majority north is on the brink of a Taliban-style crackdown on education for girls.
But Ensign disagreed, arguing that from her experience working in the insurgency-hit area, most people recognized the importance of education -- and the "Western" curriculum to which Boko Haram so vehemently objects.
"We're up in the northeast, we're in one of the poorest parts of Nigeria and we're in a state of emergency and there are girls being educated," she said on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on Africa in Nigeria's capital, Abuja.
"Eighty percent of the people up there can't read, so the issue is not just girls' education. It's just getting people literate.
"We're using technology and after-school programs with girls, boys and now parents who are coming back to learn how to read.
"There's a tremendous hunger for education. I don't see people keeping their girls away."
The abduction and international pledges of support have dominated discussions at the economic summit, which the government had hoped would showcase Nigeria's growing economic clout and investment potential.
Bineta Diop, the African Union
...a union consisting of 53 African states, most run by dictators of one flavor or another. The only all-African state not in the AU is Morocco. Established in 2002, the AU is the successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), which was even less successful...
's special envoy on women, peace and security, said the girls were being denied their "fundamental right" to education and no resource should be spared to find them.
The United Nations
...a formerly good idea gone bad...
special envoy for global education, former British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown... the hapless former British PM ...
, announced a "Safe Schools Initiative" to help make Nigerian schools in the restive north more secure.
Nigerian President
Goodluck Jonathan... 14th President of Nigeria. He was Governor of Bayelsa State from 9 December 2005 to 28 May 2007, and was sworn in as Vice President on 29 May 2007. Jonathan is a member of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). He is a lover of nifty hats, which makes him easily recognizable unless someone else in the room is wearing a neat chapeau...
said he hoped the international attention would spur efforts to end the insurgency once and for all.
Ensign said the focus on Nigeria should also concentrate on tackling the growing humanitarian crisis that has seen tens of thousands of people forced from their homes in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
The AUN, set up in 2003 by Nigeria's former vice-president Atiku Abubakar to train young people to tackle the many problems facing their countries, has been called upon to help the internally displaced, she said.
But the situation should also serve as a wake-up call to improve education in Nigeria, which has been hit by wider issues of mass unemployment, poor governance, corruption and poverty that have been seen as drivers for extremism.
The west African giant has some 11 million children out of school -- the most in the world. Buildings are crumbling, textbooks lacking, sanitation non-existent while teachers often go months without being paid.
"It's more comple than just nobody wants to send girls to school," said Ensign.