No fewer than 24,000 missing persons have been registered on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) tracking list since 2015 in Nigeria in the Boko Haram insurgency and related conflict.
The International humanitarian body said Borno had the highest number of missing persons, with about 9,000 declared missing out of a total of 16,000 missing persons in the North East.
According to the ICRC, 11 people have been reunited with their families this year, compared to 13 last year.
This was disclosed on Wednesday by the ICRC at the commencement of its one-and-a-half-day training for journalists in Borno State at their head office in Maiduguri, aimed at equipping journalists with the knowledge of reporting missing persons and families separated by over a decade of Boko Haram insurgency.
Addressing the participants during her opening remark, head of ICRC sub-delegation in Maiduguri, Diana Japaridze, lamented the increasing rate of missing persons and families who were yet to be reunited after suffering displacement caused by the armed conflict, disaster and violence in Nigeria.
She said that due to the protracted conflict and violence in Nigeria, too many people were missing loved ones, with the ICRC caseload of those lost being the highest in Africa.
Japaridze added that one of the challenges faced by the ICRC while tracking some of the missing persons was locating their family members and accessing their location.
” Some people spend years searching for loved ones, often with no result. Families have a right to know their fate.
“In the chaos of armed conflict, situations of violence and disasters, families can become separated in a matter of minutes, creating anguish and vulnerability and sometimes leading to long years of uncertainty about the fate of children, spouses or parents,” she said.
According to Japaridze, through the workshop, the INGO hopes to elaborate on the different aspects and provide participants with the needed knowledge to navigate important topics relating to missing persons and family separation.
She urged media practitioners to contribute to awareness creation and draw the public’s attention to the needs of missing persons.
“While States should raise public awareness of the problem of missing persons as a fundamental concern of international humanitarian law and human rights law, the mass media must draw the public’s attention to this problem and the needs of families of missing persons.
“We hope the knowledge and discussions we are going to share and have during the training will help you, the media professionals, research on the topic more deeply, ask better questions, write quality content, and thus report it in a more professional, unbiased, and empathetic manner,” she added.
María Angélica Mirabal Toscano, an ICRC Protection of Family Links Team Leader, noted that most of the registered disappearances—71%—occurred between 2014 and 2015, a period that saw the peak of the insurgency’s violence and numerous mass abductions.
She said about 40% of the active missing cases resulted from abductions, while 56% of the missing persons were children at the time of their disappearance.
