Stop humiliating pro-Biafra women, Igbo group cautions Buhari

A leading Igbo socio-cultural association, Igbo Bu Igbo, has told the Federal Government to stop humiliating women from the South-East zone under the “dubious guise of a crackdown on the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra.”

In a statement signed by Dr Law Mefor and Chijioke Ndukwe, Chancellor and Publicity Secretary of the group, respectively, the group wondered why the police descended so heavily on “harmless women who were exercising their right to peaceful assembly, tear-gassed and clamped them into detention.”

The group contended that the police action was regrettable, even as it said that brutalisation and the use of force had no place in a democracy.

It accused President Muhammadu Buhari of cracking down on the people of the South-East zone since assumption of office in 2015.

The statement read, “It is with sadness and regret that we observe the continued inhuman treatment being meted out to women of Igbo extraction who were brutalised by the police before being clamped into detention in Owerri, the Imo State capital.

“We wish to state categorically, without any iota of equivocation, that these women who were harmless were merely exercising their right to peaceful assembly when they were heavily descended upon by the police in a manner akin to that of a war situation as if they were common criminals.

Furthermore, we detest the continued situation where, not only our women but also all citizens of Igbo extraction, are treated like subhuman elements by the Buhari administration as part of his ignoble agenda against the Igbo.

“If not, one wonders why Fulani herdsmen terrorists, whose tag as terrorists have since been confirmed by the world and rated the fourth most dangerous terror group in the universe, are given a royal treatment by the Buhari administration despite their well- documented heinous crimes of frightful proportions against humanity and not arrested or clamped into detention with the alacrity with which our women are treated.”

“The images emanating from the detention centre of the women are disturbing and unacceptable to us.”