From 5,500 miles away, a Brooklyn pol cheers African girls’ freedom
Assemblymember and women’s rights advocate Rodneyse Bichotte ‘overjoyed’ at news of Nigerian captives’ release
Brooklyn Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte is celebrating a victory Tuesday, not in a local political election, but in an ongoing humanitarian campaign to free schoolgirls being held captive by terrorists in Nigeria.
Last week, 21 of 276 girls abducted in April 2014 from their secondary school in the northeastern Nigeria town of Chibok by armed Boko Haram extremists were released after negotiations with the Nigerian government brokered by the Swiss government and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In the course of the kidnappings, which have stunned and drawn condemnations worldwide, 57 of the girls escaped, but Boko Haram kept more than 200 captive, reportedly as negotiating pawns in exchange for some of their commanders jailed by the Nigerian government.
But on Oct. 17, 21 girls were released by Boko Haram from their forest stronghold in northeastern Nigeria and reunited with their families. The freed girls, nearly all of them Christians, told stories of being forced to convert to Islam, subsisting on rice and maize and enduring more than two years of servitude by their captors.