President Goodluck Jonathan yesterday challenged the Boko Haram sect to identify themselves and state clearly their demands as a basis for talks, while acknowledging that military confrontation alone will not end their insurgency.In an interview with Reuters news agency at the presidential villa in Abuja, Jonathan also said there was no doubt that Boko Haram had links with other jihadist groups outside Nigeria.The sect claimed responsibility for the death of more than 500 people last year and more than 250 in the first weeks of 2012 in gun and bomb attacks in the country, Human Rights Watch said this week.Coordinated attacks in Kano killed 186 people last Friday in its most deadly strike to date, prompting Jonathan to visit surviving victims.'If they clearly identify themselves now and say this is the reason why we are resisting, this is the reason why we are confronting government or this is the reason why we destroy some innocent people and their properties ... then there will be a basis for dialogue,' said Jonathan.'We will dialogue, let us know your problems and we will solve your problem but if they don't identify themselves, who will you dialogue with''Jonathan has been criticised for dealing with the insurgency in the north using purely military means.But in this interview he made clear there was a need to bring development to the remote, semi-arid corners of the country where high youth unemployment has provided easy recruits for extremists.'Military confrontation alone will not eliminate terror attacks,' he said, adding that an 'enabling environment for young people to find jobs,' was also needed.'Our commitment is to make sure our irrigation programmes are all revitalised so most of these young people are engaged in productive agriculture and ... will not be free for them to recruit,' Jonathan said in an ornate diplomatic meeting room adorned with pictures of Nigeria's heads of state since independence in 1960.Wearing a dark grey kaftan and his trademark fedora hat, the former zoology lecturer and governor of Bayelsa state in the oil rich Niger Delta cautioned that the Boko Haram crisis would be much harder to resolve than the Delta conflict, which was largely defused in 2009 under an amnesty he helped broker.That was because the Islamist militants do not have a clear public figurehead or negotiable aims, he said.'If anybody invited Osama bin Laden (to talks), he wouldn't have appeared ... Boko Haram, if you invite them, they will not come. They operate without a face, they operate without a clear identity, so it is difficult to interface with such a group.''That is the greatest difference between Boko Haram ... and the Niger Delta issue,' he said.According to Reuters, Boko Haram was formed around 2003 in Maiduguri, Borno State, and it launched an uprising against the government in 2009 that security forces crushed in days of fighting with the sect that killed around 800 people.The sect's leader Mohammed Yusuf was captured and killed by police, triggering vows of revenge from surviving members of the sect which they now seem to be honouring in increasingly lethal attacks on security forces and authority figures.
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