Since record history, people have always suffered the negative consequences of war. Victims of violent conflicts have suffered many indignity including displaced from their places of abode with little or no access to care and comfort provided by the basic necessities of life, food shelter and clothings.
From the Trojan wars, through the Internecine conflicts exacerbated by the quest for slaves in the Medieval African Society, the 20th Century World Wars to present day pseudo enemy induced violent conflict in the form of mindless terrorist activities, major international governmental institutions like the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union and other humanitarian agencies like the Red Cross and Red Crescent have responded to crises situations by providing succour for victims of conflicts.
The UN, founded in 1945 to prevent the recurrence of circumstances that led to six-year blood letting of that era has always offered the peace alternative to every conflict.
This approach has always worked wonders in bringing the dramatis personae in a conflict to the round table conference to resolve the issues at stake.
The UN had been able to stave off using its conflict resolution mechanisms and instruments to resolve crises that could have posed serious humanitarian crises to the global community.
Many countries including Nigeria acting under the auspices of the authority of the international governmental institutions have helped to restore peace to troubled areas.
Nigeria’s experience in restoring peace to then troubled Liberia and Sierra Leone is remarkable. This type of intervention works better and produce the desired result when the leading combatants are identifiable and their grievances known.
But the major cause of world’s violent conflicts today is basically idealistic with combatants lacking in physical territorial contrivance and clear cut motive. The Islamic state fighters in Syria and Iraq, their Al-Shabab, and Boko Haram counterparts in Mali, Kenya and Nigeria respectively, appear to be fighting in vacuum without clear cut motives or territorial ambition.
Dealing with these kinds of combatants who have effectively deployed guerilla war tactics including suicide bombings have been very challenging, ditto the task of identifying or sifting the enemies from friends.
For this reason, the international governmental institutions had not been able to explore the dialogue option with the elusive and seeming invisible fighters.
Aside encouraging governments’ of the respective pseudo war torn countries to strive to route out the violence mongers through the force of arms, their only response has been how to deal with the huge humanitarian crises the conflicts have caused hence  the call for greater synergies among all concerned to provide care and comfort for the displaced persons globally.
From Ukraine, Yemen, through Afghanistan, Libya to Mali and South Sudan etc, the number of displaced persons who are exposed to avoidable sufferings is increasing without a corresponding response from the global community to deal with the resulting humanitarian crises.
Here in Nigeria, as with the global community, Wednesday August 19, 2015 was observed as world Humanitarian Day. A day set aside by the United Nations General Assembly since 2008 is designed to celebrate the gallantry of humanitarian service providers who have lost their lives or survived different threats while providing humanitarian services to persons caught in the web of natural or human induced disasters especially in violent conflict situations.
Violent conflicts induced displacement of persons numbering about 1.5 million in Nigeria alone is the unfortunate lot that has befallen the country since 2010 when the first case of violent attacks perpetrated by Boko Haram were first recorded in Nigeria.
The resort to organized attacks on soft targets in the form of invasion of defenseless villagers and their urban counterparts has caused many to flee their homes to neighbouring villages and towns within Nigeria needles mention others who had to embark on forced migration to Cameroon, Niger and chad republics owing to safety concerns.
Since the Boko Haram crisis in the north Eastern States of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, and the concomitant displacement of residents of attacked villages and towns, the Nigeria’s government has tried to deal with the humanitarian crises cause by the conflict through provision of temporary shelters, food and other necessities of life.
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has since the explosion of humanitarian crises in the troubled region has had its hands full with the agency’s response capacity over stretched.
The agency originally designed to provide succour to victims of natural disasters like rain storm, flooding, fire outbreaks was compelled to learn new roles at the upsurge of Boko Haram induced violent attacks on hapless citizens.
The agency had its hands full in 2012 during that year’s flood disaster that sacked nearly all coastal communities and those living on the banks of Rivers Niger and Benue.
The experience of that year and the obvious scarce government resources as well as the limitations of NEMA in responding to disasters, the Jonathan administration constituted the Victims Support Fund a public private partnership scheme that has General Theophilus Danjuma as its chairman to mobilize funds to take care of the needs of the displaced persons most of whom have lost their means of livelihood to the violent conflicts.
The effects of the collapse of socio economic activities in the conflict zone can best be imagine given the damaging consequences it has for the Nigerian Society.
Schools, markets and other social and economic activities have not been spared owing to the conflict. Also, attempts by the government to rebuild the affected communities had suffered several set backs due to the resurgence of conflicts in hitherto cleared territories of Boko Haram combatants by the gallant Nigerian armed forces who had and are still risking their lives at the war fronts in order for the citizens to have peace.
From the growing number of out of school children in the war torn zone to hundreds of farmers displaced from their farm lands and the negative effects these have on the nation’s economy, Nigeria is on trial.
The country is indeed on trial because children, who have been made to suffer the harsh effects of these senseless violent conflicts including their denial of access to education, might pose greater threat to the same society than the Boko Haram insurgents are doing today.
This has indeed put the government reconstruction plans for the North East region in a abeyance prompting President Muhammadu Buhari to issue the new Chief of Defense Staff and the service chiefs to ensure the insurgents are routed from the country in the next three months. The reasoning is that no meaningful reconstruction or rebuilding of the troubled region can manifest except total peace is restored.
The obvious worsening conflict and humanitarian crises across the world, the global community must do more to ensure that those in positions to prevent the abuses perpetrated against those who can do nothing to help themselves are stopped.
The global community must also ensure that those who continue to carry them out are held to account in whatever way possible because to sit back and do nothing in the face of this mindless killing and persecution of hapless people would make us all culpable.