 Over the years, Nigeria has experienced attacks from several angles. The former head of crisis, which has failed the news bulletins in recent times, has existed since 1999, when Nigeria's forced republic began. Boko Haram terrorists also began to terrorize the nation in 2009, and now on the spate of attacks, kidnappings and assassinations have increased, even more in recent times. The attacks have left many destitute, poor and even lost. These people are usually called internally displaced persons. The ICRC, that is the International Committee of the Red Cross, has taken it upon themselves to ensure humanitarian protection and assistance for these victims of war and violence. Joining me to discuss this is Aliyu Dawab. He is the spokesperson of the International Community of the Red Cross. Thank you very much, Mr. Dawab, for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me. Great. Good evening. Thank you. In most disturbing of stories, of course, Nigeria's headlines have filled with very disturbing stories lately. But the most disturbing is that there are about 14 states that have been globally pinpointed as states that are unsafe in Nigeria. And of course, most of those states are in the north and some parts of the south-south and the southwest. But for someone who's worked in these troubled zones for a long time. Paint us a picture of what's going on in the north-south part of the country. Thank you very much again for inviting me into this program. The Northeast of Nigeria has been having these issues of conflict for more than a decade now. A lot of people have been affected, thousands of hundreds of people have been affected. They live in camps, actually, in very, very dilapidated conditions, very poor conditions. They are in need of a lot of basic things that has to do with like water, food, shelter, medication, just to keep their livelihood. They really need these basic things. Nobody talks about other things that are really not basic, but what they need presently is the basic things for their survival. A lot of other people are separated from their families. From our record, we have about 24,000 people registered in our organization because some of the people know that we support in terms of reuniting families that have been separated. So people come to us, and now we have a figure of 24,000 people that have registered and are trying to get reunited with their loved ones, either parents or children or husbands and wives. These are some of the people that are looking for. Sixty percent of these people are actually children that are missing. So like I said, this is just a picture. The primary health center is no more working. Primary health centers are equally sometimes because all the healthcare staff that have been there in these remote areas have deserted these areas. So the primary health centers are not actually working as they are supposed to be working. So these are some of the challenges displaced people can face in the notice of Nigeria and also in other parts of Nigeria where we are having conflicts and other situations that are related to violence in the country. We noticed that there have also been attacks on these people who work with NGOs, humanitarian agencies like yours. And this has also caused some form of shortage of people to help these displaced persons. Recently, there was an attack on a UN hub somewhere in the North again. And I remember the kidnappings of some aid workers. How do you... I'm trying to put it the best way. How do you get the energy to get back to work when you hear the next day that your colleague has been kidnapped or someone was killed from your camp? What's the driving force for people like you to continue to work in these places because it's of course the conditions are harsh and you do not know who's going to attack next? Thank you very much for these comments that you have made. Humanitarian actors are actually very busy trying to support people that have been affected. It is very unfortunate that we have some of our staff being affected during this conflict that is going on. It's unacceptable to kidnap or abduct humanitarian actors in the course of their duties. This is unacceptable in this national humanitarian law says no to this. We call on all the actors to understand that humanitarian actors, the International Committee of the Red Cross specifically does not participate in the conflict that is going on. What we do is mainly to try to see that we have supported people that are affected. People are affected, mostly civilians that are affected by the conflict. Yes, of course, we have these situations 2018. We had two of our staff that have been there once, Saifura, we still have them in our minds. We still remember them very, very unfortunate that they were abducted and finally they were killed. This is something that we always try to call on actors to understand that humanitarian actors, health workers are actually people that are out there to support the people that have been affected. Denying them access to people that are affected is actually not something to do. So we encourage people to allow access so that civilian populations that have been affected will have access to medication, will have access to food, will have access to shelter and also sanitation and so on and so forth. So this is our appeal to all the people that are engaged in fighting, all the armed groups that are fighting to be able to respect humanitarian actors and to be able to respect the International Committee of the Red Cross in Nigeria and across the globe. Let's talk about the issue of migration. There's been a lot of, in fact, there's been mass migration from Nigeria and it didn't start today. It started from when the issues of Boko Haram continued to hold sway. Now we see more and more people migrating away from these troubled zones, either to places where they feel they can seek refuge. But do you see serious cases of migration? Are people really fleeing, especially the shores of Nigeria, places that are bordered with other countries? Do you see a loss of them? Yeah, if you talk about migration, you are talking about the conflict in the Northeast generally is bordering four countries, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Of course, with the borders that are not very demarcated, it's easy for people to move across Niger Republic, also easy for people to move across Chad or for people of Chad to also cross over to Nigeria, Cameroon and the rest of them. So we have seen these people, we have also traced people that are missing to other countries and we were able to reunite them. Of course, people are moving, there are a lot of movement of civilian population to areas that are experiencing conflict. Some of them, of course, naturally they will need to have safety and security. So they move to safer areas, these safer areas, this is where we try to also move and see how we can support them. That's why we position some of our offices in the very strategic locations. Our office in BU, for example, in the southern part of Borno State, is positioned specifically to support people that are moving down south from Borno State, down south to northern part of Adam House. We also have another office in MUBI, where this office is also very strategically located, harboring people that are displaced and are moving down south to Adam House and so on. So positioning of this office is actually very strategic so that we would be able to have access to civilian populations. Of course, as an organization, we also have situations where our safety is not guaranteed. So these areas we surely would not like to send our staff to areas that are not very safe for them to be affected by one situation or the other. So we try to avoid that. Of course, the situation is changing. It's always very dynamic. Things that happened yesterday could not... So we keep assessing the situation to try to see how we can adapt our activities to the people and how we can adopt some of the measures to do so that we will be able to keep getting support to the civilian populations across this region. It's really very, very daunting task and we are trying our best to see that we are able to meet some of these people that are in need. All right, finally, we hear that there are so many ungoverned areas, ungoverned zones and spots in these places where there's no security, no cover or presence of government. I'm wondering to myself, what is the face of those people who reside in those ungoverned spots? And again, what is the level of collaboration that you've gotten from the government, especially because you are in the field, you see what's happened. So you are able to give them underspot assessments. How forthcoming has government been in dealing with these situations, especially the issues of not properly demarcating these borders and easy access? Of course, we're also going to see these terrorists run back and forth through those borders. Okay, thank you. I would go for the first question you asked. There are actually thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out there in villages, in remote villages where safety is not guaranteed, security is not guaranteed. These people, we always have them in mind because we don't know how they are able to get food. We don't know how they are able to get medication. We don't know how they are able to continue with their livelihood in these areas. So we still have them in our minds. And we are actually very committed to see that once we are able to get some guarantee, security guarantee, to get to these places, this is something we are really happy to do, to be able to support these hundreds of thousands of people that are not accessible in these areas. This is our hope that we will be able to have this. A lot of, like I mentioned earlier on, a lot of structures have been destroyed out there. The basic things like medication malaria could kill people, medication of simple diseases that are real and vomiting, the primary health centers because people have to run away for their lives are no more functioning. So imagine a place where you have like a thousand people without a primary health center. This is something that is really, really, really very bad and we still have this at the back of our minds and thinking on how to get access to these people to be able to support them. This is the first part. The second part, for the government, we actually have a very good collaboration with the government. What we do is to try to work closely with government authorities, state ministries of health, state ministries of agriculture to support people that are going back to farming activities. This is what we do. People that are like supporting primary health centers, we also work closely with the primary health centers and the state ministries of health. This is a very good collaboration that we have with the government. Also, we work closely with the armed forces, trying to train them also and also to remind them on international humanitarian law so that in the course of their engagement, they should be able to know that there are rules to respect in the course of our operations. So this is like some of the collaborations. Like as in Maidukuri, for example, we have to go, unfortunately, we are out of time. Well, out of time, unfortunately, but I want to thank you because you have been able to do justice to all of this questions that we've put across to you. We want to appreciate the ICRC for the job that you're doing for the people in these troubled zones. Aliudawab is a spokesperson of the ICRC. That's the International Commission for Red Cross. All right. Well, I want to thank you all for being part of the program tonight. I am Mary Annakul. Have a good evening.