Activist Fighting To Free Nigerian Girls: 'Nothing Else Matters'
DENVER (CBS4) - A Nigerian activist heavily involved in the effort to free schoolgirls kidnapped in her home country says the world is unfortunately forgetting about their plight while hundreds of girls are still held.
"Since then, until today, six months after, they have not been found. They have not been rescued. The world is moving on," Florence Ozor, who has traveled the world to talk about the effort to free the girls, told CBS4 recently.
On April 15, the terrorist group Boko Haram abducted 273 girls from the Chibok Government Secondary School in extreme northeastern Nigeria.
Orzo said a few dozen escaped and reported torture, rape and forced marriages to men in the group.
"Their ideology is simple: Western education is a sin," she said.
Indeed, according to Human Rights Watch, Boko Haram translates roughly into "western education is forbidden." They have also carried out a campaign of bombings in Nigeria over the past five years, killing approximately 7,000.
The Bring Back Our Girls organization says about 230 are still missing.
Ozor, who is a government relations officer for an oil and gas company in Nigeria, does not know any of the girls. But her work on behalf of Bring Back Our Girls could mean she faces retaliation when she's home in Nigeria. Still, she said it's worth the risk.
"We're fighting for our children. Nothing else matters, not even our safety," she said.
While the campaign heralded significant international attention -- even capturing the attention of First Lady Michelle Obama who held a sign with the Twitter hashtag #BringBackOurGirls -- Ozor said the Nigerian government has done little to free the girls.
"More should be done," she said. To President Barack Obama, she pleads: "Be a dad and help get our girls back."
