Nigeria Update: Additional Violence Amounts to an Act of Genocide

March 8, 2010 by Mark Christopher
Filed under Elsewhere in Africa, Genocide, OBS Reports

In January, OBS issued a genocide alert for Nigeria as religious violence consumed the centrally located city of Jos. At the time, religious violence culminated into a massacre as reports soon followed stating there was sufficient evidence to prove that high-ranking members of Nigerian society encouraged and organized the killings.

Despite our call to other anti-genocide groups for additional focus on Nigeria, our genocide alert was largely ignored. Two nights ago, another act of genocide similar to the attacks carried out by the Janjaweed militias in Sudan’s Darfur region was committed in Jos.

Over 200 Killed, Additional Evidence of Planned Massacres

The three villages were predominantly Christian. Beginning last night, armed militias stormed into homes and butchered over 500 people, including a 4 year old child, with machetes, clubs, and axes. By 3AM, the militias had retreated and left entire portions of the villages in flames.

Survivors of the massacre stated that the killers called out orders in Fulani and Hausa, two of the local languages used by the Muslim community at Jos. The military-backed nighttime curfew of the region failed to prevent the bloodshed, and armed troops only began arriving in the villages after the attacks were already over. By midday yesterday, the dead were still being gathered, many of them women and children.

Here is a snippet from a New York Times article on the massacre:

The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen, officials and human rights workers said, apparently in reprisal for similar attacks on Muslims in January.

The head of a leading Nigerian rights group, Shehu Sani of the Civil Rights Congress, said in a telephone interview on Monday that his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in the village of Dogo Nahawa.

A spokesmen for the government of Plateau State, Gregory Yenlong, said the number of dead was about 500. “Those that were injured have been dying,” he said. “The communities are taking inventory.”

Those figures, however, did not seem to represent the final tally…

Hundreds on both sides were killed as recently as January, though the victims this time were Christians, according to the information commissioner for Plateau, Gregory Yenlong, and a local human rights organization.

Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group…

Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa.

“They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”

Witnesses, including Mr. Peter, spoke of bodies littering the streets of Ratt. One victim was less than 3 months old, he said.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Monday on Nigeria to find and punish those responsible for the killings.

The violence in Jos now has a growing pattern of planned violence that is amounting to genocidal acts. These atrocities will only continue to worsen if the Nigerian government and international community do not hold the perpetrators of the violence accountable, both from the Christian and Muslim communities. Both sides must also be disarmed and brought into peace talks with one another. Preventing genocide is the always the best choice, and by acting now we can prevent future bloodshed.