[Reader-list] Nigeria:Massacre Of 500 Christians

[S. Jabbar]

FYI:
>From the New York Times
March 8, 2010
Toll From Religious and Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Rises to 500
By ADAM NOSSITER
DAKAR, Senegal ‹ Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria sharply
increased the count of the dead after a weekend of vicious ethnic violence,
saying Monday that as many as 500 people ‹ many of them women and children ‹
may have been killed near the city of Jos, long a center of tensions between
Christians and Muslims.

The dead were Christians and members of an ethnic group that had been
feuding with the Hausa-Fulani, Muslim herders whom witnesses and police
officials identified as the attackers. Officials said the attack was in
reprisal for violence in January, when dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in
and around Jos, including more than 150 in one village.

Early Sunday, the attackers set upon the villagers with machetes, killing
women and children in their homes and ensnaring the men who tried to flee in
fishnets and animal traps, then massacring them, according to a Nigerian
rights group whose investigators went to the area. Some homes were set on
fire.

The latest attacks were ³a sort of vengeance from the Hausa-Fulani,² said
the Rev. Emmanuel Joel, of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Jos.
After the January attacks, ³the military watched over the city, and
neglected the villages,² he said.

The attackers ³began to massacre as early as 4 a.m.,² Mr. Joel said. ³They
began to slaughter the people like animals.²

The police said Monday that they had made 95 arrests, including a number of
Hausa-Fulani. The clothes of many of the suspects were bloodstained, said
Mohammed Larema, a police spokesman in Plateau State.

The mood in Jos was tense Monday. Troops were deployed in the streets, shops
closed early and residents remained indoors.

A few miles south of the city nearly 400 of the victims were buried in a
mass grave in Dogon Na Hauwa, the village where the worst violence occurred.
Some of the bodies had been mutilated.

There, women cried unconsolably amid crowds of mourners, and the smell of
burned and decomposing flesh hung in the air. Officials combed a large area
around the village, continuing to find bodies during the day.

Shehu Sani, president of Civil Rights Congress, said in a phone interview on
Monday that members of his group counted 492 bodies, mainly in Dogon Na
Hauwa. He said that security forces had not been much in evidence in the
³vulnerable areas² south of Jos. Mr. Sani said that the attackers were
motivated at least in part by a large theft of cattle by members of the same
Christian ethnic group as the victims.

³We were at the scene of the violence,² Mr. Sani said, suggesting that the
local government figure of 500 was not an exaggeration.

³We have counted as many bodies as that,² he said. ³There are not enough
functional mortuaries to take them. It¹s possibly even more than that
because many were buried without documentation.²

Mr. Sani said the latest violence strongly resembled the killings in
January. At that time, one predominantly Muslim village, Kuru Karama, was
virtually wiped out, and bodies were thrown into pits and latrines.

Jude Owuamanam contributed reporting from Dogon Na Hauwa and Jos, Nigeria.




> From: Pawan Durani <pawan.durani at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:09:16 +0530
> To: reader-list <reader-list at sarai.net>
> Subject: [Reader-list] Nigeria:Massacre Of 500 Christians
> 
> Source 
> :
http://centurean2.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/nigeriamassacre-of-500-christians
> -by-muslims/

CHANNEL 4 NEWS LAST NIGHT- SHOWED HUNDREDS OF BODIES PILED UP-
> CHILDREN AND
WOMEN WERE THE HIGHEST IN NUMBERS- BUT INCLUDED MEN TOO- THE
> MUSLIMS HAD
BEEN SHOOTING GUNS INTO THE AIR- WHEN THE WOMEN AND CHILDREN RAN
> OUT ONTO
THE STREETS THE MUSLIMS ARMED WITH SWORDS AND MACHETI¹S CUT THEM
> DOWN- IT
WAS DESCRIBED AS A MASSACRE!!

10,000 Christians have been
> slaughtered by Muslims in the past four years.
And Barack Obama says
> nothing.
Violence against Christians by Muslims in Jos in central Nigeria site
> has
more than one hundred deaths. Sectarian violence in the region in
> January,
took hundreds of lives. The Christian villagers were massacred with
> machetes
and then put in fire.

A witness who visited the village after the
> massacre reported that there
were hundreds of bodies in stacked layers.

The
> Muslim attackers came from the surrounding hills and attacked the
sleeping
> villagers, took them from their homes and slaughtered them with
machetes. Jos
> is located on the border of the Muslim north and predominantly
Christian
> southern Nigeria and is regularly the scene of religious
> riots.
LINK

Approximately 140 million people inhabit Nigeria, the most
> populated country
in Africa. The country is divided by ethnic and religious
> differences. 60%
of the population is Muslim living mostly in the North of the
> country.
Christians mainly inhabit the South. The introduction of the Sharia
> law 10
years ago in 12 states provoked a series of riots throughout the
> country. In
August 2004 the Islamic government in the Zamfara state threatened
> to
demolish all churches considered as illegal structures, close all
> businesses
belonging to Christians during Muslim prayers, and enforce a new
> law against
clothing that is not compliant with Islamic
> law.
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