MUSLIM HATE IN NIGERIA
Nigeria: Muslim Violence Forces Christian Withdrawal from Peace Talks
By Michael Ireland
Chief Correspondent, ASSIST News Service
NIGERIA (ANS) -- Violence in Kaduna which has claimed 1000 Christian lives and destroyed 63 churches just this year, "must stop" says the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN),in a report from the U.K-based Barnabas Fund.
For three years, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has engaged in government-backed peace talks in the state of Kaduna with its Muslim counterpart, Jamutu'ul Nasir Islam (JNI). However, after the recent spate of attacks in which Islamic militants burnt down nine churches in Makarfi, CAN leaders say the peace process has been undermined.
As a result of the ongoing violence against Christians, CAN withdrew from the talks April 9 saying, "If we continue to dialogue with people when we doubt their sincerity and commitment to the peace which we are honestly pursuing, then the consequences will be grave, to our peril and enslavement."
North and Middle Belt Nigeria is plagued with frequent outbreaks of rioting between Muslims and Christians. Over 10,000 have been killed in such sectarian violence since 2000 when 12 Muslim-majority states in North Nigeria adopted Islamic law (shari'a).
Further details, quotes and photos on this and other stories may be available for news editors on request to Barnabas Fund.
Barnabas Fund works to support Christian communities mainly, but not exclusively, in the Islamic world where they are facing poverty and persecution.
Barnabas Fund, The Old Rectory, River Street, PEWSEY, Wiltshire, SN9 5DB, UK. Tel: +44(0)1672 564938, Fax: +44(0)1672 565030, E-mail: info@barnabasfund.org Web: www.barnabasfund.org
Nigeria tense after clashes
6/10/2005 12:08 - (SA)
Sokoto - Despite the restoration of relative peace in the Sokoto, Nigeria after three months of sectarian clashes, tension still envelops the city as mutual resentment and suspicion between the two feuding sects linger, residents said on Friday.
The clashes were between followers of rival Shia and Sunni Muslim sects.
At least seven people were killed and 53 houses were burnt or vandalised in the clashes that erupted ostensibly over control of the central mosque but which faction leaders, government officials and the police blame on politicians opposed to the state government.
Shia sect spokesperson Sidi Mannir said: "The attacks have stopped but we are not sure if the state government will be able to arrest the masterminds of the attacks and punish them, given their status and connections."
"Only the arrest and prosecution of the masterminds of the attacks will ensure lasting peace because if the arrests are limited to the thugs, the masterminds can recruit new squad from the army of hooligans around," he added.
Following the arrest by the police of Umar Dan-Maishiyya, a Sunni cleric suspected of fuelling the clashes, a Sunni mob went on rampage and burnt down a local government secretariat in Sokoto which led to a police crackdown and arrests were made.
Heavy police presence
Police patrol vehicles have been combing the dusty, refuse-littered streets since Friday, arresting thugs suspected of involvement in the clashes with the help of local vigilantes and rival groups did not participate in the violence.
"The vigilantes are only helping the police to effect the arrests because they know every thug and where to find him. They help our men access the deep recesses of the old city where the suspects live," said Sokoto state police spokesperson Muhammad Umar Dakin-Gari.
Fear of revenge
The involvement of the vigilantes in the clampdown on suspected trouble makers has been a source of concern to inhabitants of the city who fear gang fights between rival groups once the police are off the streets.
"My fear is the youths that have escaped arrest may not take it lightly on their rivals who sold them out to the authorities," Abdullahi Buhari, a civil servant, said while inspecting the carcass of his car that was burnt along with 24 others when Sunni rioters set the local government secretariat ablaze.
"The police operation has been hijacked by thugs and vigilantes who have taken the law into their hands, terrorising opponents and innocent people in the name of assisting the police. This could have a negative effect in the long run," said Sidi Alhaji.
The Shia followers view the formation of a reconciliation committee of clerics and traditional chiefs by the Sokoto sultan Muhammadu Maccido with distrust, alleging the committee is made up of people who sponsored the violence.
Edited by Fidelia van der Linde
Nigeria swings between bloodshed and harmony
11 Apr 2007
By Tume Ahemba
MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, April 11 (Reuters) - Nnamdi Okpala believes he still has a future in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri despite being a victim of repeated bouts of ethnic and religious violence.
Okpala is a Christian from the Ibo ethnic group, a minority in Maiduguri where Muslims from the Kanuri group dominate. He has lived and traded in the largely Islamic north for 21 years.
Last year, his shop was among dozens belonging to Christian Ibos that were looted and torched during riots in which Muslim mobs killed about 30 Christians.
"The crisis was the worst I have seen in all my stay here. We had to run for our dear lives after the rioters overwhelmed the police. By the time we came back, our shops had been looted and burnt," said Okpala, sitting with a group of Ibo traders in front of a row of shops, some still blackened by soot.
News of the killings in Maiduguri sparked reprisal attacks in the Ibo heartland in the southeast. Christian mobs there turned on northern Muslim traders, killing about 100 of them.
The Maiduguri riots and the tit-for-tat violence in the southeast were typical of Nigeria's volatile mix of ethnic diversity, religious rivalry and complex politics.
The ostensible cause of the riots was Muslim anger over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. But many local people said the violence was instigated by politicians because Maiduguri was scheduled to host a public hearing about a plan to extend the president's tenure, which was unpopular there.
Such eruptions of violence are not uncommon in Nigeria, where human rights groups estimate at least 15,000 people have died in religious or ethnic fighting since 1999 when elections returned Nigeria to democracy after three decades of almost continuous army rule.
But that statistic belies a broader picture of usually peaceful cohabitation in Nigeria, whose 140 million people are split into about 250 ethnic groups and divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians.
Okpala said the violence, when it occurs, is orchestrated by politicians and radical Islamic preachers who use ethnicity and religion to manipulate people for their own cynical ends.
MUSLIM PRESIDENT
For now, he places his hope in the expected election on April 21 of a northern Muslim to be the next president after eight years of Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian and an ethnic Yoruba from the southwest.
The two main candidates, Umaru Yar'Adua and Muhammadu Buhari, are both Muslim from Katsina state in the north.
"These senseless killings will reduce when a northerner is president because his Muslim brethren will see him as their own man and won't want to cause trouble for his government," said Okpala.
Obasanjo is due to step down next month after elections marking the first transition from one elected leader to another since independence from Britain in 1960.
The major parties have nominated Muslim flagbearers from the northern part of the country in the spirit of an unwritten agreement by the political elite that the presidency alternates between the north and the south.
"There is no cause for alarm because a reasonable Muslim president may even be better than a bad Christian president," said Reverend Nevin Mshelia, secretary general of the Christian Association of Nigeria's branch in Maiduguri.
Obasanjo has implemented economic reforms that have won praise from Western powers and the private sector, but many northerners feel they have exacerbated an economic imbalance between the south and the poorer north.
"Obasanjo's government has empowered the south and neglected the north," said Audu Maishanu, a 59-year-old car and real estate dealer, sheltering under a tree from the scorching sun in Maiduguri, on the fringes of the Sahel.
"You can hardly get petrol at any filling station in the north. It has been so for eight years," he said, pointing at a group of teenagers hawking fuel in jerrycans by the roadside.
Maishanu said: "Almost all the textile industries in the north have shut down. Anyone that Allah chooses as the next president will surely reverse all this."
Borno, where Maiduguri is located, is one of 12 northern states that imposed provisions of Islamic sharia law into the criminal justice system in 2000, a politically motivated move by state governors that alienated Christians and sparked violence.
But in Maiduguri, residents of all ethnic and religious backgrounds gather in the evenings at Wurali, an area the size of a soccer field filled with shanties, to drink beer or local gin despite sharia restrictions.
"Here there is no religion or ethnicity, we are all united by Bacchus," said a senior Muslim police officer, asking not to be named.
NIGERIA: Children dying needlessly from measles and other preventable diseases
11 Jul 2007 20:00:07 GMT
Source: IRIN
LAGOS, 11 July 2007 (IRIN) - Measles is a preventable disease yet when it strikes in Nigeria it finds a ready pool of victims most of whom are children.
In June more than 50 children died while another 400 were hospitalised in Nigeria's northeast Borno state following a measles outbreak.
The viral disease, transmitted both by air and by bodily fluids, was first reported on 19 June in the village of Njimtilo in the outskirts of the Borno state capital Maiduguri, and then quickly spread to five adjoining local areas including Konduga, Jere, Damboa, Bama and metropolitan Maiduguri.
Health officials have frequently blamed low immunisation rates for such outbreaks, as well as outbreaks of polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis. A 2005 World Health Organisation (WHO) survey found that 72 percent of measles cases in Nigeria occurred in children under five years old, three-quarters of whom had not been immunised.
Measles can strike as much as 90 percent of an un-immunised population.
Despite Nigeria's oil wealth only 12.7 percent of children under five years old are fully immunised against childhood diseases. That rate is among the lowest rates anywhere in the world, according to WHO.
One reason for the low coverage, WHO says, is the decrepit health services sector which lacks funding and proper infrastructure and management.
Emeka Iwobi, a paediatric doctor based in Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, told IRIN that poverty and ignorance also play a part. "Most of those who need [vaccines] are too poor to afford them or may not know they need them,"
Some 70 percent of the population of 140 million lives on less than US $1 a day, many in unhygienic conditions that favour the spread of disease.
Most people often lack access to basic medical care. Nigeria was 187th out of 191 countries in a WHO global ranking of performance of health systems, coming ahead of only DR Congo, Central African Republic, Myanmar and Sierra Leone.
The worst affected states in Nigeria are those in the Muslim north. Immunisation efforts in the region have suffered major setbacks because some radical Muslim preachers there are suspicious of Western medicine. The preachers have claimed that the polio vaccination programme was part of plot to reduce the Muslim population.
In 2004 authorities in the mostly Muslim state of Kano suspended polio vaccination for 10 months to conduct tests to determine if the vaccines contained sterilising agents or the AIDS virus, as critics had alleged.
In other parts of northern Nigeria communities systematically boycotted efforts to immunise their children.
"The polio boycott has had a ripple effect on immunisation efforts of other childhood diseases," said a senior official of the National Programme on Immunisation who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"We can't make much progress unless we overcome the negative perception," he said.
Nigerian Sunnis, Shiites clash
after cleric shot
The Associated Press
Published: July 19, 2007
SOKOTO, Nigeria: Clashes between Muslim sects left at least one dead after the shooting of a popular cleric in northern Nigeria, witnesses said Thursday. The cleric later died.
An Associated Press reporter saw the corpse of one man who had been beaten to death by a mob after being accused in the shooting of Sunni cleric Umar Danshiya, who is well-known for his anti-Shiite sermons, at a mosque in the capital of the desert state of Sokoto on Wednesday.
Nura Mohammed, who was taking the cleric home by motorbike taxi, said that three gunmen on motorbikes shot the cleric in the forehead after he finished leading a morning prayer.
The sultan of Sokoto, the spiritual head of Nigeria's Muslims, announced on Thursday that Danshiya had died that morning after lapsing into a coma. Sultan Mohammadu Sa'ad Abubakar appealed for calm, saying on local radio stations: "Do not take the law into your own hands ... the security agencies are investigating."
The body was being washed in preparation for burial in accordance with Islamic rites, the sultan said. At the news of Danshiya's death, several of his supporters cut branches from the trees with machetes and fixed them to their vehicles, a common form of protest in Nigeria.
Earlier, a mob of Danshiya's followers wielding sticks and machetes attacked several Shiites in retaliation for the attack on Danshiya. Nigerian soldiers and police set up roadblocks and patrolled the streets on Thursday with rifles and tear gas.
Nigeria's 140 million people are roughly equally divided between Muslims and Christians. The country is the frequent scene of ethnic and religious clashes. Thousands of people have been killed since the end of military rule eight years ago. Residents say that ethnic or political differences are often exploited by powerful local figures for economic and political reasons.
Most Nigerian Muslims are Sunni, as are most Muslims throughout the world. The Sunni-Shiite doctrinal split dates to the early days of Islam, and tensions between the sects are not unusual.
Associated Press Writer Salisu Rabiu contributed to this report from Kano, Nigeria