Nigeria’s religious fault line was in the spotlight yesterday after sectarian riots in the central city of Jos, nestled between the Muslim north and the Christian south, claimed hundreds of lives.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) squarely blamed the government for the latest bloodletting in Africa’s most populous country and called for a probe “to find who sponsored and carried out the killings.”
The clashes were triggered by a rumor on Friday that the majority-Muslim All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) had lost a local election to the mainly Christian Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a police spokesman said.
PHOTO: AP
“Nigeria is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines. More than 12,000 people have died in religious or ethnic clashes since the end of military rule in 1999,” the New York-based organization said in a statement.
“Government policies that discriminate against ‘non-indigenes’ — people who cannot trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of an area — underlie many of these conflicts,” it said.
“In Jos, members of the largely-Muslim Hausa ethnic group are classified as non-indigenes despite many having resided there for several generations,” it said.
Georgette Gagnon, HRW’s Africa director, said: “These discriminatory policies relegate millions of Nigerians to the status of second-class citizens and fuel the flames of ethnic and religious violence, which have often erupted during elections.”
On Monday, about 2,000 angry youths stormed a mosque in Jos calling for the resignation of the governor of Plateau state, as thousands of troops and police patrolled the city.
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), meanwhile, urged calm and restraint.
OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu expressed “deep regret” over the clashes and “appealed to Nigerians to shun violence and embrace dialogue, tolerance and the rule of law as means of resolving disputes.”
A 24-hour curfew in four districts of Jos that saw the worst of the fighting has been replaced with a night-time curfew applied to the city as a whole, Plateau State information commissioner Nuhu Gagara said.
“The situation has improved in the state capital,” he said, adding that the curfew might be further relaxed yesterday.
The state government has said that about 200 people died in the clashes, though other sources have given a toll twice the official figure.
A Red Cross official spoke of “well over 300 people killed” and Khaled Abubakar, an imam at the central mosque, and another Muslim official spoke of about 400 bodies taken to the mosque. A Christian clergyman spoke of “several hundred” killed.
Corpses that were still visible in large numbers on Sunday had all been removed from the streets of the town and buried by Monday.
Security has also been beefed up in three major cities in the north — for fear that violence could spread. Residents of Kaduna and Katsina reported increased police patrols on Monday morning.
Thousands of people sought refuge in churches, mosques and army and police barracks after the Jos troubles, the Red Cross said. Muslims and Christians for the most part cohabit peacefully in Nigeria.
But Jos, in the “middle belt” between the predominantly Muslim north and the mainly Christian south, already witnessed violent clashes between the two religious groups in 2001 when hundreds of people were also killed.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to