Clashes between Muslims and Christians in the centralNigeria city of Jos have killed more than 400 people and injured 4,000 more, a domestic human rights group said.
Most of the fighting in three days of violence occurred in the city’s poor neighborhoods where security forces arrived late, Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress, said today by phone from Jos, Bloomberg reported. Earlier, New York-based Human Rights Watch put the death toll at 216. Hospitals are overwhelmed and have run out of supplies to treat the injured, Sani said.
Nigerian Vice PresidentJohnathon Goodluckordered the police and army to “immediately” contain the crisis, Aliyu Bilbis, minister of state for information, told reporters today in Abuja, the capital. The government is “greatly concerned, worried and disturbed” about the situation in Jos, he said.
“This is not the first outbreak of deadly violence in Jos, but the government has shockingly failed to hold anyone accountable,”Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mailed statement.
The Nigerian government should investigate the cause of the violence and the excessive use of force by the security forces trying to quell the clashes and punish those responsible for the killings, the rights group said.
Jonathan is overseeing the government response because President Umaru Yar’Aduahas been in a Saudi Arabian hospital for almost two months receiving treatment for a heart ailment.
Ethnic Groups
While Muslim leaders reported 80 deaths yesterday, in addition to 71 who died in the first two days of fighting, Christian officials have counted 65 deaths, Human Rights Watch said, citing “credible reports” from the city. More than 5,000 people have fled their homes in the Plateau state capital, it said. Sani said the violence had displaced 60,000 people.
More than 50 ethnic groups live in Plateau state, where at times violence erupts between ethnic groups, while at other times ideological differences are exploited, Kissy Agyeman- Togobo,an analyst atIHS Global Insightin London, said in an e-mailed note today
“The conflicts that emerge in this volatile region are rarely about religion itself; often the reason for discontent is embedded in some other grievance,” Agyeman-Togobo said. In Jos, “land is a particularly emotive subject for the majority of the peasant farmers there. Economic difficulties have in the past exacerbated tensions.”
More than 700 people were killed in sectarian violence that erupted between Christians and Muslims in Jos in 2001. Another 500 people were killed in 2004 when violence broke out in the Plateau town of Yelwa between Muslim Hausa-speakers and Christian Berom people.
Ethnic Tensions
Misrule by Nigeria’s political leadership and widespread poverty have created conditions that sustain ethnic and religious tensions, said Sani of Civil Rights Congress.
“There’s a complete disconnect between the leaders and the governed,” he said. “And the vacuum is being filled by extremists on both sides.”
Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa with 140 million people, is divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south.
The West African nation is the continent’s largest oil producer and is the fifth-biggest source of U.S. oil imports. Attacks by armed groups in the southern Niger River delta region, home to Nigeria’s oil and gas industry, cut more than a quarter of the country’s oil production between 2006 and 2009.
There are conflicting accounts of why violence broke out on Jan. 17 in Jos, a city about 200 kilometers (124 miles) northeast of Abuja that has been hit by repeated sectarian fighting over the past decade, Human Rights Watchsaid.
Some reports blame a dispute over the rebuilding of a house destroyed in a previous clash more than a year ago, while the city’s police commissioner, Greg Anyating, said it was caused by an attack by Muslims on Christians in a church, the group said. Read report here
