The people of Jos buried their dead on Thursday as thousands of refugees sought shelter following Nigeria’s latest eruption of violence between Christians and Muslims that many blame as much on poverty and failed government as on religious hatred.
Burned-out houses, a heavy military presence and mass burials attested to the havoc of three days of clashes in the central Nigerian city, sandwiched between the mainly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south.
The full death toll could not be verified but human rights groups said at least 400 were killed in clashes that started last weekend. With the attacks subsiding, a 24-hour curfew was partially relaxed on Thursday when a rush of corpses to the central mosque brought the total buried there since Sunday to 150, said Lawal Ishaq, a Muslim leader.
Goodluck Jonathan, the vice-president of Africa’s biggest energy producer, has ordered the security forces to restore order. However, the violence has added to nationwide unease, with Mr Jonathan at the centre of power struggles that have ensued in the two months since President Umaru Yar’Adua has been incapacitated in a Saudi Arabian hospital.
The Red Cross said it knew of at least 160 people of both faiths who had been killed since the efforts of a Muslim man to rebuild his house – destroyed in 2008’s violence that killed hundreds – led to an altercation with Christian youths on Sunday.
Unrest spread through the city and outskirts. Thousands have been wounded, many suffering gun or machete wounds.
Among what the Red Cross estimates are 18,000 people forced to flee their homes was a small crowd of Muslims loading whatever they could gather to shelter them for the cold night ahead into an overloaded Volkswagen.
The 20 army and police roadblocks on the road between Jos and Kano, northern Nigeria’s biggest city, testified to the authorities’ fears that the communal violence could spread.
More than 13,500 people have died in religious unrest since Nigeria’s military handed back power to civilians in 1999, Human Rights Watch estimates.
Some of the crises were linked to the decision by 12 northern states of the 36 that make up Nigeria’s federal system to introduce partial Sharia law. Another was sparked by proposals in 2002 to hold the Miss World contest in Nigeria.
But in Jos, where 1,000 died in 2001, religion is only one factor in the tensions. A flourishing Nigerian economy has withered, giving way to patronage lubricated with oil revenues.
Jos’s volatility is due in part to the immigration of northern Muslims from the Hausa and Fulani tribes, whose presence some of the Christian Berom people – designated as the “indigenous” inhabitants of the state – resent. Local politicians are also blamed for stoking tribal sentiment to their own ends.
Jan222010