Nigeria’s interim leader ordered the Army to restore order today in the central town of Jos where nearly 200 people have been killed in three days of clashes between Christians and Muslims.
As gunshots echoed through the deserted streets of Jos, security forces imposed a 24-hour curfew.
Armed police and soldiers manned roadblocks separating rival gangs of mostly young men armed with homemade guns, bows and arrows, rocks, knives, machetes and clubs.
The civil unrest comes at a dangerous time for Nigeria, a centralised state with much power resting with the President. For the last eight weeks President Yar’Adua has been out of the country undergoing medical treatment in Saudi Arabia and his exact condition is unknown.
It was left to a spokesman for Goodluck Jonathan, his deputy, to assure Nigerians that “the situation is under control”. Mr Jonathan later issued the order for the Army to move in. It was the first time Vice-President — a Christian — has used the executive powers since the President left the country.
Jos in Plateau State lies on the ethnically diverse religious faultline that divides Nigeria between the Christian South and Muslim North. It is also a fertile belt, where poor communities compete for farming land.
Machine-gun fire started before dawn, said Aboi Madaki, who works at the Jos University Teaching Hospital, where many of the dead were brought. “I saw soldiers moving into town and I can see smoke coming from many places,” he said.
Bodies have also been stacked in mosques. Sani Mudi, a spokesman for the local imam, said: “We could hear gunshots all over the area.” State officials said that they were still waiting for more troop reinforcements but that the violence had not yet spread beyond the city.
A worker at the mosque said that 149 bodies had been brought there. According to Red Cross officials, 300 people have been injured and 5,000 have fled their homes in this latest round of religious violence in the city of half a million. Mosques, churches, homes and government buildings have all been torched.
If Mr Yar’Adua, a northern Muslim, is forced by his illness to stand aside, then Mr Jonathan, a southern Christian, will take over, and this is likely to exacerbate religious and ethnic tensions among Nigeria’s 150 million people.
According to an unwritten agreement within the ruling People’s Democratic Party, power switches between the North and South every two terms. Mr Yar’Adua’s ill health threatens to upset this pact, which helps to maintain the country’s fragile peace.
It is unclear what started the unrest in Jos, with conflicting reports blaming both Muslim and Christian youth. Some say that Muslim youths set fire to a church, while others say young Christians violently protested over the building of a mosque in a Christian district. Still others have traced the dispute to a row over the rebuilding of houses destroyed when similar violence broke out in 2008.
Sectarian clashes have erupted with deadly regularity. Hundreds were killed in separate incidents in 2008, 2004 and 2001 as Christians and Muslims battled one another on the streets, shooting and hacking each other to death and setting fire to homes and religious buildings.