Violence sweeps across Nigeria’s Plateau State

by | Nov 29, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security

The Nigerian city Jos, the capital of the Plateau State, is the scene of some of the worst sectarian violence in recent years. Up to 300 people were killed after a disputed local election on Friday which has divided the town on social and religious fault lines. Police have imposed a 24-hour curfew and the army is patrolling the streets.

Update, 30/11, 12.40 pm (David): The death toll appears to have risen further:

Residents delivered more bodies to the main mosque in the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday, bringing the death toll from two days of clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs to around 400 people.

Rival ethnic and religious mobs have burned homes, shops, mosques and churches in fighting triggered by a disputed local election in a city at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south. It is the country’s worst unrest for years.

Murtala Sani Hashim, who has been registering the dead as they are brought to the city’s main mosque, told Reuters he had listed 367 bodies and more were arriving. Ten corpses wrapped in blankets, two of them infants, lay behind him. A doctor at one of the city’s main hospitals said he had received 25 corpses and 154 injured since the unrest began. “Gunshot wounds, machete injuries, those are the two main types,” Dr Aboi Madaki, director of clinical services at Jos University Teaching Hospital, told Reuters.

The overall toll was expected to be higher, with some victims already buried and others taken to other clinics. The violence appeared to die down on Sunday. Soldiers patrolled on foot and in jeeps to enforce a 24-hour curfew imposed on the worst-hit areas. People who ventured out walked with their hands in the air to show they were unarmed. “They are still picking up dead bodies outside. Some areas were not reachable until now,” said Al Mansur, a 53-year-old farmer who said all the homes around his had been razed.

Overturned and burnt-out vehicles littered the streets while several churches, a block of houses and an Islamic school in one neighbourhood were gutted by fire. The Red Cross said around 7,000 people had fled their homes and were sheltering in government buildings, an army barracks and religious centres. A senior police official said five neighbourhoods had been hit by unrest and 523 people detained.

Update, 30/11, 4.58 pm (Alex):

For some of the backstory on violence and civil conflict in Plateau State, this 2004 article on OCHA’s IRIN website is worth a look.  While the rest of the world’s attention was focused on New York in early September 2001, the city of Jos was consumed by a week of bloodletting in which 1,000 people died. But as the article notes, that was just the beginning: over the following 32 months, 53,787 people died in retaliatory violence between Plateau state’s Christians (who are mainly indigenous farmers) and Muslims (mainly traders and livestock herders).

International Crisis Group give more of the background in their 2006 briefing on governance in Nigeria:

The constitution enshrines a “federal character” principle, a type of quota which seeks to balance the apportionment of political positions, jobs and other government benefits evenly among Nigeria’s many peoples but is distorted by a second principle, that of indigeneity, which makes the right to such benefits dependent upon where an individual’s parents and grandparents were born. The result is widespread discrimination against non-indigenes in the 36 states and sharp inter-communal conflict. In Plateau State, for example, recurrent clashes since 2001 between “indigene” and “settler” communities competing over political appointments and government services have left thousands dead and many more thousands displaced…

Update, 30/11, 16.58 pm (David): One interesting wrinkle – Henry Okah, the man John Robb has dubbed “one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare”, is currently on trial in Jos. After repeated delays, the secret hearing is due to resume on Thursday…

Karachi burns

by | Nov 29, 2008 | South Asia

Poor old Karachi. Pakistan’s economy is yet again on the slide – with an IMF bailout threatening more hard times ahead (3 million job losses predicted). Mumbai’s attackers are said to have come from Pakistan’s business and media capital. And now… more riots.

For the latest, follow #Karachi on Twitter, where the topic is trending heavily. Media reports are scanty – but four people are reported dead, many more injured… This is not likely to be associated to the Mumbai attacks (see background), but it sure won’t help!

Update – Grim, grim reports of much worse riots in Nigeria too…

I love mah legacy

by | Nov 29, 2008 | North America

George Bush – he liberated the downtrodden, helped the sick and gave succour to the old. Yes, those are the fond thoughts the 43rd President hopes we’ll have for him:

I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn’t going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions.

I’d like to be a President (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace; that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package; that came to Washington, D.C., with a set of political statements and worked as hard as I possibly could to do what I told the American people I would do.

(Photo under a cc license from icbulk.)

Update: The National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson is lapping this up. Yes sir, Bush has done mighty fine:

We will come, through the Obama prism, to see that Bush’s sins were largely the absence of rhetorical skills, unfortunate shoot ’em braggadocio in 2003-4, the federal response to Katrina, and a certain administration haughtiness about the problems in Iraq between 2002-6, but not most of his policies that included prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, AIDs relief in Africa, the removal of two odious regimes, and consensual governments in their places, a framework at home to stop 9/11-type terrorism, and good working partnerships with key allies abroad such as Britain, Germany, France, Italy, India, et al, and a pragmatism in handling rivals like Russia and China. 

In short, given all that, Obama’s victory (predicated on painting Bush as a Hoover/Nixon redux), more so even than perhaps a John McCain’s, may do more for Bush’s reputation that anyone ever imagined. And the Mumbai mess (over there, not here) will only empasize all this, as an array of old 9/11-era experts who used to warn us about radical Islam, then, in the subsequent respite at home, screamed that Bush fabricated a war against terror against bogeymen, and now in their third manifestation are paraded once more out to warn us about?—why, yes, radical Islam!