Violence sweeps across Nigeria’s Plateau State Charlie Edwards
November 29, 2008 | More on Africa, Conflict and security | 7 comments
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…
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Christain Gangs? I doubt it. Look a little closer in the story with your details. Where in the world do you see such behavior except from Muslims and Buddist extremests.
Er – which particular Buddhist extremists did you have in mind?
Sri Lanka, presumably.
If it’s Tamils you have in mind, they’re 88% Hindu, 6% Christian and 5.5% Muslim, apparently – http://is.gd/akdZ – ? Sinhalese are Buddhists, I grant you, but on the basis of my (deeply sketchy) knowledge of the conflict, isn’t their problem less extremism (in the civil unrest sense) and more a government that thinks a military solution can work, in defiance of international consensus and evidence (a la Uganda vs. LRA)?
I was really only pointing out that even Buddhism does produce extremists… JC, who is probably on the Christian right, has presumably been riled up by reports of Buddhist attacks on churches in Sri Lanka…
Please we should always be reasonable, I believe Bhudist have less problem of that kind of voilence, and in that Jos Nigeria crisis, how could muslims be the agressors when over 90% of those killed are muslims, and it is said the election was presumed to be worn by a muslim, agress what ? and muslim gang what? when the overal state isa christian dominated state.It is just to show you how Nigerian politicans are so careles about their people. The governor mof the state is a christian and while the crisis started and few lives were lost, the merciless and not a good christian asked the electoral commission to announced a rigged result, what do think he intended; peace? or voilence? and yet we say muslim gangs. We are lured in to the problem of lacking seeing the truth once the agressor is from our sect ,ethnic, tribe ,religion. It is evident that Nigeria has the highest rigged elections and conflicts. So we help them by telling the truth to the aggressors.
my comments is on the issue of Chritians ganging up against the Muslims in Jos North. Actually it has been on record that, Plateau state has total hatrate for the Muslims, because no matter where you come from as long as you are a muslim you have no place in plateau state. We that are indegins can testify to that. As an indigen you can only find appointment either in Fedral, Private or else you can remain redondant.
I can tell you non indigens that are chritians find employment with state government and are working peacufully.