⁠Ugly violence in Northern Nigeria after Nigeria's election; an echo of bloody run-up to war

Written by elombah.com   

Saturday, 23 April 2011 02:13

The gory scale of the massacre that swept Nigeria days after its presidential election has been revealed to Elombah.com. Whole sections of towns are burned out, the smell of rot is in the air, and people are escaping with whatever they can carry across the rural lands that separate Nigeria's Christian in the south and Muslim in the north.

Residents told us the number of death from this crisis could number in Hundreds if not thousands. An eyewitness told me that the figure is grossly under-reported especially in Kaduna State. “I personally counted more than 240 bodies buried in mass graves in Zonkwa and Kafanchan”, he said.

 Government officials remain hesitant to offer death tolls for fear of sparking more violence.

 

Initially,,journalists were barred from going into Kafanchan and other parts of Southern Kaduna. "The Chief of Army Staff that was there yesterday barred journalists from taking pictures, The CNN journalists was also stopped from taking pictures".

After Saturday's election, violent protests erupted in cities throughout the north. That rioting immediately took on religious tones, as rioters burned churches and attacked Christians. Christians thus retaliated by burning mosques and attacking Muslim neighbourhoods.

One burned mosque outside the hard-hit city of Kaduna bore expletives written within the burned remains targeting Islam while extorting Christianity.

Even before the violence hit, young men gathered around a ballot counting in neighbouring Katsina state, chanting "God is Great" in Arabic as they say "Sai Buhari".

During a tour of Kaduna state Thursday, Associated Press journalists travelling with Nigerian military leaders said they saw the religion-focussed violence continue. In the town of Maysirga, rioters burned mosques and houses, while churches suffered no damage.

But a Nigerian in the company of the foreign journalists equally told elombah.com  the damage occurred on both sides. He confirmed the scale of destruction.

In Jos Plateau State, there was an attack in Ryom LGA injuring 4 and one matcheted to pieces. The attack occurred 10pm and 2am on Thursday night. In a village named something like Bachit

The victims were suspected fulani rustlers. one military comander confirmed there was an attempt to rustle cows in the afternoon but was thwarted.

Elombah.com was also told of the arrest of a Retired Army Gen in southern Kaduna who was shot leading the reprisal attacks. We were told investigations are on.

I was told that what happened in Southern Kaduna was beyond description, an open warfare between locals and the Fulani's, with many lives lost. “The Muslims started at about 12 Midnight to 2am using sophisticated weapons but the local organised and repelled them. They went further than just repelling and dislodged them from the nearby settlements”.

 

“In southern Kaduna, Kafancahan precisely but by Thursday it had extended to Kwoi and Zangon Kataf”.

In Kafanchan, gas stations lay burned as the curious gathered on the street to see the convoy. Both mosques and churches were also razed to the ground, as were election offices for the ruling People's Democratic Party, which has controlled Nigerian politics since the nation became a democracy in 1999. Whole neighbourhoods and markets sat in smouldering ruins.

Military officials stopped at a police station in the town, where several hundred refugees — all Muslim — were taking shelter. In Zonkwa, where witnesses say several hundred died, as many as 1,000 Muslims sought refuge at a police station.

Brig. Gen. Isa Raphael, an army spokesman, told The Associated Press that officers wanted to "see the truth on the ground."

"It's unfortunate and unwarranted, that's just all I can say," Raphael said of the violence.

What happens next appears unclear. Election officials hope to hold state gubernatorial elections Tuesday, with two-day delays for Kaduna and Bauchi states because of security concerns there. Federal authorities say more than 65,000 people have been displaced across the north since the violence began.

Those able to leave filled the highway out of Kaduna on Friday morning, their possessions crammed into vans and automobiles, idling carefully past armed soldiers who were peering inside each vehicle to escape feared future attacks.

On story of fake police and army killing muslims, we were told they were not likely to be fake soldiers, as military men were moved there immediately, “mostly Muslim officers who had no sympathy for the locals who were defending themselves. The locals openly confronted NAF officers and snatched a riffle from Squandron leader Musa”, elombah.com heard. 

Our informer admitted the locals killed non- muslims; “  yes, the dead toll was high for the non Muslims”, he said

 

In Kafanchan and Zonkwa in the southern part of the state, heavy fighting broke out between Christians and Muslims at about 8pm on Monday night. The fighting did not subside until about noon on Tuesday with some of the residents alleging that those involved in the fight may have been brought into the area from elsewhere. 

Elombah.com gathered that the Police in Kafanchan could not contain the situation as youths from surrounding villages teamed up and entered the town around midnight to take on the alleged CPC armed men. 

The youths reportedly used bows and arrows, cutlasses and sticks to slow the advances of the attackers in some areas but many churches and homes of Christians were complete razed.  

Observers say there is a sickening familiarity to what is now unfolding in the northern cities. When I lived here, I saw the same scenes in 1999 and 2000 in Kano, Kaduna, but also in southern cities like Sagamu and Aba. And, of course, those with longer memories, will remember the massacres of 1966. 

President Jonathan, to his credit, had the courage to draw that link himself, saying these “acts of mayhem are sad reminders” of “an unfortunate civil war [that] as a nation we are yet to come to terms with”.

These events are so sad because they help to unpick the fabric of Nigeria as a nation. 

Take the city of Kaduna, for example. Before the dreadful Sharia riots of 2000, different religions and ethnic groups shared neighbourhoods. But after all the violence and killing, those mixed neighbourhoods have unravelled, and Kaduna is now a city largely divided between respective Muslim and Christian halves.  

To the nation's president and his top political rival, however, the rioting evokes memories of the nation's bloody post-independence disorder and the Nigerian-Biafran War.

"These acts of mayhem are sad reminders of the events which plunged our country into 30 months of an unfortunate civil war," President Goodluck Jonathan said in a recent nationwide address.

"As a nation we are yet to come to terms with the level of human suffering, destruction and displacement, including that of our children to faraway countries, occasioned by those dark days."

There are stark differences between today's violence and that of 40 years ago. Those dark days began with what many thought would herald a new beginning for West Africa — Nigeria's independence from Britain in 1960. A civilian government led by Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa promised change in the oil-rich nation, though his administration quickly became known for graft.

Then a 1966 coup led primarily by army officers from the Igbo ethnic group of Nigeria's southeast shot and killed Tafawa Balewa, a Muslim northerner, as well as the premier of northern Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello. The coup failed, but the country still fell under military control.

Northerners, angry about the death of its leaders, attacked Igbos living there. Historians say tens of thousands of Igbos died during that period, while others fled back to their southeastern homelands. There, separatists formed the breakaway republic of Biafra.

Nigeria thus plunged into a civil war that saw more than 1 million people die, the first images of skeletal African children broadcast on televisions around the world.

In today's Nigeria, many northerners wanted the country's ruling party to nominate a Muslim candidate this year because Jonathan — a Christian from the south — had taken power only because the Muslim elected leader died before finishing his term.

Under an unwritten power-sharing agreement in the ruling party, the presidency should have been held for another term by a northerner because a southerner had it for the first eight years of democracy in the nation. However Jonathan prevailed in the ruling party's primary and became its candidate for president.

Many did the same 40 years ago.

Nigeria has a compulsory youth service, the National Youth Service Corps. Established in the aftermath of the civil war, the NYSC is intended to foster a sense of nationhood. 

The theory is commendable; young people out of university are sent to different parts of the country to meet other Nigerians and gain useful work experience. 

But in this election campaign many young “Corpers”, enlisted to help in the voting process, have been targeted and attacked, and several have been killed. 

In practice, many Nigerians are now extremely nervous about their children serving in other parts of the country, and those with political or financial influence often do their best to ensure this does not happen.   

 

What is frightening is the scale of planted misinformation and propaganda. Rumours have been circulated in Northern Nigeria of the Hausa's being massacred in the South, in a bid to ignite reprisal killings in the North and vice-versa, so that the whole place will go ablaze.

The fear is that this may be a rehearsal for a military coup.

Reports say this week’s violence started with attacks against political leaders and traditional rulers, and later developed into ethnic and religious clashes. And it is the Nigerian elites, (of course not just in the north), who have a lot to answer for. In the event of crisis, the elites have much to lose

For decades they have enriched themselves, whilst an ever-growing army of unemployed young people struggles to survive. Worse, some leaders have used ethnicity and religious identity when it suits them, cynically unleashing a monster they cannot control. 

President Jonathan can be under no illusions about the scale of the task before him. In parts of the south, particularly in the Niger Delta, he is seen as a messiah, who will suddenly deliver a rapid improvement in living standards. 

In parts of the north, he is viewed with suspicion, by a region that believes it has been robbed of power. 

Barnaby Phillips writing on AlJazeera said “Nigeria has a long-proven ability to pull back from the brink, and stumble on. But the events of the past few days show that the country is desperately in need of a new kind of leadership”.

 

Tuesday elections appears threatened, as many youth corpers have fled the area, and vowed never to return.

In Kafanchan and Zonkwa in the southern part of the state, heavy fighting broke out between Christians and Muslims at about 8pm on Monday night. The fighting did not subside until about noon on Tuesday with some of the residents alleging that those involved in the fight may have been brought into the area from elsewhere. 

Elombah.com gathered that the Police in Kafanchan could not contain the situation as youths from surrounding villages teamed up and entered the town around midnight to take on the alleged CPC armed men. 

This is a reminder to the almajaris and there masters that no one has the monopoly of violence!!!

Don't let Ukeoma Ikechukwu, Obinna Okpokiri and their NYSC mates die in vain!!

I've actually started a FB group to help get justice for Ukeoma and his mates. The group's name is: justice for Ukeoma Ikechukwu, Obinna Okpokiri et al

Link-http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_179579825426318. There is also a twitter trend- #justiceforUkeomaetal-where you can make a comment. Please join and spread the word!

The man died who keeps silent in the face of tyranny-Wole Soyinka