INVESTIGATION: Survivors of herdsmen attacks tormented by deaths, rape at Benue IDP camps

Fear of the known – killer herdsmen – dissuaded taxi drivers in Makurdi, the Benue State capital, from taking the ICIR reporter to Guma and Logo, the two local government areas in the state that have become the epicentre of repeated hate crimes since the beginning of the year. It was until the next day that a car was arranged for the journey. From Makurdi to Agasha on the sandy bush road and crossing the River Benue on the ferry to Tse-Ikyo and getting to Tse-Ginde, there were neither soldiers nor police in a journey of about three hours. Desolate farming villages laid across in Guma and Logo but those who deserted their communities face another horror in camps – deaths, rape, malnutrition and other indignities – reports CHIKEZIE OMEJE, who visited all the eight recognised camps in the state.

On the first night of 2018, people in Tseghem village in Guma were awoken by sporadic gunshots in Timota, another village about two kilometres away. Williams Jime, 34, and other villagers gathered their families and fled. Some men stayed.

His 28-year-old brother Pever Kwaghando was among the villagers who did not run away. When the attackers approached the village by motorcycles and the courageous men realised they were Fulani militants, they began to run to different directions.

“My brother was the only one killed in our village,” Jime told the ICIR at Tse-Ginde Primary School in Guma where he has been sheltered along with his wife and two children since the attack. The primary school accommodates 20,928 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) forced out of their villages by the lingering crisis between Fulani herdsmen and Tiv farmers.

His brother’s corpse was not discovered until after three days. Shot from behind on the head, the corpse was already decomposing when his cousin discovered it. With their noses covered, they hurriedly dug a shallow grave and pushed the corpse inside it before the attackers whom they alleged had occupied their village could sight them.

Jime’s brother was not among the 73 who were given a mass burial in Makurdi on January 11 after the attacks in several villages in Guma and Logo by the Fulani extremists. “There was nothing we could do than to bury the decaying corpse there in the bush,” Jime says, wiping away the tears that ran down his cheeks with the back of his palm. This was the second time that he was being displaced; his village was attacked and burned by herdsmen in 2014.

Sewuese Mhile, a 15-year-old junior secondary school student, told the ICIR that her father and three uncles were killed in Timota by the herdsmen. She was cooking rice on firewood – with only groundnut oil and seasoning as an ingredient – while her mother sat on the pavement of the school with hundreds of others, monitoring her progress. Every family cooks their own foods, often given to them by the state’s emergency management agents, and usually involving rice and noodles without additional ingredients to cook them.

Since 2013, the Benue State government has documented more than 50 attacks against farmers by the pastoralists, with more than 1,600 people killed in those attacks. The frequent clashes made the state to pass a law banning open grazing of cattle in late last year. Rather than halt the attacks, the anti-open grazing law has sparked another wave of killings since January, the state enduring its worst-ever humanitarian crisis. More than 170,000 people have been registered in eight camps while an unknown number of affected people are taking shelter with relatives in safe communities in and outside the state.

“Generally talking about statistics of IDPs in Benue State is very challenging,” Emmanuel Shior, Executive Director of the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), told the ICIR. The reason, he says, is that as the attacks continue, more people desert their villages, increasing the number of IDPs daily. The last figure the state registered three weeks earlier was 176,070 IDPs in the eight camps in Makurdi, Guma, and Logo.

Haruna Ubi, Benue State Chairman of Miyetti Allah, the association of Fulani cattle breeders, blamed the Tiv for the protracted violence and accused them of confiscating cows of Fulani herders.

“When we sit and discuss reconciliation, a binding document must be signed between the Fulani and the Tiv so that they cannot attack them and collect their cows,” Ubi told the ICIR. “If they can stop killing the Fulani and collecting their cows, that is fine. Nobody wants war. We need peace also.”

When Ubi was reminded that the state’s law bans open grazing, he claimed that the herders had relocated to Nasarawa State but the Benue State’s agents had been entering Nasarawa State to confiscate their cows. The ICIR did not see herdsmen or cattle in any of the deserted communities in Guma and Logo. Nevertheless, a day after the ICIR reporter visited communities in Guma, a village was attacked in the morning, with two killed and one injured.

Bernard Ahmbe, 45, his wife and two children were one of the latest arrivals to Daudu camp after his village, Torkula, was attacked by the herdsmen two weeks earlier. He told the ICIR that he had been sleeping outside the camp. “We can’t go back,” he says. “The Fulani will kill us all.”

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/investigation-survivors-of-herdsmen-attacks-tormented-by-deaths-rape-at-benue-idp-camps/

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