Jos

Hello All-
I am not sure of the reports you are getting from Nigeria on TV, but I saw this article in the New York Times. NO NEED TO WORRY! Now, I was in Jos on the 27th and 28th for a wedding, but not too close to the riots. I returned safely to Abuja during the early afternoon Saturday. Abuja is about 3 hours from Jos, so I am far from the unrest now. I am pretty safe here (well, at least as safe as in Detroit).

Here is the article from the NYT:


December 1, 2008
Deadly Nigeria Clashes Subside
By LYDIA POLGREEN
DAKAR, Senegal — On Sunday morning, Sani ibn Salihu went to

pray for the dead. Even as he arrived at the central mosque of

the Nigerian city of Jos to join a throng mourning 364 people

whose bodies he said had already been taken there, the

battered corpses kept coming: 11 in the hour he spent praying.

“There were women and children, old men,” among the bodies,

Mr. Salihu, a peace activist and journalist, said in a

telephone interview from Jos, the central Nigerian city where

two days of ferocious violence between Christians and Muslims

after a disputed local election has left hundreds of people

dead.

A tense calm returned to Jos on Sunday as soldiers wrested

control of the streets from armed Christian and Muslim gangs

that had roamed the city, slaughtering people with guns and

machetes and torching houses, churches, shops and cars,

according to residents. The sudden and vociferous explosion of

religious violence was the worst Nigeria has seen in at least

four years.

Religious and health officials gave varying accounts of the

death toll but agreed that at least 400 bodies had already

been recovered and more probably remained in the charred

churches, homes, cars and alleyways that had been no-go zones

until Sunday. The Red Cross said that about 7,000 people had

fled the most violent neighborhoods and that they were living

in shelters.

The clashes began suddenly, taking the city by surprise in

both the swiftness and ferocity of the bloodshed, despite a

long history of religious violence in the region. The trouble

began Friday as results of elections trickled in for important

local government posts that control hundreds of thousands of

dollars in government funds.

Elections have not been held in Jos for years, in part because

of fears that the political parties would split along

religious lines, which is in fact what happened. Even before

the results were announced, gangs on both sides began

rampaging, anticipating defeat. Christian gangs claimed that

the governing party, the P.D.P., was being cheated of victory,

while Muslim gangs claimed that the opposition A.N.P.P., which

is identified largely with Muslims in the north, was being

robbed of its win.

Nigeria’s 140 million people are about evenly divided between

the Muslim and Christian faiths. People of both religions live

all across the country, often cheek by jowl, usually in

relative peace.

But the religious divide in this nation of more than 250

ethnic groups mirrors a geographical one, between a

historically Muslim north and a Christian and animist south,

as well as deep political divisions that cross religious

lines. Beyond that there are conflicts over land and political

power, which are often intertwined as a result of traditional

customs that hold the rights of indigenous people over those

of migrants from other parts of the country. Religion is

almost always a proxy for those grievances.

The fissures are so profound that it takes only the smallest

tremor for a seemingly peaceful community to descend into an

abyss of bloodletting. In 2002, a dispute over a perceived

insult to Islam during a beauty pageant led to riots in which

hundreds died. In 2006, riots over Danish cartoons depicting

the Prophet Muhammad led to the deaths of nearly 200 people in

several Nigerian cities, more than in any other country that

experienced violence in the global backlash against the

cartoons.

Nigeria’s Middle Belt, a band of fertile land that straddles

the largely Muslim north and the Christian south, has always

been a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence, and Plateau

State, of which Jos is the capital, has borne the brunt.

Most of the state’s original inhabitants come from tribes that

are almost entirely Christian and animist, but the farmland

and grazing pasture has attracted migrants for centuries,

especially Muslim Hausa and Fulani people from the more arid

north. In Jos, a picturesque city set on a verdant plateau in

central Nigeria, 1,000 people died in religious riots in 2001,

and in 2004 hundreds more were killed in a nearby city of

Yelwa. Jos became a balkanized city, with Muslims and

Christians retreating to separate neighborhoods.

Despite the history of religious bloodshed in the region,

residents, officials and activists said the city had come a

long way toward healing divisions. Interfaith commissions set

up to improve relations between the faiths and ethnic groups

after the 2001 riots appeared to help cool tensions. “Things

had really improved in Jos,” said Nankin Bagudu, a Christian

and state government commissioner who had worked with the

League for Human Rights. “Nobody expected this kind of

violence this time.”

Mr. Salihu, a Muslim, said that the violence threatened to

undo years of careful bridge building between the communities.

“As someone who has been involved in a peace work between

Christian and Muslims, this has set our work back 10 years,”

he said. “It will take us a very long time to rebuild the

confidence.”