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.”
