wfn.org | Christian-Muslim violence kills 400 in Nigeria

[Daphne Mack <dmack@dfms.org>]

For more information contact:
Episcopal News Service
Kathryn McCormick
kmccormick@dfms.org
http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/ens
2000-050

Christian-Muslim violence kills 400 in Nigeria

by Kathryn McCormick

     (ENS) Although in early March calm seemed to be returning to 
cities in Nigeria that had been ravaged by riots over the 
previous three weeks, Nigerian Anglicans were still living with 
the fear that struck with the eruption of Christian-Muslim 
violence in the northern part of the country.

     "Our people are being shot, butchered and roasted," Bishop 
Josiah Fearon of the Diocese of Kaduna reported to a friend. 
Later, he added, "We need prayers and the intervention of the 
Lord for people to regain their confidence."

     The violence first flared at a February 21 protest by 
Christians against Muslim demands for the introduction of Muslim 
law, known as sharia, in Kaduna state. According to some reports, 
more than 400 people were killed as rioting spread, and hundreds 
of homes and businesses burned. Within days, the Anglican 
Communion News Service said, Fearon had been confined to his home 
with his family and six other bishops. The bishops had gathered 
in Kaduna to elect a new primate of the Church of Nigeria. 
(Eventually, the country's bishops held their synod in another 
city and elected P.J. Akinola as their primate.)

     Fearon said one of the dead in his diocese was the son of a 
senior priest. The wife of a diocesan evangelist was fighting for 
her life in a hospital.

     At least six Anglican churches were destroyed in fires. An 
estimated 25,000 Christian and Muslim refugees, among them 1,000 
Anglicans, were reported to have fled from the violence.

     Rioting ignited again a week later in the southern city of 
Aba, where local Christian Ibos fought with Hausa-speaking 
immigrants from Muslim northern Nigeria. Residents said the 
violence was in response to the killings in the north.

     In a separate report, Bishop Benjamin A. Kwashi of Jos, also 
in the south, said that as the local chairman of the Christian 
Association of Nigeria, he met with denominational leaders, 
tribal chiefs and others, who agreed to try to make Jos safe. 
They did that, he said, by resorting to prayer, setting up a 
special week of prayers among Christians in the state from 
February 28 to March 6.

     Religion and ethnicity have long been a source of tension 
and periodic violence in Nigeria. The adoption of sharia by 
Zamfara state in October triggered a spate of similar decisions 
and announced intentions in other Nigerian states. Two have 
already approved legislation under which sharia is expected to 
come into effect in May.

     Fearon warned in December of his concern that Nigeria may 
break up in a religious civil war over the sharia issue, 
according to the Church of England Newspaper. Kwashi has also 
expressed fears of a civil war, the newspaper said.

     The violence has uncomfortable parallels with the period 
before the civil war that began in 1967, when the killing of 
thousands of Ibos in northern Nigeria and the subsequent flight 
of tens of thousands more helped trigger the southeast's bid to 
secede. An estimated 1 million people died before the breakaway 
state of Biafra was defeated by forces from the rest of Nigeria, 
Africa's most populous state.

--Kathryn McCormick is associate director of the Episcopal 
Church's Office of News and Information.