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Nigeria: Investigate Massacre, Step Up Patrols | Human Rights Watch - 0 views

  • Nigeria's acting president should make sure that the massacre of at least 200 Christian villagers in central Nigeria on March 7, 2010, is thoroughly and promptly investigated and that those responsible are prosecuted, Human Rights Watch said today.
  • The latest killings in Nigeria's restive Plateau State took place in the early morning hours of March 7, when groups of men armed with guns, machetes, and knives attacked residents of the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Ratsat, 10 kilometers south of Jos, the capital of Plateau State. The dead included scores of women and children.
  • "This kind of terrible violence has left thousands dead in Plateau State in the past decade, but no one has been held accountable," said Corinne Dufka, senior West Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
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  • Witnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch said the attacks were committed by Muslim men speaking Hausa and Fulani against Christians, mostly of the Berom ethnicity. Civil society leaders in Jos said that the attacks appeared to be in retaliation for previous attacks against Muslim communities in the area and the theft of cattle from Fulani herdsmen. On January 19, more than 150 Muslim residents were killed in an attack on the nearby town of Kuru Karama.
  • Witnesses to the killings, community leaders from Jos, and journalists who visited the villages told Human Rights Watch that they saw bodies, including corpses of young children and babies, inside houses, strewn around the streets, and in the pathways leading out of the villages. A Christian leader who participated today in a mass burial of 67 bodies in Dogo Nahawa said that about 375 people are dead or still missing. Journalists and community leaders who visited the town said that many homes, cars, and other property were burned and destroyed.
  • After the worst of the mid-January violence in and around the nearby town of Kuru Karama, Jonathan pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice. "Those found to have engineered, encouraged or fanned the embers of this crisis through their actions or pronouncements will be arrested and speedily brought to justice," he said. "We will not allow anyone to hide under the canopy of group action to evade justice. Crime, in all its gravity, is an individual responsibility, not a communal affair." While Jonathan's commitments are a step in the right direction, they need to be followed with credible investigations and prosecutions, Human Rights Watch said.
  • Nigeria is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines. More than 13,500 people have died in religious or ethnic clashes since the end of military rule in 1999. The outbreak of violence south of Jos on March 7 is the latest in a series of deadly incidents in and around Plateau State.
  • An unprecedented outbreak of violence in Jos claimed as many as 1,000 lives in September 2001; more than 700 people died in May 2004 in inter-communal clashes in the town of Yelwa in the southern part of Plateau State; and at least 700 people were killed in the violence in Jos on November 28 and 29, 2008. Human Rights Watch documented 133 cases of unlawful killings by members of the security forces in responding to the 2008 violence. Sectarian clashes broke out again in Jos on January 17 and quickly spread to neighboring communities, including Kuru Karama.
  • Human Rights Watch urged the Nigerian government to take concrete steps to end policies that discriminate against "non-indigenes" - people who cannot trace their ancestry to those said to be the original inhabitants of an area - which fuel tension and underlie many of these conflicts. The federal government should pass and enforce legislation prohibiting government discrimination against non-indigenes in all matters that are not purely cultural or related to traditional leadership institutions, Human Rights Watch said.
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Retaliation fears stalk Nigeria city after clashes | Reuters - 0 views

  • JOS, Nigeria, March 10 (Reuters) - Sporadic shooting rang out overnight in the central Nigerian city of Jos and witnesses said at least one person was killed by soldiers enforcing a curfew days after attacks on three nearby Christian villages.
  • Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south, has been tense since raiders attacked the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat just south of the city on Sunday, violence in which hundreds are feared to have died. Fierce competition for control of fertile farmlands between Christian and animist indigenous groups and Muslim settlers from the north have repeatedly triggered unrest over the past decade.
  • "Last night until this morning everybody kept vigil. Nobody slept," said Felvis Aduba, a Jos resident who owns a shop selling electronic goods. Jos was already under a dusk-to-dawn curfew after clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in January which killed more than 400 people, according to community leaders.
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Clashes kill more than 100 in central Nigeria - Reuters AlertNet - 0 views

  • JOS, Nigeria, March 7 (Reuters) - More than 100 people were killed in clashes on Sunday between Islamic pastoralists and Christian villagers near the central Nigerian city of Jos, where sectarian violence killed hundreds in January, witnesses said.
  • Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, the capital of Plateau state, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The latest unrest in the volatile region comes at a difficult time for Nigeria, with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while the country's ailing leader Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern.
  • A Reuters witness who visited the village counted around 100 bodies piled in the open air. Pam Dantong, medical director of Plateau State Hospital in Jos, showed reporters 18 corpses that had been brought from the village, some of them charred. Officials said other bodies had been taken to a second hospital in the state capital. It was not immediately clear what triggered the violence.
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  • The instability underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge. Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public. Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.
  • Apart from the violence in Plateau state, there is also potential for fresh instability in the Niger Delta, the heartland of the country's mainstay oil and gas industry, after a militant splinter group last week claimed two attacks on oil facilities.
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BBC News - Nigeria ethnic violence 'leaves hundreds dead' - 0 views

  • Hundreds of people, including many women and children, were killed in ethnic violence near the city of Jos in Nigeria at the weekend, officials say.They said villages had been attacked by men with machetes who came from nearby hills. Troops have now been deployed in the area and dozens of arrests are said to have been made.
  • Jos has been under a military curfew since January when at least 200 people died in clashes between Christians and Muslims.
  • The authorities say the villages are now calm after troops and military vehicles entered them. An adviser to the Christian-dominated Plateau state government, Dan Manjang, told AFP: "We have been able to make 95 arrests but at the same time over 500 people have been killed in this heinous act."
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  • Many of the dead in the villages of Zot and Dogo-Nahawa are reported to be women and children.
  • He said: "We saw mainly those who are helpless, like small children and then the older men, who cannot run, these were the ones that were slaughtered."
  • "The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," Peter Jang told Reuters news agency.
  • Some witnesses said villagers were caught in fishing nets and animal traps as they tried to escape and were then hacked to death. Mud huts were also set on fire. Mass burials took place on Sunday and scores more bodies were laid out in the streets of the three attacked villages, awaiting further burials on Monday. Figures given for the death tolls in the ethnic clashes have varied widely, sometimes to achieve political ends or to reduce the risk of reprisals, or simply because victims are buried quickly.
  • Analysts say the latest attack seems to be in reprisal for clashes in January, which claimed the lives of at least 200 people and displaced thousands of others. Hundreds of people have fled from Jos in the aftermath of the fighting, the International Committee of the Red Cross says.
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Retaliation fears stalk Nigeria city after clashes | Reuters - 0 views

  • Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and Christian south, has been tense since raiders attacked the villages of Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Ratsat just south of the city on Sunday, violence in which hundreds are feared to have died.Fierce competition for control of fertile farmlands between Christian and animist indigenous groups and Muslim settlers from the north have repeatedly triggered unrest over the past decade.
  • Jos was already under a dusk-to-dawn curfew after clashes between Christian and Muslim mobs in January which killed more than 400 people, according to community leaders.Aduba said the city had been put on edge by SMS messages sent to mobile phones warning that militants from the Muslim Hausa-Fulani ethnic group, blamed for Sunday's attacks, were coming from the northern city of Maiduguri to wage war.
  • Gunfire also rang out from the Tudun Wada neighborhood of the city overnight, where residents said panic was sown when a resident from another state received a truckload of cows.Many of the herders around Jos are Hausa-Fulani and when a vigilante group saw the animals, they took the man for a northern Muslim and mobbed him, before the security forces opened fire to disperse them, killing one person.
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Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed - 0 views

  • Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed AMINU ABUBAKAR March 11, 2010 - 12:44AM Ads by GoogleCAFM/CMMS FacilitiesDeskWeb-based integrated CAFM/CMMSMaintenance, Asset & Space mgmtwww.manageengine.com/FacilitiesDesk Pope Benedict XVI denounced the "atrocious" bloodshed in Nigeria on Wednesday after a massacre of Christian villagers, as police said 49 people would be charged over the killings. As new gunfire added to the tensions around the flashpoint city of Jos, the pope added his voice to a chorus of international revulsion over the weekend slaughter which police say left 109 people dead but the state information commissioner said left more than 500 dead.
  • "Violence does not resolve conflicts but only increases the tragic consequences," he added. The three-hour killing spree in the early hours of Sunday was the latest wave of sectarian violence to engulf the Jos region where several hundred people were killed in Muslim-Christian clashes in January. The security forces have faced heavy criticism over their failure to intervene to stop the latest killings at a time when a curfew was meant to be in force.
  • Jang told reporters he had alerted Nigeria's army commander about reports of movement around the area and had been told that troops would be heading there. "Three hours or so later, I was woken by a call that they (armed gangs) had started burning the village and people were being hacked to death. "I tried to locate the commanders, I couldn?t get any of them on the telephone."
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  • Residents have said the killings on Sunday were part of a spiralling feud between the Fulani, who are nomadic herders, and Berom, who are farmers, which had been sparked by the theft of cattle.
  • Eyewitness account: Slaughter of the innocentsSome survivors told of the attacks as they recovered. In a surgical ward of Jos hospital, women with deep scalp wounds mourned the loss of their children. Chindum Yakubu, a 30-year-old mother of four, described the screams of her 18-month-old daughter who was plucked from her back and hacked to death as the family tried to flee the pre-dawn attacks. "They removed the baby and killed her with the machete," Yakubu said.
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Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Has Killed 500, Officials Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • about 500 people had died in weekend ethnic violence near the central city of Jos, considerably more than what had initially been reported.
  • The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen, officials and human rights workers said, apparently in reprisal for similar attacks on Muslims in January.
  • The head of a leading Nigerian rights group, Shehu Sani of the Civil Rights Congress, said in a telephone interview on Monday that his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in the village of Dogo Nahawa.
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  • League for Human Rights
  • The killings took place in Plateau State near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north.
  • Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group.
  • Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa. “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”
  • Mr. Peter said the attacks began around 2 a.m. and lasted around four hours.
  • One man who was present during the attacks said the killers began firing guns, then poured gasoline on the roofs in Ratt. “We saw the Fulani coming, and they started shooting,” said the man, Yohanna Kudu. “They used machetes to kill our women and children. Some of the children were burned inside the houses.”
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BBC World Service - Africa - Jos violence - 0 views

  • The situation in the central city of Jos is calm today, after violence at the weekend resulted in the deaths of 500 people. The authorities believe the attacks on three Christian villages near the Plateau State capital were an act of revenge carried out by members of the Muslim Fulani community.
  • Focus on Africa's reporter in Kaduna, Abdullahi Kaura Abubakar, spoke to the Secretary General for the northern zone of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Sa'idu Dogo.
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allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Jos Crisis - It'll Never Happen Again - FG - 0 views

  • Abuja — Federal government yesterday said it will stop at nothing in dealing with the sponsors and perpetrators of the Jos crisis, even as it assured that such ugly incidents will not recur. Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Prince Adetokunbo Kayode commiserated with the families of the victims, saying: "It will not happen again."
  • "Our national action plan for promotion and protection of human rights contains explicit provisions on how we intend to achieve this. In addition, the NCT is our national mechanism to investigate allegations of torture, extra judicial executions and other unlawful killings". He said with the process, a culture of accountability within the nation's security agencies would be engendered and that impunity under whatever guise would be punished.
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Ravaged Nigerian Village Is Haunted by Massacre - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • DOGO NA HAWA, Nigeria — Nightmare images haunt this dusty sun-baked village, fresh memories of tall young men emerging from darkness to slash the unarmed with long knives in a frenzy of ethnic and religious hatred.
  • On Tuesday, a day after hundreds were buried in mass graves here, groups of villagers in this Christian farming community a few miles south of the central Nigerian metropolis of Jos sat mutely among their mud-brick homes, remembering Sunday’s horror.
  • Some of the small houses had been burned in the attack: tin roofs were caved in and twisted, facades were charred and carbonized hulks of vehicles littered the dirt streets. Traces of blood were evident in the sandy soil.
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  • Estimates by officials and human rights groups of the number of dead have ranged from 300 to more than 500 in the attack here and in two nearby villages, Zot and Ratsat.
  • The people here spoke of a well-organized gang of dozens who stealthily surrounded the village before dawn. They had come on foot from the low hills surrounding this rocky plateau, Muslim herdsmen apparently bent on revenge for similar killings in January and angry over what one rights group said were cases of cattle rustling.
  • A separate corps — men with machetes, or “cutlasses” as some villagers described them — began their work. “I saw them with very long, white swords,” Mr. Pam said. “Some were dressed in black, and some in camouflage.” The men were ruthlessly efficient, and in halting sentences the villagers described the carnage that followed. “They killed my daughter and my son,” Ezekiel Chwang said. “It was Sunday night. They surrounded our house. They were shouting.” He climbed into a tree to escape the marauders, and dropped back down after they had left, to find a horrific scene in his home. The men, he said, had discovered his 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son sleeping in the bedroom. They slit their necks with a machete, then set them on fire.
  • human rights experts on this region said it was all too reminiscent of previous episodes, including the killing of Muslims by Christians in January. “There many similarities as far as the targeting of unarmed residents, including women and children,” said Eric Guttschuss of Human Rights Watch.
  • Perhaps 3,000 have died in these ethnic-religious conflicts in the region surrounding this village since 2001, in the estimates of rights groups. There have been investigations and commissions of inquiry, but little retribution. The police here, known for their summary methods, say they have already arrested around 100 people in connection with Sunday’s killings.
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Villagers bury their dead after Nigeria clashes | Reuters - 0 views

  • Villagers in central Nigeria buried dozens of bodies, including those of women and children, in a mass grave on Monday after attacks in which several hundred people were feared to have been killed.
  • Armed police and soldiers stood guard as residents of Dogo Nahawa, about 15 km (9 miles) south of the central city of Jos, carried bodies wrapped in multi-coloured cloth from trucks and lowered them into a large open pit in the red-brown earth.
  • Acting President Goodluck Jonathan called an emergency meeting with security service chiefs in the capital Abuja to try to prevent the violence in Nigeria's volatile "Middle Belt" from spreading to neighbouring states. "For many years people have been living together peacefully ... We don't know what happened," one Dogo Nahawa resident, Dan Yamu, told Reuters at the burial ceremony.
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allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Inter-Faith Conference for Peace in Plateau - 0 views

  • Jos — A three-day inter-faith conference on peace in Plateau State came to a close with participants drawing up a 12-point communiqué on how lasting peace can be achieved in the state.
  • Speaking at the closing ceremony, Mrs Tallen noted that the crises that had torn the state apart in the past has been an eye opener to all those who knew the price of peace, adding that both religion has their sad tales to tell. According to her, the time has come for youths in the state and across the country, to learn to say no to violence and be tolerant of each other no matter what it may entail.
  • A big lesson, he said had been learnt and with this conference, it was expected that all forms of hatred should be eschewed in the interest of lasting peace, even as it had become mandatory that people from both religion must learn to live together as it was the case in the past. In his own comments, Mr. Daniel Choji said the conference had assisted in no small measure in identifying the causes of the problems, and the frank discussions had enabled all participants an opportunity to take the messages back to the grassroots as that would be the only way to mend fences properly.
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