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

www.hrw.org/...estigate-massacre-step-patrols

Nigeria Jos violence massacre human_rights HRW

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 15 Mar 10 - Cached
  • 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.
Teachers Without Borders

Insight on Conflict > Interview with a Leader of a Peace Community in Urabá, ... - 0 views

www.insightonconflict.org/ce-community-in-uraba-colombia

Colombia peace community interview nonviolence conflict

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 15 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Jesús Emilio Tuberquia is a leader of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Urabá, northwest Colombia. The Urabá region has lived a bloody recent history – a history that is yet to reach its end. It is a heavily militarised zone with a strong presence from guerrilla, army and paramilitary forces. Urabá acted as the launch pad for the savage paramilitary expansion across Colombia in 1997. In February 2005 the Peace Community suffered a now infamous massacre in which paramiltary forces combined with the Colombian army to brutally murder 8 civilians, including several children.
  • Teachers Without Borders on 15 Jan 11
     
    Jesús Emilio Tuberquia is a leader of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Urabá, northwest Colombia. The Urabá region has lived a bloody recent history - a history that is yet to reach its end. It is a heavily militarised zone with a strong presence from guerrilla, army and paramilitary forces. Urabá acted as the launch pad for the savage paramilitary expansion across Colombia in 1997. In February 2005 the Peace Community suffered a now infamous massacre in which paramiltary forces combined with the Colombian army to brutally murder 8 civilians, including several children.
Teachers Without Borders

Ravaged Nigerian Village Is Haunted by Massacre - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10nigeria.html

Nigeria violence Jos massacre

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • 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.
Teachers Without Borders

Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Has Killed 500, Officials Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...09nigeria.html

violence ethnic Nigeria sectarian developing nations Jos

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • 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.”
Teachers Without Borders

Pope denounces 'atrocious' Nigeria bloodshed - 0 views

news.smh.com.au/...a-bloodshed-20100311-pzjz.html

Nigeria violence Jos women eyewitness Pope

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 10 Mar 10 - Cached
  • 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.
Teachers Without Borders

Rwanda makes gains in all-inclusive education | Society | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...andan-schools-open-up-disabled

Rwanda teachers child-friendly disabilities students education

shared by Teachers Without Borders on 02 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • In Rwanda, children with disabilities typically face discrimination and are excluded from school and community life. Silas Ngayaboshya, a local programme manager for Handicap International (HI), says that "many families hide their kids at home because having a disability is a shameful thing for the child and the family, as it's considered to be a punishment from God".
  • Rwanda's ministry of education says that 10% of young people have disabilities, while the Education for All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2010 concludes that the number of disabled children at school is likely to be small. A few attend their local mainstream school, though most go to special schools and centres in urban areas, too far for most Rwandans and mainly for children with visual or hearing impairments.
  • Despite these shortcomings, Rwanda's education system overall is considered to be one of the most progressive in Africa. The government recently introduced free compulsory education for the first nine years of school for all Rwandan children (this initiative is expected to increase to 12 years from next year). According to Unicef, Rwanda now has one of the highest primary school enrolment rates in Africa (95% of boys and 97% of girls in 2009). 
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  • Currently, the ministry of education and Unicef fund 54 "child-friendly" schools across Rwanda, which also provide "best-practice" examples to other schools in their cluster areas. A 2009 Unicef report on the initiative indicates that they have assisted 7,500 disabled children. The government is aiming to expand the programme to 400 schools nationwide by 2012, and has also adopted it as the basic standard for all Rwanda's primary schools.
  • Ngayaboshya, who worked with Claude, says that his inclusion plan also involved preparing the teachers and the other children at his school through measures such as pinning up Claude's picture in the classroom, talking in class about how disability can occur, inviting the class to contribute ideas that could help to include him, and encouraging Claude's father to visit the school and show teachers simple measures to assist his son.
  • It took weeks to integrate Claude into school life, but he now gets good grades and is making friends. And he walks over a kilometre every day on his crutches to go to school. Although it is a long way he doesn't mind the journey, and is excited about the classroom. 
  • Undoubtedly there are complex challenges for disabled learners in Rwanda. These include the lack of awareness among families that children with disabilities can attend school; poverty (poor families might need their children to support them with looking after animals, fetching water or firewood); the effects of the genocide in 1994, including the massacre of thousands of teachers that has reduced their numbers (the pupil-teacher ratio in Rwanda is as high as 60:1 according to HI); and the burden placed on resources by a curriculum shift from French to English as the official language of instruction.
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