Christian-Muslim Violence Kills 400 in Nigeria
Episcopal News Service. March 9, 2000 [2000-050]
(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.