Written by Matteo Fagotto
JOS
- “I was born and bred in Jos, thinking that Muslims were my brothers.
But they are snakes.” Sitting in a barber’s chair, just a few metres
from the church he saw explode two years ago, 35-year-old David Raphael
struggles to make himself understood due to the scarring on his lips. “I
can’t do any hard work or play football
anymore, because my intestines would
come out,” he says, lifting his Chelsea Football Club T-shirt to show a
long scar that runs vertically across his stomach. “It took me three
months to recover. Even pregnant women died in that blast.”
David Raphael, 35, was injured in an
explosion at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church in Jos. The
Islamic group Boko Haram claimed responsibility.
A shopkeeper in the predominantly
Christian area of Kabong, in the Nigerian city of Jos, Raphael is one of
the victims of five simultaneous bomb attacks that hit the
neighbourhood on Christmas Eve 2010. Two of the attacks targeted the
Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church, where people were attending mass.
Raphael was outside the church when
the explosion, set off by dynamite hidden in a nearby electric panel,
hit him. “It was like a dream” he says, his hands playing nervously with
a pair of sunglasses. “I lost consciousness for 20 minutes. When I woke
up, I was at the hospital.”
The blasts, which killed at least 32
people and injured another 74, were later claimed by Boko Haram, the
Islamic armed group operating in northern Nigeria. The group’s name
translates as “Western education is sinful.”
Boko Haram, whose actions have
killed more than 900 people since 2009, is a galaxy of loosely connected
armed cells under a murky leadership with alleged links to Al Qaeda.
Its main goal is to overthrow the federal government and impose Islamic
law in Nigeria.
It was the first time the group had targeted a church, although many more attacks against Christian places would follow.
Inter-religious clashes have been
all too common in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, where 170
million people are almost equally divided between a predominantly Muslim
north and a mainly Christian south.
Boko Haram’s targeting of churches
has deteriorated an already volatile situation, pushing Nigeria to the
brink of a religious war.
The situation is particularly
serious in Jos, a city of 1 million people and the capital of Plateau
state, which has experienced the most serious ethno-religious clashes in
Nigerian history: politically controlled by Christians, who are the
majority in Plateau, Jos is geographically a wedge into the Muslim
north. In 11 years of violence, thousands of people have died and tens
of thousands have lost their homes.
It wasn’t always like this. Founded
in the early 1900s as a tin mining city, Jos attracted migrants from all
over Nigeria and became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the
country.
“I used to live in a mixed
neighbourhood and I had a lot of Muslim friends,” says Davou Dangyang,
the 30-year-old director of a vocational centre whose aim is to put
Christians and Muslims back together by enrolling them in training
classes.
But in 2001, when a minor protest
set off a round of deadly clashes that killed more than 1,000 people,
Dangyang’s house was targeted by an angry Muslim crowd.
“Many of those who attacked me were people I used to mingle with,” he recounts. “It was both heartbreaking and disappointing.”
Dangyang sold his house and moved to
a Christian area, but the memory of how good life used to be haunts
him. “Even though I was attacked, I feel bad that I cannot get in touch
with my former friends. You feel you have lost something.”
Years of ethno-religious clashes
have slowly but constantly set the two communities apart, sometimes
breaking decades-long personal friendships in just a few moments of
intense violence.
Christians and Muslims now have
rigorously segregated lives, with minimum interaction: there are even
separate street markets. What were once mixed public schools have become
de facto segregated institutions.
On Sundays, the city is sealed off
by security forces to prevent armed attacks and suicide bombings at
churches. There are military checkpoints on the access roads to
Christian places of worship, where the entrances are protected by metal
detectors.
“When I visit a church I come
prepared, knowing that anything could happen,” says Most Rev. Ignatius
Kaigama, 54, the archbishop of Jos.
On March 11, the precautions were
not enough to spare the worshippers at St. Finbarr’s Catholic Church, in
the upscale neighbourhood of Rayfield. A car laden with dynamite
exploded in front of the church gate during morning mass, killing 15
people, including three Boko Haram suicide bombers.
John Kim Richard, the security guard
on duty that day, survived only because he had to fetch a metal
detector a few minutes before the explosion. “When I came back it was
hell. There were pieces of flesh everywhere, two people had
disintegrated. We found some pieces of body in the parish house,
hundreds of metres away.”
Following the St. Finbarr’s bombing,
an angry Christian mob began stopping Muslim motor-taxis on the main
road in front of the church. Some of the drivers were killed.
“Here in Jos, clashes between
Muslims and Christians are a matter of mentality. Wherever you are the
majority, you oppress the other,” says Alhaji Othman Ibrahim, 40, a
Muslim businessman from Dogon Karfe, a community in Jos surrounded by
Christian areas.
Boko Haram’s arrival in town has
forced him out of business, he says, because his Christian partner is no
longer comfortable working with him. “He told me that Boko Haram has no
face, so I might be one of them.”
In 2008, Ibrahim lost one of his
brothers during an attack carried out by Christian youths. Since then, a
steel bar protects the entrance to the neighbourhood, a mass of small
mud houses and a few dilapidated brick buildings.
Most of the violence in Jos is
carried out by youth gangs recruited by “conflict entrepreneurs,”
politicians who are interested in mobilizing their base by playing the
religious card. Apart from the Boko Haram attacks, most of the violence
between Christians and Muslims in Jos happens during and after
elections, when candidates arm their supporters to create havoc and reap
benefits at the negotiating table.
“We never had this problem during
the military rule. It came with democracy, and more and more politicians
are using these tactics,” says Austin Jang, a 26-year-old social
development worker who is part of a group of volunteers trying to
prevent clashes between the communities.
Far from being just a religious problem, the crisis in Jos is also a conflict over resources and political representation.
The city is inhabited by the
predominantly Christian tribes of Berom, Naraguta and Afizere on one
hand, and by the Muslim Hausa-Fulani on the other. While both
communities claim to be the original inhabitants of the region, the
status of “indigenship,” which entitles people to ownership of land and
priority over government jobs allocation, health-care and scholarships,
has been granted only to the former.
This has caused deep anger among the
Hausa-Fulani, most of whom have been living in Jos for generations and
feel like second-class citizens. “They claim we are not indigenous, and
they keep on killing us for no reason,” shouts an angry Mohammed Nuuru
Abdullahi, state secretary of an umbrella body for Nigerian Fulanis. “A
region here in Plateau state was named after my father. Yet, they are
not issuing indigenous certificates to my children.”
The introduction of Sharia law in 12
northern Nigerian states since 1999 has further increased the anxiety
of indigenous Christians, who fear Muslims could take over Jos and
impose Islamic law in Plateau state, should the indigenous concept be
scrapped as the local Hausa-Fulani are requesting.
Muslims in Plateau have been
complaining of an unofficial “glass ceiling” policy implemented by
Christian authorities that prevents them from reaching top political
posts in the state, something Christians have confirmed off the record
and justified with the fear of being overpowered by an ever-growing
Muslim population.
The growing alienation is on everyone’s mind here.
Says Timothy Parlong, special
adviser on peace building to the governor of Plateau: “Jos is the most
strategic place to set this country ablaze.”
First published in THE STAR
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