Nigeria arrests 100 suspected members of violent Islamist sect Boko Haram
Nigeria’s state security service (SSS) has arrested more than 100 suspected members of radical Islamist sect Boko Haram and had foiled a spate of attempted bombings in the past month and a half. Guerrilla attacks on police stations and assassinations by gunmen on motorbikes have killed more than 150 people since the start of the year in the remote northeastern state of Borno. Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for much of the violence.
Insecurity in parts of northern Nigeria has rapidly replaced militant attacks on oil infrastructure hundreds of kilometres away in the southern Niger Delta as the main security risk in Africa’s most populous nation in recent months.
“Successful security operations have led to the arrest of some identified key cell commanders and members of the dissident group in Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano, Yobe and Adamawa,” the SSS said in a statement on Monday, referring to six northern states.
The sect said it was behind a car bomb last month outside the national police headquarters in the capital Abuja and there are fears that it will increasingly trying to operate beyond its home region if not brought under control.
Critics have accused Nigeria’s security agencies of failing to act decisively enough to prevent bombings and shooting by Boko Haram, which has been responsible for almost daily acts of violence in and around Borno’s state capital Maiduguri.
Read the full story by Camillus Eboh here.
.
Q+A-What is Nigeria’s radical Islamist sect Boko Haram?
Nigeria’s radical Islamist sect Boko Haram is suspected to be behind almost daily attacks in the remote northeast and claimed a series of bomb blasts further afield last month. Following are questions and answers on who the group are, what they want, and whether their ideology is widely followed.
WHAT IS BOKO HARAM?
Based in Maiduguri, capital of the northeastern state of Borno, it was initially led by self-proclaimed Islamic scholar, Mohammed Yusuf, who was radically opposed to Western education and wanted strict sharia Islamic law adopted across Nigeria.
Sometimes referred to as the “Nigerian Taliban”, the group’s name means “Western education is sinful” in the Hausa language spoken across northern Nigeria.
Boko Haram followers pray in separate mosques in cities including Maiduguri, Kano and Sokoto, and wear long beards and red or black headscarves.
They believe their wives should not be seen by any men other than themselves and are not supposed to use Western-made goods.
Violent Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram rejects amnesty offer
A radical Islamist sect in remote northeastern Nigeria, blamed for almost daily killings and attacks, has rejected an offer of an amnesty. Kashim Shettima, governor-elect of Borno state, made the amnesty offer to the Boko Haram sect shortly after winning April elections to try to end months of attacks on symbols of authority including politicians and police officers.
“We reject any offer of dialogue or so-called amnesty from Kashim Shettima for two reasons,” a spokesman for the group said in a statement broadcast on the BBC Hausa service, a local language radio station in northern Nigeria, on Monday. “First we do not believe in the Nigerian constitution and secondly we do not believe in democracy but only in the laws of Allah,” the spokesman said, speaking in Hausa.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sinful”, wants sharia (Islamic law) to be more widely applied across Nigeria but its views are not widely espoused by the country’s Muslim population, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.
Sect members launched an uprising in 2009, attacking government buildings and triggering days of gun battles with the security forces in which up to 800 people were killed. Its attacks became increasingly political in the run-up to last month’s presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections but there has been no let-up in the violence since then.
Read the full story by Ibrahim Mshelizza here.
.
Nigerian elections seal major power shift to largely Christian south
(Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan casts his ballot in his home village of Otuoke, Bayelsa state April 16, 2011/Joseph Penney)
A decisive election victory by President Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria has shifted power firmly to the largely Christian south from the Muslim north and could reopen political fissures in Africa’s top energy supplier.
Violence swept northern cities, leaving hundreds of people dead and many homeless after Jonathan’s crushing victory over his northern opponent Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler.
“Jonathan’s landslide, though on the surface it appears like a resounding pan-Nigeria mandate, has brought back with a vengeance all the religious and sectional cleavage, not to mention ethnic bitterness,” Olakunle Abimbola of The Nation newspaper wrote in a column.
Many people see the riots as a reaction by the north to being cut adrift from power and say Jonathan will have to tread gingerly to avoid fuelling resentment in the vast impoverished area. So far the president has said his victory is for all Nigerians and his aides have refrained from being triumphalist.
Although Buhari won in almost all Nigeria’s northern states, Jonathan also picked up millions of votes and his northern backers — particularly in the elite — have high expectations.
After independence from Britain in 1960, the understanding among Nigerians for many years was that the less advanced north held political power, while the south, where Christianity and Western-style ideas have long held sway, controlled the economy.
Nigerian president appeals to Muslim leaders before vote
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has appealed to Muslim leaders to help ensure that elections next month, which risk stoking regional rivalries, pass off peacefully. Africa’s most populous nation holds presidential, parliamentary and state governorship elections spread over three weeks in April, all of which are set to be fiercely contested.
Jonathan met on Sunday with the Sultan of Sokoto, one of Nigeria’s most influential Islamic leaders, and other senior figures from the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs and Muslim umbrella organisation Jamatul Nasir Islam in the northern city of Kaduna. Nigeria is home to the largest Muslim community in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for roughly half of the country’s 150 million people, as well as to more than 200 ethnicities, most of whom generally live peacefully side by side.
But ethnic and religious rivalries bubble under the surface and the candidacy of Jonathan, a Christian from the southern Niger Delta, has fuelled resentment from some in the north who believe the next president should be a northern Muslim. Jonathan is running for what would have been the second term of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, a northerner who died last year leaving Jonathan to inherit the country’s highest office.
His main rival in the presidential race is former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner whose reputation as a devout Muslim and a disciplinarian means he has strong grass roots support in large parts of the north.
“Some members of the political class may be very desperate to win the elections by all means,” Jonathan said after the meeting, also attended by the Emir of Kano and Shehu of Borno, the leaders of Nigeria’s other two main Muslim dynasties. “They will create a lot of problems and the only people who can counsel us are religious leaders and our traditional rulers … I am requesting for you to continue to impress on all Nigerians the need for peaceful coexistence.”
Read the full story by Sahabi Yahaya here.
.
Nigeria’s Muslim north risks growing sense of alienation
Standing on the dancefloor among shards of glass and splintered wood, Tony Baisie rues the day he agreed to help set up a nightclub in one of West Africa’s oldest Islamic cities. For more than 15 years this converted office on an industrial back street in Kano, northern Nigeria, was a thriving business. Customers — Christian and Muslim — would dance among its mirrored walls or shoot pool in the courtyard outside.
But three weeks ago, members of Hisbah — a uniformed Islamic squad set up by Kano’s state governor in 2003 to enforce sharia (Islamic law) — raided the club, smashing tables and chairs, and seizing its drinks stocks and sound systems. “They took me away and detained me overnight,” Baisie said. “Before they released me they made me sign an undertaking I would not sell alcohol or play music ever again in Kano.”
Africa’s most populous nation — roughly divided into a Muslim north and Christian south, but with sizeable minorities living in both regions — is full of paradox. It is home to more Muslims than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa but is also the world’s second biggest consumer of Guinness beer.
A secular government sits in Abuja in the centre of a fervently religious nation. Megachurches in Lagos to the south attract weekly congregations numbering tens of thousands of Christians, while the north traces its Islamic heritage back centuries to the trans-Saharan trading routes linking it to north Africa.
Around a dozen northern states have introduced sharia over the past decade, but it is practised to varying degrees and only four of them have enforcement squads like Kano’s Hisbah, a force of around 9,000 men in green and black uniforms.
Sa’idu Ahmad Dukawa, their director-general, makes no apologies for what he says is a mission to purify the city.
Nigeria’s Jonathan takes election campaign to Muslim north
From Islamic police enforcing a ban on beer and prostitution to its centuries-old market and mosques, Nigeria’s northern city of Kano feels like a different country to the pulsating southern sprawl of Lagos. Its low-rise buildings and dusty tree-lined streets have more in common with the sleepy Sahelian cities of Niger or Chad than with Nigeria’s commercial hub, a city built on hustle and home to some of Africa’s largest companies and richest tycoons.
Securing support in this ancient city — the second most populous after Lagos — and other parts of Nigeria’s Muslim north will be key if President Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, is to clinch victory in the first round of elections next month.
As the incumbent, Jonathan is considered the front-runner, but his main rival, Muslim ex-military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, has strong grass roots support in the north and the opposition is hoping to force a run-off.
“What we are looking for is change. The only option is Buhari,” said Sagir Haruna, a textile merchant in Kano’s Kwari market, a labyrinth of narrow alleyways packed with stalls made of wooden lattice and corrugated iron roofs. Cheers of “Buhari, Buhari” rang out from other stall holders as sirens wailed in the streets outside, signalling a security build-up ahead of Jonathan’s arrival in the city, the latest stage of a campaign which has focused on the north this week.
Jonathan inherited power after the death of late northern President Umaru Yar’Adua last year and is seeking what would have been Yar’Adua’s second term. Some in the northern elite feel fate robbed them of what should have been another four years in power and there had been fears of an election campaign polarised around regional rivalries and a northern backlash if Jonathan wins.
But in the Kwari market debate, nobody mentioned the north-south issue, focusing instead on concerns common across the country such as the need for better electricity supply and security. Some stall holders voiced support for Jonathan.
Muslim-Christian sectarian divisions haunt central Nigerian city
An outsider crossing the dried-up gulley between two neighbourhoods in this central Nigerian city might not notice he had stepped over one of its increasingly tense sectarian dividing lines. On both sides, stallholders sell freshly slaughtered meat and tropical fruit under umbrellas. Motorcycle taxis weave in and out of the traffic. Soldiers with AK-47s on the street corners are the only outward sign all is not well.
“No Christians come here because they are scared. We used to have Christians running stalls here but now there is no trust,” said Umar, a Muslim, from behind a pile of mangoes and pineapples.
It is a sentiment mirrored on the other side of the gulley. “I don’t want Muslims in my market,” said Victor, the Christian owner of a meat stall five minutes away.
Perched on a plateau in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt”, where the Muslim north meets the largely Christian south, Jos’s temperate climate and lush vegetation long made it a weekend retreat for Nigerians looking to escape the heat and hustle of other cities.
But the colonial-style villas dotting the surrounding hills lie largely empty. The dusty streets of the city centre, lined with market stalls and strewn with rubbish, are shared by military patrols and nervous crowds who discuss rumours of the latest violence, now almost a daily occurrence.
More than 200 people have been killed in sectarian violence in and around Jos since a series of bombs shattered Christmas Eve celebrations almost two months ago. “There used to be mutual respect but the whole place is polarised, we have places we can’t go and the Christians have the same thing,” said Khadijah Hawaja, a Muslim community leader who went to a Catholic school as a child.
Snooker row sparks deadly Christian-Muslim clashes in Nigeria
Clashes between Christian and Muslim youths in central Nigeria triggered by a game of snooker have killed four people and led to the burning of houses, churches and mosques, police said on Friday.
Residents said the dispute in Tafawa Balewa, in Bauchi state, started when a man from the Muslim Hausa ethnic group refused to pay for a snooker game on Wednesday evening.
The snooker club owners, from the mostly Christian Sayawa ethnic group, threw him out but he returned with a gang of friends and tried to set the building ablaze, witnesses said.
Several houses and places of worship were torched as rioting broke out the following morning, leading the police to call in reinforcements from the northern states of Gombe and Kano and the local government to impose a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
Bauchi lies next to Plateau state, where religious and ethnic clashes have killed more than 200 people over the past month, according to U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.
Read the full story by Abdulwahab Muhammed here. (Photo: Snooker shot, 7 March 2008/Michael Maggs)
Christian-Muslim clashes flare in Nigeria after Christmas Eve bombings
Clashes broke out between armed Christian and Muslim groups near the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday, a Reuters witness said, after Christmas Eve bombings in the region killed more than 30 people.
Buildings were set ablaze and people were seen running for cover as the police and military arrived on the scene in an effort to disperse crowds. This correspondent saw dozens of buildings on fire and injured people covered in blood being dragged by friends and family to hospital.
The unrest was triggered by explosions on Christmas Eve in villages near Jos, capital of Plateau state, that killed at least 32 people and left 74 critically injured. Pope Benedict condemned the attacks, which killed six people in two churches.
The governor of Plateau state has said the bombings were politically motivated terrorism, aimed at pitting Christians against Muslims to start another round of violence.
Christians, Muslims and animists from a patchwork of ethnic groups live peacefully side by side in most Nigerian cities.
Read the full story by Afolabi Sotunde in Jos here. See also Christmas Eve attacks kill at least 38 in Nigeria.
“Which is the progenitor of all religions”????
Not so. Not of my religion.
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
Islam is intolerant to criticism and this has been demonstrated time and time again throughout history. It is most evident in the recent past as demonstrated by fatwa’s against the Danish cartoonist who drew your mighty prophet followed by attempts on his life by peace-loving Muslims. The “religion of peace” is responsible for virtually all terrorist attacks of today.
Even the most tolerant countries like Sweden and Denmark are realizing that Islamists will not treat them like in the same inviting and accepting manner that they have been accepted into western society.
Most immigrants are grateful for having the privilege of being accepted into such a society, but the Islamists turn back and join jihadists, donate money to their causes and further the destruction of the very countries that took them in. It is time to stop immigration of Islamists.
Their hypocrisy of peace has been evident for centuries but they still continue to insist that they are peace-loving.