Religious riot toll hits 138

2006-02-23 14:13

Onitsha - At least 138 Nigerians died in five days of rioting by Muslims and Christians across Africa's most populous nation, where uncertainty over the political future was exacerbating ethnic and religious tensions.

Human rights group, Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), said that in mainly Christian Onitsha in the southeast, at least 85 people were killed in two days of mob violence.

Christian youths rampaged through the streets attacking Muslims with cutlasses and setting fire to them with petrol to avenge the killing of at least 46 people, mostly Christians, by Muslim mobs in the north.

Emeka Umeh, head of CLO in Anambra state, said: "Dead bodies were littered in various parts of Onitsha. We counted 60 on Tuesday and 25 on Wednesday.

Main ethnic group

"The majority of victims were Hausas but some Ibos were killed too." He gave a detailed breakdown of numbers of bodies sighted in specific areas.

The Hausa are the main ethnic group in northern Nigeria and most of them are Muslims, while the Ibo are the dominant tribe in the southeast and they are almost all Christians.

The Anambra police commissioner declined to give a death toll, but he said about 11 000 people, mostly Hausas, had fled their homes and were camping in army barracks or police stations, too frightened to venture out.

Nigeria's 140 million people were split roughly equally between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, though sizeable religious and ethnic minorities lived in both regions.

Restoration of democracy

Thousands of people had been killed in religious violence since the restoration of democracy in 1999, and killings in one part of the country often triggered reprisals elsewhere.

The killings in Onitsha started when news emerged of Ibo deaths in the north. On Wednesday, the tit-for-tat violence spread to Enugu, another Ibo city in the southeast, where seven people were killed.

In Onitsha, Ibo mobs torched mosques and shanty towns, where Hausas lived, while thousands of looters invaded Hausa markets.

Sectarian violence in Nigeria often had roots in politics as leaders manipulated religious sentiment to bolster their power bases.

Rising political tensions

Religious and secular leaders had linked this week's violence in three northern cities to rising political tensions.

In Maiduguri and Bauchi, the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad and an alleged blasphemy started the trouble.

In Katsina, the trigger was a constitutional review, which was controversial because many saw it as an attempt to keep President Olusegun Obasanjo in power for longer.

Under the constitution, Obasanjo can't seek a third term in 2007 elections and he said he would uphold the charter. But, he had declined to comment on a powerful lobby to amend the constitution to allow him to stay.

The idea of a third term was unpopular with a wide range of interest groups across Nigeria.

- Reuters