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Last updated on August 9th, 2017 at 11:52 am
Sheer butchery in Nigeria:
At least 19 Nigerian Muslims were killed by a Christian mob at the entrance to the southeastern city of Onitsha yesterday, according to an AFP correspondent who saw the bodies.
The corpses were scattered by the side of the main road into Onitsha across the Niger river bridge, where a contingent of soldiers had set up a roadblock to hold back a gang of hundreds of Christian youths wielding clubs and machetes.
The bodies, apparently all ethnic Hausa, had been beaten, slashed and in some cases burnt.
“There are thousands of boys with cutlasses and sticks on the rampage. I’ve counted at least 20 bodies here by the Onitsha bridge. They are Hausas. Some of them are burnt and some have their stomachs cut open,” a Reuters photographer said.
More than 90 have been killed since Saturday. Other factors besides murderous cartoon lunacy, and vicious responses to that, are at play:
Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, rumours of a Koran desecration and opposition to constitutional change provided the catalysts for four days of fighting between Muslims and Christians in predominantly Muslim northern cities. Then there were revenge attacks in one mainly Christian southern city.
But in Africa’s most populous country the underlying causes of sectarian clashes are often political and observers say this round of violence is no exception.
- Disgusting and horrific, lets hope that certain people will finally realise that the blame for mob violence lies with the perpetraters not with the people who have offended their delicate sensibilities.Posted by Ross on 2006 02 23 at 09:11 AM • permalink
- I know I’ll be slammed for saying it, but at least the Nigerian Christians are killing in response to, you know, people killing them.
The Nigerian Muslims slaughtered them for cartoon’s drawn in Denmark.
Posted by Mike Jericho on 2006 02 23 at 09:36 AM • permalink
- Oh, no! Murderous Christians! We must act at once!Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 02 23 at 10:41 AM • permalink
- Here’s the thing. From everything I’ve read about Denmark, it’s a real open question as to whether any of the cartoonists (or at least most) were even Christian, in the true meaning of the word. An article said only 3% of Danes go to church regularly. I think that just multiplies the irony factor. How much more sense does it make that Muslims in northern Nigeria are killing Christians because of a cartoon printed in Denmark drawn by a secularist? As Mike Jericho says, while not something we want to condone, at least the Christian killing Muslim thing makes a wee bit of logical sense. They are responding to being killed by killing those from the same group the killers come from.
- I don’t know if it was justified or not (need more facts about those involved), but now that we have a case of Christians killing Muslims, maybe the UN will finally step in and do something.Posted by tim maguire on 2006 02 23 at 02:36 PM • permalink
- This exception to the rule will quickly become a dubious equivalency meme (e.g.: Christian fundamentalists no different from their murderous Muslim cousins, blah, blah).
The schoolmarms in charge of our national debate will tut-tut about ‘people-living-in-glass-houses’ and engage in simple-minded ‘let-he-who-has-not-sinned’ moralizing—
—everything needed to quiet down rambunctious pre-schoolers (“both of you stop it; I don’t care who started it”), but useless when confronting organized, pathological violence.
- At least the Christians in Nigeria realise tey’re at war, and are prepared to fight back.Posted by Oafish and Infantile on 2006 02 23 at 04:01 PM • permalink
- Heh! Liberals like to claim that conservatives and neocons lack a facility for nuance. But finding a silver lining around the dark cloud of mob violence, man, if that ain’t nuance, what is it?Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 02 23 at 05:04 PM • permalink
- I vehemently agree. But when THEY do it, they call it “nuance.”Posted by Stoop Davy Dave on 2006 02 23 at 05:47 PM • permalink
- great blog on BBC moral equivalence on how the BBC covers the slaughter of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria and how they cover the response by Christians to the attacks. The Islamic PR Agency.
When muslims attack it is “sectarian violence’
When Christians respond it is “attacks on Muslims by Christians”
And of course the cartoons are to blame for it all. Well at least its not the Israelis.
- Ross—That is war, in Africa. Ask the Rwandans. Welcome to the tribal sensibility we must embrace in a spirit of inclusivity. To show that we in the West understand, I call now for a resumption of Viking raids and Apache attacks.Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 02 23 at 09:54 PM • permalink
- I think you would be close to the truth if you thought of the Muslim violence against the Christiand in NIgeria, as in many such countries, as similar to lynchings of blacks in the Jim Crow American South. Gotta keep the uppity kufrs in their place dontcherknow. Now the Christians are hitting back with the same methods. As Richard McEnroe points out this is the way war is waged in modern Africa.
The Nigerian government ought to stop it. It ought to stop the Muslim violence against the Christians as well. Does it have the power to do either? One of the big problems in the Third World is the lack of authority there. Ironically most of the countries are dictatorships, but the absolute dictator is unable to exert power and authority farther than his loyal troops can march, and not all troops are loyal. This is one of the main reasons Africa has reverted, in so many places, to the bush. This intercommunal violence will not help. But if the Muslims want communal peace they should stop killing others. They have the initiative, they began it, it’s up to them to take the lead in ending it. Maybe the only thing that will convince them to end it is if they are on the receiving end of similar violence, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2006 02 23 at 11:50 PM • permalink
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