NYT: Nigeria Counts 100 Deaths Over Danish Caricatures
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Nigeria Counts 100 Deaths Over Danish Caricatures, Lydia Polgreen, February 24, 2006
ONITSHA, Nigeria, Feb. 23 — Dozens of charred, smoldering bodies littered the streets of this bustling commercial center on Thursday after three days of rioting in which Christian mobs wielding machetes, clubs and knives set upon their Muslim neighbors.
The body of a Muslim victim of the violence lay Thursday outside a ruined mosque as a member of a local gang looked inside. Attacks on Muslims in the south of Nigeria followed attacks on Christians in the north. George Asodi/Associated Press
A mosque in Onitsha was destroyed by Christian rioters.
Rioters have killed scores of people here, mostly Muslims, after burning their homes, businesses and mosques in the worst violence yet linked to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper. The violence in Nigeria began with attacks on Christians in the northern part of the country last week by Muslims infuriated over the cartoons.
Now old ethnic and political tensions between Muslims in the north and Christians here in the south have been reignited, with at least 33 bodies still visible on the streets of Onitsha on Thursday and a local organization that has tried to collect the scattered corpses reporting that it has already picked up 80 others.
The cycle of tit-for-tat sectarian violence has pushed the death toll in the last week well beyond 100, making Nigeria the hardest-hit country so far in the caricature controversy.
The main thoroughfare leading into the city across the Niger River was covered in bodies of Muslim Hausas who had tried to flee rampaging bands of youths, witnesses said. Many of the victims appeared to have been beaten to death; most of the bodies had been doused with gasoline and burned.
Residents combed through the destroyed shops and homes of Muslims, looting whatever the flames had not carried away.
"These things belong to Igbos," said Sunday Tagbo, 25, referring to the dominant ethnic group of this region, more commonly known worldwide as Ibos, as he helped himself to sooty car parts left behind by fleeing merchants. "This is Igbo land. No more Muslims can live here."
City and state officials urged calm, and a semblance of the ordinary returned to the city's streets on Thursday, with markets open and heavy traffic on the streets. But the damage of three days of carnage was evident. At the central mosque, rioters burned the building and hacked down trees surrounding it.
Someone wrote in chalk on a charred wall, "Jesus is Lord." The message went on to warn that "from today" there would be no more Muhammad. Thousands of Muslim residents fled the city, some on foot over the bridge leading to Delta State, taking refuge in neighboring cities. Thousands more huddled in police and army barracks in Onitsha and surrounding towns.
"What has become of us?" lamented the Rev. Joseph Ezeugo, pastor of Immaculate Heart Parish. "This cannot be Nigeria today. We have been living side by side with our Muslim brothers for so long. Why should a cartoon in Denmark bring us to civil war?"
But the cartoons, many political analysts say, were simply a pretext to act on very old grievances rubbed raw by political tensions. Nigeria is entering a period of great political uncertainty in which it must elect a new president to replace Olusegun Obasanjo, who is barred by term limits from running for re-election. Speculation has been rife that he may try to amend the Constitution to run again.
"At the end of the day it is all politics," said Kayode Fayemi, a political scientist and the director of the Center for Democracy and Development, an advocacy group in Nigeria. "Everything else is just pretext."
Conflicts between religious and ethnic groups are common and deadly in Nigeria. In 2002, riots over a beauty contest held in Kaduna in northern Nigeria left more than 200 people dead, and thousands of others have died in such clashes in the last few years.
The most recent cycle began in Borno State, where riots broke out over the Danish cartoons, killing at least 18 people. Muslim rioters burned churches and the homes and businesses of Christians.
In Bauchi State, riots were set off last week when a Christian teacher took a Koran away from a Muslim student who was reading it without permission in class, according to Nigerian newspaper accounts. Muslims were incensed because it is considered a desecration to touch the Koran without performing ritual ablutions. Twenty-five people were killed.
The riots in Onitsha were ignited when a busload of the bodies of Ibo victims of violence in the north returned home earlier this week.
The violence has picked at a very old wound, one inflicted by Nigeria's civil war in the late 1960's, in which Ibo-led insurgents tried to form an independent country called Biafra. The war and the mass starvation it caused killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Some Ibo leaders still nurse a hope that Biafra will be resurrected, and the government recently arrested the leaders of a militant group advocating the re-establishment of an Ibo state. An echo of that sentiment could be seen in graffiti scrawled on a wall here. "This is Biafra," it read. "Rejoice."
The Ibo claim to self-governance is but one of many of the fraying threads in Nigeria's complex quilt of 200 ethnic groups. Tensions between northerners and southerners, and Muslims and Christians, are a staple of Nigeria's contentious political scene, and the nation has always struggled to make sense of its vast diversity.
Its population of roughly 140 million is evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and while most Muslims live in the north and Christians in the south, large numbers of both groups have settled all over the country.
But Ibos nurse particular grudges, making the conflict between them and the Hausas, Muslims who are the dominant group of the north, particularly violent.
"Since 1970 the northerners have been stealing our wealth and ruling us like we are slaves," said Innocent Okafor, a motorcycle taxi driver who brought his 12-year-old son, Jindo, to see the carnage in Onitsha on Thursday, so that he might "know our history and our struggle."
"Thousands of Igbos have died in the north," he said. "So why should some northerners not die here? We must avenge our brothers."
ONITSHA, Nigeria, Feb. 23 — Dozens of charred, smoldering bodies littered the streets of this bustling commercial center on Thursday after three days of rioting in which Christian mobs wielding machetes, clubs and knives set upon their Muslim neighbors.
The body of a Muslim victim of the violence lay Thursday outside a ruined mosque as a member of a local gang looked inside. Attacks on Muslims in the south of Nigeria followed attacks on Christians in the north. George Asodi/Associated Press
A mosque in Onitsha was destroyed by Christian rioters.Rioters have killed scores of people here, mostly Muslims, after burning their homes, businesses and mosques in the worst violence yet linked to the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper. The violence in Nigeria began with attacks on Christians in the northern part of the country last week by Muslims infuriated over the cartoons.
Now old ethnic and political tensions between Muslims in the north and Christians here in the south have been reignited, with at least 33 bodies still visible on the streets of Onitsha on Thursday and a local organization that has tried to collect the scattered corpses reporting that it has already picked up 80 others.
The cycle of tit-for-tat sectarian violence has pushed the death toll in the last week well beyond 100, making Nigeria the hardest-hit country so far in the caricature controversy.
The main thoroughfare leading into the city across the Niger River was covered in bodies of Muslim Hausas who had tried to flee rampaging bands of youths, witnesses said. Many of the victims appeared to have been beaten to death; most of the bodies had been doused with gasoline and burned.
Residents combed through the destroyed shops and homes of Muslims, looting whatever the flames had not carried away.
"These things belong to Igbos," said Sunday Tagbo, 25, referring to the dominant ethnic group of this region, more commonly known worldwide as Ibos, as he helped himself to sooty car parts left behind by fleeing merchants. "This is Igbo land. No more Muslims can live here."
City and state officials urged calm, and a semblance of the ordinary returned to the city's streets on Thursday, with markets open and heavy traffic on the streets. But the damage of three days of carnage was evident. At the central mosque, rioters burned the building and hacked down trees surrounding it.
Someone wrote in chalk on a charred wall, "Jesus is Lord." The message went on to warn that "from today" there would be no more Muhammad. Thousands of Muslim residents fled the city, some on foot over the bridge leading to Delta State, taking refuge in neighboring cities. Thousands more huddled in police and army barracks in Onitsha and surrounding towns.
"What has become of us?" lamented the Rev. Joseph Ezeugo, pastor of Immaculate Heart Parish. "This cannot be Nigeria today. We have been living side by side with our Muslim brothers for so long. Why should a cartoon in Denmark bring us to civil war?"
But the cartoons, many political analysts say, were simply a pretext to act on very old grievances rubbed raw by political tensions. Nigeria is entering a period of great political uncertainty in which it must elect a new president to replace Olusegun Obasanjo, who is barred by term limits from running for re-election. Speculation has been rife that he may try to amend the Constitution to run again.
"At the end of the day it is all politics," said Kayode Fayemi, a political scientist and the director of the Center for Democracy and Development, an advocacy group in Nigeria. "Everything else is just pretext."
Conflicts between religious and ethnic groups are common and deadly in Nigeria. In 2002, riots over a beauty contest held in Kaduna in northern Nigeria left more than 200 people dead, and thousands of others have died in such clashes in the last few years.
The most recent cycle began in Borno State, where riots broke out over the Danish cartoons, killing at least 18 people. Muslim rioters burned churches and the homes and businesses of Christians.
In Bauchi State, riots were set off last week when a Christian teacher took a Koran away from a Muslim student who was reading it without permission in class, according to Nigerian newspaper accounts. Muslims were incensed because it is considered a desecration to touch the Koran without performing ritual ablutions. Twenty-five people were killed.
The riots in Onitsha were ignited when a busload of the bodies of Ibo victims of violence in the north returned home earlier this week.
The violence has picked at a very old wound, one inflicted by Nigeria's civil war in the late 1960's, in which Ibo-led insurgents tried to form an independent country called Biafra. The war and the mass starvation it caused killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Some Ibo leaders still nurse a hope that Biafra will be resurrected, and the government recently arrested the leaders of a militant group advocating the re-establishment of an Ibo state. An echo of that sentiment could be seen in graffiti scrawled on a wall here. "This is Biafra," it read. "Rejoice."
The Ibo claim to self-governance is but one of many of the fraying threads in Nigeria's complex quilt of 200 ethnic groups. Tensions between northerners and southerners, and Muslims and Christians, are a staple of Nigeria's contentious political scene, and the nation has always struggled to make sense of its vast diversity.
Its population of roughly 140 million is evenly split between Christians and Muslims, and while most Muslims live in the north and Christians in the south, large numbers of both groups have settled all over the country.
But Ibos nurse particular grudges, making the conflict between them and the Hausas, Muslims who are the dominant group of the north, particularly violent.
"Since 1970 the northerners have been stealing our wealth and ruling us like we are slaves," said Innocent Okafor, a motorcycle taxi driver who brought his 12-year-old son, Jindo, to see the carnage in Onitsha on Thursday, so that he might "know our history and our struggle."
"Thousands of Igbos have died in the north," he said. "So why should some northerners not die here? We must avenge our brothers."
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