now plays And when the kids tell how Christians with machetes fulfilled the commandment of the Lord of Hosts - "And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you pierced by the sword" when you realize that among the burnt ruins of the only intact building is the temple of Pentecostals, you have to wonder whether those who ordered this massacre did not read the Bible just as in the opposite camp, some Islamists read the Koran. And that is, as a theology of terrorism especially useful for destroying rival human groups, plunder, to subdue, and then sell those crimes for heroic acts of faith.
clash ancient African religions in the Moluccas is finding excuses, inspirations and their accomplices, in central Nigeria obeys a symmetry radical Muslims and Christians are out whole villages. Large bands attacked by surprise isolated settlements and do not spare anyone, even children. The other night a bunch of Muslims massacred Christians in Doko Nahawee, killing perhaps five hundred. Five weeks earlier, on Jan. 26, had been erased from the maps Kuru Karama. Of the three thousand inhabitants, but Christians have murdered at least hundred and fifty, those too old or too young to escape, and those determined to defend their property. Among the houses of earth congealed, none of which keeps the sheet that served as a roof, meeting four soldiers and three school depressed olds who come in search of the notebooks kept by the bed.
Soldiers sealed with two wells in the ground where the attackers had thrown him killed: too many dead bodies, they explain, and did not know how to get them out. Kids belonged to a class that has been decimated by the machete when he tried to escape through the circle of the besiegers. While we do not find the words tell, and have their eyes wide open, I do not know if in your fear, horror or disbelief.
None of them, they say, were expecting the attack. It is hard to believe. Kuru Karama is one of many ethnic Hausa settlements in the state of Plateau, where villages are a small mosque next to a tiny Christian church, and shops displaying posters matched the beating heart of Christ and girls in ecstasy Koran. All around, a land that can not arouse appetites - parched fields, a bush sparse scattered over a dusty wasteland. But Kuru Karama has a peculiarity: it is entirely surrounded by the villages of the Christian, the Birom, which expresses the power in the Plateau. That's was fatal.
If we go up the chain of causality, fate is in the form of a law in unsuspected deeply democratic theory. Assimilation to save the smallest of the 250 Nigerian ethnic groups, each of the 36 governments that make up the federation gives the status of "indigenous people" considered native to the tribes, with the status and privileged access to education and public administration that is the only chance to find a decent job. The Hausa are the Plateau since the mid-nineteenth century, but the local government, monopolized by Birom not consider them "natives". Since 2001, this is the cause of discrimination against them furious, and the equally brutal reaction of Birom.
Whenever more violent confrontation begins to overlap with a fault line running through the Nigeria from its colonial origins. The country was invented by the British in 1914 incongruously assembling the Muslim north and Christian south. After the end of military dictatorship (1999) twelve northern states, attracted by the Saudi donation, they decided to apply sharia to their citizens, albeit on a voluntary basis. But one of the twelve has rethought and others do not apply Islamic law in substantial part. But the dominant groups (Muslims) feel entitled to enforce the pretexts with which to share the government employment. In universities, Christian teachers are denied tenure, teachers in schools decreased non-Muslims. In turn, some Christian oligarchies of central Nigeria have begun to engage in discriminatory religious ethnic groups to ward off "non-indigenous" Muslim majority, as the Hausa, who claim their rights. And since this gap now crosses also the security apparatus, it is becoming dangerous for a country struggling to find a common name, if not in the huge oil revenues.
These conflicts can not use the mask religion if the clergy remained in opposition. In this region, a breakwater of races and creeds, have formed an inter-religious committee, which meets in the city of Jos to prevent tension. The participants get to know the time in elementary, but I trust one of them, all in the same way doubt the sincerity of what is being said. And with good reason: in fact one and the others maintain a conspiratorial restraint on misdeeds of Christian and Muslim gangs. These gangs are inspired by two political rivals, eminences of the same party: the Christian governor, a former general aviation ethnic Birom, a former minister and Muslim Hausa ethnic group.
latter would organize violent demonstrations January, the beginning of the riots. Reason or excuse Christians would have prevented the reconstruction of a Muslim's house, destroyed in the clashes in Jos two years ago. Muslims have reacted with the burning of houses and attacks on Christian churches, January 24, Sunday. In any event, the evening was turned over, crushed by the army in the usual way: by shooting at eye level on the demonstrators. But the Christians had suffered casualties, although in smaller numbers of Muslims, and the oligarchy of Birom wanted to give a lesson to the Hausa. In the hours after the state television, run by a Pentecostal pastor, has aired in a continuous cycle news excited, culminating in an editorial that the 26 seconds it sounded like an appeal to Muslims in the massacre. "It was all planned, we can prove it," he says Sani Mudi, the spokesman of the Muslim community in Plateau, showing the stack of papers two feet high that this week will deliver to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Certainly the extermination of the Plateau are not spontaneous. It was not the massacre of Kuru Karama, although among the performers were young Birom from outlying villages. "I recognized several," says Samir Abubakar, a merchant of fruit that I find among the ruins. When did the hunt for a Muslim, and between the houses in the country, ran away in panic, abandoning his family. He was reunited with his wife in hospital (in the photo that shows the phone with arms in casts for the three fractures produced by four machete). Instead, no more news of his mother, probably burned inside the mosque, alive or already dead, and then thrown down a well.
When Birom who had surrounded the village began to advance, one of the three Christian pastors present that day in the village tried to stop them. But he was beaten and tied to a tree, I confirm the students. The other two if they are spun. You can carry out their escape, not the silence of Muslim clerics and Christians. With the exception of Bishop John Onayekam, the Catholic Archbishop, evangelical pastors and mullahs remain silent or hide behind statements vague. They pretend not to know. Kuru Karama is half an hour but does not arouse curiosity in the massacre Reverend Caleb Alas, general secretary of the Pentecostal Churches. When I ask him answer: "The crises highlight the limits of the human condition." Well said, but who did? "We do not know, there's plenty around malignant propaganda." But who was it? "I do not advocate the illegal killing." The maximum that you can get is a "do not exclude that some Christians ...". Then the Reverend
Alas I reveals that the origin of all is the obsession planted in the minds of Muslims finish the holy war that their ancestors failed over a century ago and "wet the Quran in the ocean ", that is the whole impossessari Nigeria. And now everything is clearer. In the eyes of the Hausa Kuru Karama were an outpost of Islamist towards the coast.'s Understandable that their destruction will not affect more than of killing of Christians (not) many impressions mullahs, in turn convinced that Christians conspire against Islam.
When the herd becomes a pack of wolves, shepherds often supports him. The justifications are. And their ears not to hear the cries of the slaughtered. There is also a clergy who opposes and reacts, often in solitude. But the general trend today seems to be that. There, where Muslims and Christians live together for centuries, If anything, the zeitgeist seems to blow in the sails of the religious harsher, more blood, more militant. As elsewhere in Asia and Africa, including Nigeria profit from Islamic extremism as much of Pentecostal Christianity, a creed which has experienced a spectacular boom in the last century, to the point that today would be, for many believers, the second Christian faith after Catholicism. Here also known as formidable healers possessed, the Pentecostal pastors have a predisposition for the first line, not by chance that their parent is in the tumultuous city of Jos, and a reverence for the sacred Word, which is not difficult to find in God of Hosts, that no discounts. Islamic extremism by the time he attended, and indeed in Nigeria even distinguish between adults and children when the massacre.
Muslims or Christians, the murderers and instigators of the massacres occurred in Jos in 2001, 2004, 2008 and January 2010, are all free. The police did not seek. His checkpoints at the entrance of Jos, a dozen, last week seemed to offer an opportunity especially for the officers to rob motorists. It was not hard to imagine that the exterminators would soon be returned to villages to sacrifice to their god. (Guido Rampoldi - La Repubblica, March 8, 2010)
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