Over half a million displaced in central region, official says

At least 550,000 people have been displaced by a combination of ethnic clashes and military action in Nigeria’s central region, a senior official said. Benue State's commissioner for information, Emmanuel Udende, told a news conference in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Tuesday that the displaced people were victims of the violence that had rocked the states of Nasarawa, Benue and Taraba since June. "We now have about 550,000 refugees in 10 camps," Udende said. He added that the Benue State government had so far spent about 40 million naira (US $357,142) on providing care for the displaced people, while the federal government had provided two million naira (US $17,857). Nigerian Red Cross officials told IRIN they could not corroborate the displacement figure as they were still awaiting the reports of their field officers in the region. "We have sent a team to distribute relief materials to displaced people with the assistance of DFID (British Department for International Development). We will know the position when they send in their reports in the next day or two," Patrick Bawa, Nigeria Red Cross spokesman, said. Since September, fresh waves of displaced people fleeing fighting between members of the Tiv and Jukun communities in areas along the border between Benue and Taraba have taken refuge in several camps around the Benue capital, Makurdi. There they joined people displaced by earlier clashes between Tivs and Hausa-speaking Azeris in nearby Nasarawa State. However, officials said, the largest contingent of displaced people are those who have been flooding the refugee camps since soldiers attacked and ransacked several Tiv communities in late October in apparent retaliation for the killing of 19 of their colleagues by a Tiv militia earlier in the month.