Government ordered Benue massacre, says Malu

Former Nigerian army chief of staff, retired General Victor Malu, said on Monday President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government had ordered into action soldiers who last year sacked a number of villages and killed over 200 people in central region Benue State. Malu, who lost three relatives and had his country home destroyed during the army raid, was testifying before a special commission in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, set up by the government to investigate ethnic unrest in the central region last year. Malu said after his hometown of Tse Adoor had been ransacked, the officer who led the troops called the surviving villages together and told them "it was the Federal Government of Nigeria that had instructed them to kill everybody and destroy every structure they may find." He therefore demanded a public apology from the government and payment of compensation of 500 million naira (US $4.3 million) for the damages he suffered. The attack launched on settlements of the Tiv ethnic group between 22 and 24 October was in apparent reprisal for the killing of 19 soldiers by a local militia. The government said the soldiers had been sent to quell ethnic clashes between the Tiv and Jukun communities in nearby Taraba State. But Malu told the judicial commission the soldiers “deserved what they got because they were assisting the Jukun to kill the Tiv”. After serving as Field Commander of ECOMOG, the West African regional peace-keeping force, in Liberia, Malu was appointed army chief of staff by Obasanjo after he was elected president in 1999. Malu was fired in early 2001 by Obasanjo following his repeated public criticism of Nigeria’s military cooperation with the United States, which he said compromised strategic national security interests. While in service, Malu was reported to have frequently clashed with Minister of Defence General Theophilus Danjuma, a one-time army chief and close confidant of President Obasanjo. With Malu a Tiv and Danjuma a Jukun, the rivalry between the two was widely believed to have coloured the longstanding hostilities between their different communities, and provided a pretext for some influential persons in government to deal with Malu. "With the attendant indiscriminate killings that resulted in the death of my family members," Malu told the commission, "one could safely state that had I been present, I could have been equally killed." Obasanjo has continued to defend the action of his soldiers in attacking the villages despite criticism by local and international human rights groups. And so far no one has been brought to account for the events.