Muslim death toll in raid on Yelwa tops 600 - Red Cross

More than 600 people were killed when militiamen from a mainly Christian ethnic group attacked Muslims in a small town in central Nigeria last weekend, a Red Cross official said Friday. A heavily armed group of militiamen from the mainly Christian Tarok ethnic group raided the small town of Yelwa in Plateau state on Sunday in reprisal for an earlier Muslim attack on their own community. Their victims were mainly members of the Hausa and Fulani tribes. On Thursday, Umar Mairiga led the first team of Red Cross officials into Yelwa, 220 km east of the capital Abuja, to assess the situation. He told reporters afterwards that he was shown a mass grave where more than 250 people were said to have been buried. Mairiga said he had heard accounts from survivors indicating that several hundred people had been killed. “From what we have seen and heard we think it is correct that more than 600 people were killed,” he said. Police said earlier this week they had found 67 bodies in Yelwa. According to Mairiga, an unknown number of people, mostly women and children, were abducted in the attack by young Tarok men armed with guns and machetes. Red Cross officials treated 158 people for injuries, he added. The Tarok are farmers from Plateau state who are mostly Christian and Animist. Those they attacked in Yelwa were mainly Hausa and Fulani nomadic herdsmen and itinerant traders who have migrated into region from northern Nigeria over the past century. These northerners constituted a minority of the town's 10,000 population. Frightened residents continued to stream out of Yelwa on Thursday despite the arrival of heavily armed police and soldiers to patrol the area. The few remaining residents estimated that more than three-quarters of the town’s population had already fled to safer areas. An IRIN correspondent who was allowed by the security forces to briefly visit Yelwa said the town was dotted with the blackened and burned out remains of homes burned down by attackers bearing jerrycans of kerosene. The Red Cross has distributed tents, plastic plates and buckets as well as food rations to those made homeless by the attack. More than 1,000 people are believed to have died in successive bouts of inter-communal violence in Plateau state so far this year. Until recently, the mainly Christian and Animist farming communities that dominate Yelwa district had lived in harmony with their Hausa and Fulani neighbours. But things changed in 2001 with the eruption of sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims in the state capital Jos. More than 1,000 people were killed in inter-communal violence in the city. That outbreak of violence was provoked by growing tension between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria caused by the adoption a strict Islamic Shari’ah legal code by 12 states in the mainly Muslim north. Many non-Muslims perceived the introduction of Shari'ah law, which prescribes punishments such as public flogging for drinking alcohol and stoning to death for adultery, to be part of a Muslim plan to achieve hegemony over Nigeria. However, Jos resident Sam Mbok told IRIN that the conflict in Plateau state was more about land than religion. “It is more of a matter of the natives fearing their land was being taken over and deciding to fight for it,” he said. The Sahara Desert is steadily advancing southwards, forcing many farming and grazing communities in the Nigeria’s far-north to move south in search of greener pastures. Their arrival in central Nigeria has increased pressure on the land. Many indigenous communities in the Middle Belt have become afraid that they will lose out to the newcomers. Uzo Egbuche, who heads the Lagos-based non-governmental organisation, Centre for Environmental Resources and Sustainable Eco-systems, believes the conflict could be defused by starting to push the desert backwards. “Unfortunately this has never grabbed the attention of successive governments in Nigeria, but the fact is that the environmental disaster in the north is helping fuel communal conflict in central Nigeria,” Egbuche said. The government has attempted to bring the sides together to negotiate an end to the killings. However, these mediation initiatives have failed to produce results and there are indications that idle gunmen from neighbouring Niger and Chad are being drawn into the conflict. Following an attack on Christians who had taken a refuge in a church in Yelwa in February, priests claimed that former combatants from Niger and Chad were involved in the raid. A total of 48 people were killed in that bout of bloodletting. Pointing to the increasingly use of automatic weapons and machine guns in such attacks, some analysts have have suggested that they are the work of men with military training. “There is no doubt that rebel remnants from the civil wars in Niger and Chad have been active in central and northern Nigeria in the past decade,” said political analyst Ike Onyekwere, who is frequently quoted by Nigeria's leading newspapers. However, there are also suspiscions that some of the weapons used in these intercommunal conflicts have been obtained from Nigeria's own security forces. “Another part of the equation is the fact that the military is a favourite occupation of people in central Nigeria.” Onyekwere told IRIN. “There is no lack of ex-servicemen who can be deadly members of a militia and know how to obtain weapons.”