Acting Leader of Nigeria Dissolves His Cabinet

The acting president of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, dissolved his cabinet on Wednesday in the strongest assertion yet of his authority over a country where his rule has been challenged. The ministers were all inherited from Umaru Yar’Adua, the gravely ill president whose place Mr. Jonathan took in February. Analysts and presidential advisers suggested that they had become an impediment to Mr. Jonathan’s attempts to put his stamp on the office. Information about Mr. Yar’Adua’s condition has been sparse. Three weeks ago, he returned home after a long hospital stay in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Jonathan has had to deal with sectarian and ethnic violence in one region, a flare-up in the rebellion over oil in another and strife in the cabinet. “There are pro- and anti-Jonathan ministers in the cabinet, and pro- and anti-Yar’Adua ministers, and they were polarized as to whether the acting president should act or not act,” said Hassan Tukur, a retired diplomat who is close to Mr. Jonathan. In a foretaste of Wednesday’s dismissals, Mr. Jonathan dismissed Mr. Yar’Adua’s national security adviser last week after mass killings near the city of Jos. “It’s the prerogative of the president to change the cabinet whenever he feels the need to inject new blood, reinvigorate the cabinet and give it a new focus, and that’s what we’ve done here,” said Ima Niboro, Mr. Jonathan’s spokesman.

Others said that Mr. Jonathan’s agenda was not helped by the infighting. “There was a lack of cohesiveness in the cabinet, and the cabinet had become polarized, in a way that was harming effective governance on the core issues,” said a person close to the president who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Source: New York Times

8 000 flee Nigeria violence

About 8 000 Nigerians have fled their homes around the troubled city of Jos following new sectarian attacks there over the weekend, the International Committee of the Red Cross said Wednesday. "The Nigerian Red Cross Society is distributing food and water to about 5 000 displaced people (IDPs) who have taken refuge in various police stations in the area and to about 300 detainees," the ICRC said in a statement. "An additional 3 000 people have fled from Jos to camps in the neighbouring state of Bauchi," it added.

The commissioner in the state of Plateau said on Wednesday that 109 people were killed in the attacks on Sunday morning in three Christian villages just outside Jos carried out by members of the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.

The ICRC said Nigerian Red Cross volunteers evacuated 28 injured persons to Jos University Teaching Hospital and gave first aid to 137 wounded detainees at the city's police headquarters. Several hundreds of people were killed in Christian-Muslim clashes around Jos in January. Another 3 800 people displaced by clashes in January are still being sheltered in Bauchi, the ICRC said. Thousands have died in ethnic strife in recent years in Jos, which lies on the dividing line between Nigeria's mainly Muslim north and Christian-dominated south. Residents have said the killings on Sunday were part of a spiralling feud between the Fulani, who are nomadic herders, and the rival Berom clan, who are farmers, which was sparked by the theft of cattle.

Source: News 24

Toll From Religious and Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Rises to 500

Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria sharply increased the count of the dead after a weekend of vicious ethnic violence, saying Monday that as many as 500 people — many of them women and children — may have been killed near the city of Jos, long a center of tensions between Christians and Muslims.

The dead were Christians and members of an ethnic group that had been feuding with the Hausa-Fulani, Muslim herders whom witnesses and police officials identified as the attackers. Officials said the attack was in reprisal for violence in January, when dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in and around Jos, including more than 150 in one village.

Early Sunday, the attackers set upon the villagers with machetes, killing women and children in their homes and ensnaring the men who tried to flee in fishnets and animal traps, then massacring them, according to a Nigerian rights group whose investigators went to the area. Some homes were set on fire.

The latest attacks were “a sort of vengeance from the Hausa-Fulani,” said the Rev. Emmanuel Joel, of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Jos. After the January attacks, “the military watched over the city, and neglected the villages,” he said. The attackers “began to massacre as early as 4 a.m.,” Mr. Joel said. “They began to slaughter the people like animals.” The police said Monday that they had made 95 arrests, including a number of Hausa-Fulani. The clothes of many of the suspects were bloodstained, said Mohammed Larema, a police spokesman in Plateau State.

The mood in Jos was tense Monday. Troops were deployed in the streets, shops closed early and residents remained indoors. A few miles south of the city nearly 400 of the victims were buried in a mass grave in Dogon Na Hauwa, the village where the worst violence occurred. Some of the bodies had been mutilated. There, women cried unconsolably amid crowds of mourners, and the smell of burned and decomposing flesh hung in the air. Officials combed a large area around the village, continuing to find bodies during the day.

Shehu Sani, president of Civil Rights Congress, said in a phone interview on Monday that members of his group counted 492 bodies, mainly in Dogon Na Hauwa. He said that security forces had not been much in evidence in the “vulnerable areas” south of Jos. Mr. Sani said that the attackers were motivated at least in part by a large theft of cattle by members of the same Christian ethnic group as the victims. “We were at the scene of the violence,” Mr. Sani said, suggesting that the local government figure of 500 was not an exaggeration. “We have counted as many bodies as that,” he said. “There are not enough functional mortuaries to take them. It’s possibly even more than that because many were buried without documentation.”

Mr. Sani said the latest violence strongly resembled the killings in January. At that time, one predominantly Muslim village, Kuru Karama, was virtually wiped out, and bodies were thrown into pits and latrines.

Source: New York Times

Christian-Muslim Mayhem in Nigeria Kills Dozens

Armed with guns, machetes, torches, and bows and arrows, Christian and Muslim antagonists in central Nigeria’s religiously volatile city of Jos have been fighting for three days in sporadic clashes that have left dozens dead, witnesses and local news accounts said Tuesday. It was difficult to ascertain the precise toll in Jos, the scene of frequent religious violence over the past decade. Estimates ranged from 30 to 300 deaths, as the city was still consumed by mayhem Tuesday evening, with security forces descending on Jos in an attempt to contain it.

Gunshots could be heard throughout the city, and smoke from burning buildings was visible everywhere, witnesses said. “This morning there was smoke, and a lot of shooting by the military personnel,” said Shimaki Gad Peter, director of the League for Human Rights, which is based in Jos, in a telephone interview. The violence began Sunday when Muslim youths attacked a church, according to Mr. Peter, “and they were resisted by church members.” Subsequently, “innocent persons were macheted,” Mr. Peter said. “I saw youths holding bows and arrows, and machetes,” he said. While “the majority” of people killed Sunday appeared to be Christians, he said, there was now a “balance of terror” among the religious groups.

The Rev. Emmanuel Joel of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria said, “Personally, I have seen over 100 bodies.” He said he had seen the bodies in Red Cross trucks going to the morgue. Mr. Joel said Jos was “still boiling.” He was critical of the security forces’ efforts to contain the violence, saying, “While they are trying to contain it in one area, it is breaking out in another area.”

Government spokesmen could not be reached for comment. News reports said a curfew had been imposed on the city. “Nobody comes in, nobody goes out,” Mr. Joel said. “We are all scared of coming out, standing outside.” Several thousand people have been killed in religious rioting in Jos since 2001. The city is situated near the frontier between Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north and the mostly Christian south. “All we see is smoke coming out of burnt structures,” Mr. Joel said. “And gunshots, seriously.”

Source: New York Times