Nigerian Christians Face ‘Atrocity’ With No Protection From ‘Appalling’ Muslim Militia, State Department Warns Congress

Christians in Nigeria are facing deadly persecution despite efforts by the United States State Department to force its Nigerian counterpart to confront the violence and hold perpetrators of the attacks accountable.Much of the violence is blamed on Muslim Fulani militias. The Christian charity Open Doors says Nigeria is the world’s deadliest place for Christians for faith-related reasons. As many as 100,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria since 2009.Last October, President Trump designated Nigeria as a country of concern due to the violence and persecution directed against Christian communities. In recent months, under American diplomatic pressure, Nigeria’s secular government made some notable arrests of Fulani leaders, but it has not been enough to end the killings.“Unfortunately, the violence has not stopped,” a State Department assistant secretary, Frank Garcia, told a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Thursday. “It is an ongoing atrocity.”Another witness at the hearing, the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedoms director, Nina Shea, warned that Christians in Nigeria are mostly killed with impunity. Just last month, some 60 defenseless residents at Binnari in the Taraba State, were killed and a marketplace was looted.“Fulani militias invade rural Christian villages and farming areas and murder, maim, rape, and kidnap for ransom the defenseless residents and their church leaders,” Ms. Shea said. She added that the attacks have forced more than one million people from their lands and homes, and they now live in refugee camps.Ms. Shea puts the blame on Nigeria’s government for failing to protect Christians from Fulani terror. She says authorities do not seriously investigate the crimes and rarely arrest or disarm Fulani suspects.The Fulani are a major Muslim ethnic group spread across West Africa. Its people make up nearly 10 percent of Nigeria’s population. Church leaders say they believe the attacks are intended to eliminate the Christian presence from the rural areas of multiple Nigerian states, with invaders routinely burning and destroying churches and church property.Last week, a Catholic priest was ambushed and attacked by armed men in central Nigeria. The priest, also the headmaster of a Catholic school, was robbed and left unconscious.In October a Catholic bishop announced the indefinite closure, for security reasons, of a central Nigerian parish and its schools because of repeated arson attacks on the school’s dormitories. The decree ordered the withdrawal of all priests, parish teachers, healthcare personnel, and other support staff.Another contributor to the spread of violence is the growth of human settlements, large farms, and other private commercial interests that have deprived herders of scarce water supplies and land once used for grazing. The Fulani are one of the world’s largest nomadic populations. A State Department assistant secretary, Riley Barnes, told the committee that another ongoing issue is the enforcement of blasphemy laws with state-level officials prosecuting individuals for alleged blasphemy – or perceived insults to Islam – including peaceful speech.“The levels of violence and atrocities committed against Christians in Nigeria are appalling,” Mr. Barnes said.The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ program director for Africa, Oge Onubogu, said Christians are not the only victims of the violence and religion is not the only driver. “Leaders should distinguish verified evidence from inflammatory claims and condemn attacks consistently,” Ms. Onubogu said. “Selective empathy is dangerous. Christian deaths should not matter only to Christians, nor Muslim deaths only to Muslims.”Ms. Onubogu went on to say, “No leader should turn ordinary Nigerians’ suffering into political currency, particularly as another national election approaches.” The Open Doors chief executive officer, Ryan Brown, said his group does not argue that every act of violence in Nigeria is exclusively motivated by religion, but contended that religious identity is an important vulnerability factor for many victims. “To suggest that religion plays little or no role in the violence ignores the voices of thousands who have been displaced and scarred by the violence,” Mr. Brown said.The Nigerian government has primarily directed its response to violence in the Northeast and Northwest regions, where Sharia law is practiced in civil matters in 12 states. Internationally recognized terrorist organizations such as Boko Haram and Islamic State reside there with little prosecution or resistance. Mr. Brown, however, said Fulani attacks have caused more deaths in the country than the better-known terror groups that have targeted both Muslims and Christians.

Nigerian Christians Face ‘Atrocity’ With No Protection From ‘Appalling’ Muslim Militia, State Department Warns Congress

Nigerian Christians Face ‘Atrocity’ With No Protection From ‘Appalling’ Muslim Militia, State Department Warns Congress

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