The gun men came from the hills, armed with guns and machetes under the cover of an afternoon rain. They split into groups and selected remote areas within walking distances of between 40 and 50 minutes to unleash mayhem on innocent lives.
Before then, they had laid ambush on mourners returning from a funeral service in Kakuruk village and simultaneously raided nearby villages, shooting, stabbing and maiming anyone at sight. Even the youthful and agile were helpless as the scoundrels massacred and soiled the land with tears and blood. Witnesses said the carnage lasted for hours and travellers evacuated their vehicles and fled into the bush.
Last weekend 238 Christians were killed in a number of attacks by militia in Plateau State, a region in the heart of the country.
Campaigners are warning it is just the latest example of “pure genocide” in a country ravaged by religious division.
A joint statement issued by the Christian Association of Nigeria said more than 6,000 Christian worshippers – “mostly children, women and the aged” – had already been killed this year.
Fulani brigades appear to arrive in numbers great enough to surround their targets and destroy them with automatic weapons and petrol. For Christian defense: nothing — not weapons, which are confiscated by the government to discourage “vigilante actions”, not terrain, which is rugged but short on natural barriers to foot and vehicle assault, not military or police, who are either spread thin and easily confused or disinterested — and that last has become a point in political contention about the sincerity of Nigerian Muslim President Buhari in relation to his commitment to secure the Christian community in Nigeria.
The blue frown refers to the 200 Nigerian recently killed by Fulani raiders in Plateau State.
United States Ambassador in Nigeria, Mr W. Stuart Symington has enjoined both the Nigerian leaders and citizens to make concerted efforts to stop the killings currently ravaging the country. The ambassador was speaking at ceremonies marking the 242 years of Independence for the United States of America.
Symington speaking on the situation in Nigeria said every day, people’s hopes are stopped by unnecessary deaths and by those whose acts reflect no good and served no cause.
In the little more than two years since the above was posted, Fulani-associated attacks on Nigerian farming villages have skyrocketed, bringing to play suspicions about a Muslim dominated government and security apparatus. One BackChannels source has suggested that all the top military and police officers have Arab names and Islamic affiliation, and, therefore, so may go the reasoning, the same have turned a blind eye to attacks in the making. Add to that, the state’s confiscation of old unregistered firearms from villagers, leaving the same completely bared to the whims of AK-47 equipped rape-and-rapine “Fulani Land Pirates”.
Not surprisingly, the complaint of Islamic Jihad and the ethnic cleansing of Christians has surfaced in more recent news.
Governor Ortom in his speech, stated that what was happening in the state was ethnic cleansing and Jihad. Ortom said, “this is not a hidden agenda, it’s known and those people who are perpetrating it did say it. They’re not hidden. They held press conferences, they came out and said they were going to resist our law, that they were going to do ethnic cleansing, it’s about Jihad, it’s about taking over the land, it’s not about herders and farmers clashes.
Related in Vanguard on this day: an editorial critical of “The probe on Army ‘partiality'”; and another, finally, on theshooting of armed herdsman in the “Gwer, Logo and Guma Local Government Areas of Benue State” — and in use: Russian Mi-35 helicopter gunships.
BackChannels has been curious about where “the bandits” have been obtaining their arms — and the mention of such curiosity alone should raise knowing and cynical smiles in West Africa: “Firearms Trafficking in West Africa” n.d., PDF.
The Boko Haram back story in relation to arms and equipage has been poked at:
However, the “tank” in the photo appears to be a Panhard ERC-90 Sagaie, a wheeled armored fighting vehicle of French manufacture. Chad and Cote d’Voire each have a few of these vehicles, and, according to one commentator, the Nigerian military has forty-two of them. If that is accurate, then it is likely that the tank and the armored fighting vehicle were stolen from a Nigerian military armory and did not come from Libya.
Last year the police carried out a dawn raid on Orilowo-Ejigbo, a Lagos suburb, and arrested three men after seizing a cache of arms that was sufficient to outfit a 20-man army. In another incident last year, at the border town of Seme, bandits overwhelmed the huge security presence at the border post, laid in wait for traders and robbed them. Many lives were lost. As an officer testified after the incident, it wasn’t the effrontery of the robbers that unnerved him and his colleagues, but the sophistication
of the arms they used.
However acquired — and whatever the true (cultural, communal, economic, personal religious, social, tribal) motivations of Boko Haram or Fulani Land Pirates — the violence targeting the state’s peaceful (and disarmed) Christian communities has brought into view the possibilities for deep mistrust across the Christian-Muslim discriminator and forced the state to defend its integrity with greater military power, skill, and resolve, which, of course, requires heightened military spending.
Distilled: violent rogue organizations promote defense spending, i.e., they’re good for business!
Affected states, perhaps especially today Nigeria, have no choice but to heighten integrity in their ranks and push back or, over time, disintegrate down into feudal squabbles that might presage — for lack of decency in governance — meltdown into the modern dark ages of failed states.
At the same time, BackChannels fears the Orwellian possibility of state-based manipulation of bandits, jihadists, and raiders in the producing the sustained chaos and conflict profitable to two kinds of markets: 1) the black markets known to “failed states” and “frozen conflicts” in which authorities have been so compromised, corrupted, or otherwise weakened (absented in force) that anything goes and EVERYTHING illicit moves through the territory; and 2) the state-to-state business markets invested in defense economies nurtured for expansion.
Appreciate the contemplation: the truth really is Out There where ships stop in the night far out at sea and hours later smuggled arms move across the land toward the money that makes it all seem worthwhile.
What will happen if the seemingly limitless tide of young men recruited in the wild become supplied with shoulder-launched rockets?
BackChannels 