YAOUNDÈ, Cameroon – Amid growing concerns over what some observers describe as an anti-Christian “genocide” in Nigeria, a Catholic-inspired human rights group has accused the country’s security forces of being more concerned about protecting cows than Christians and other non-Muslims. .
In a January 18 report titled “Rivers of blood and tears flowing unceasingly in Nigeria,” the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, known as Intersociety, also accused security forces of Africa’s most populous country to carry out disappearances. and extrajudicial executions.
One of the main causes of sectarian violence in Nigeria is the tension between predominantly Muslim herdsmen, from the Fulani ethnic group, and sedentary, generally Christian farmers. For example, a series of attacks by Fulani gunmen against Christian targets during the Christmas holidays left around 300 people dead.
According to the Intersociety report, whenever a threat is perceived to cows owned by Fulani herdsmen, Nigerian security forces spring into action with a coded operation known as “cow humanization.”
The rapid military response results in “arrests, kidnappings, disappearances and ‘neutralization'” against the killers or attackers, according to the report, but such an aggressive response does not occur when Fulani herdsmen and bandits, often dressed in black and shouting jihadist slogans, attack Christians and non-Muslims.
The report claims that since 2015, the Nigerian government has made conscious efforts to promote the Islamization of security forces, with the result that these forces have become “radicalized, biased and bastardized.”
Intersociety Director Emeka Umeagbalasi said Node that the administration of former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari “radicalized security forces, ordered them to march to protect Fulani herdsmen and contributed to their invasion of southern farmlands, forests and bushes “.
Emeka accused the security forces of being “grossly and incurably biased and partisan”, describing them as “an emerging Islamist policeman”.
The Intersociety director said the protection of Fulani herdsmen and their livestock, and the concomitant indifference to the killing of Christians, was part of a broad Islamization program that began in 2009, when Boko Haram insurgents began launching attacks in Nigeria.
Since then, at least 18,500 Christian churches have been affected, Emeka said, and it is a program that is expanding to other African countries.
“The Buhari government has financed the escalation of Fulani terrorism across Africa,” he said, citing the consequences of this policy in the Central African Republic, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other countries. .
“They want to make Africa the capital of Islamic jihadists, with Nigeria as the epicenter,” Emeka said. Node.
The report calls for a restructuring of the country’s military.
“The security forces need to be urgently restructured and their personnel and leaders fully retrained and deradicalized,” he said.
“The factor of ‘Fulanization’ within the security forces must be addressed head on, including by eliminating all the ethno-religious killer elements that were allegedly clandestinely recruited during the disastrous years of the government of retired General Muhammad Buhari,” says The report.
“The Nigerian state must abandon the infamous ‘state jihadism project’ and return the country to its so-called secular status,” he said.
Among other points, the report expresses concern that more than 85 percent of Nigeria’s military personnel lack training in information and communications technology security measures.
Overall, according to the report, Nigeria’s security forces are “inches away from being converted into true ‘tribo-Islamic policemen,'” making a complete reorganization of the country’s security apparatus imperative.
During the period from August 30, 2015 to December 31, 2023, according to the report, Nigerian security forces “conducted 28 major ‘atrocity operations’, calamitously resulting in direct or indirect death outside the law of more than 100,000 people. unarmed and defenseless citizens of Nigeria, during which tens of thousands of people were severely tortured and held incommunicado without a fair and evidence-based trial and many thousands more disappeared permanently during kidnappings and of incarcerations in custody,” the report states.
The report states that “indirect deaths” included people who died “as a result of torture and gunshot wounds or people who were kidnapped and disappeared; and the hunger, starvation and deprivation inflicted on their dependents occasioned by their absence.
It is telling that, according to the report, people from predominantly Christian and non-Muslim areas of Nigeria are responsible for about 70 percent of the direct killings, torture, kidnappings and disappearances documented in the report, i.e. more than two thirds.
According to the report, about half of the victims were either Christians or followers of traditional African religions, mostly members of the Igbo ethnic group. These individuals, according to the report, were either killed “under false labels and class criminalization; or kidnapped from their homes or workplaces, or on their way to their homes, workplaces or social outings, and tortured or starved to death; or permanently disappeared or secretly detained outside the provisions of written laws without a fair trial based on evidence.
The remaining thirty percent of casualties, according to the study, were Muslim victims “killed or maimed during crude counter-insurgency operations in Muslim areas of the northeastern states of Borno, Yobe, Bauchi and Adamawa.”
