Washington D.C., Dec 18, 2020 / 10:00 am (CNA).- The world must not ignore the “genocide” of Christians in Nigeria, the Catholic Bishop of Gboko told members of Congress on Thursday.
“The mass slaughter of Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, by every standard, meets the criteria for a calculated genocide from the definition of the Genocide Convention,” Bishop William Avenya of Gboko, in center of Nigeria, told a congressional commission on Thursday.
The bishop said that “it is depressing that our Middle Belt region has truly become a vale of tears, a region where mass burials are very common!”
Bishop Avenya was testifying at a Dec. 17 hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, a bipartisan congressional commission, on “Conflict and Killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.”
The Middle Belt is a fertile region stretching across the central part of Nigeria, the site of an increasing amount of violence in recent years where many farming villages in a predominantly Christian have been attacked.
According to the International Crisis Group, there were an average of more than 2,000 fatalities per year from 2011 to 2016 in the Middle Belt. Although 600 have died in the Middle Belt this year, the number is nearly six times that when the area of concern includes the country’s north, said Robert Destro, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the State Department.
Christians and Muslims in Nigeria have suffered an mounting toll from violent attacks by Fulani militants in the Middle Belt and in the country’s northeast by the terror groups Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap)—formerly Boko Haram—and by the new Boko Haram group that split off from Iswap.
According to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), more than two million are estimated to be “internally-displaced” in Nigeria.
The drivers of the violence are complex, members of Congress and State Department officials said on Thursday.
Fulanis are nomadic herdsmen who populate the broader region of the Sahel, some have been driven south into the Middle Belt by desertification caused by climate change, commission co-chair Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said on Thursday, and he noted there are also counter-reprisals committed against Fulanis.
Nevertheless, “[t]he largest, dominant driver of conflict in the Middle Belt region is committed by Fulani extremists, who appear driven in large part by ethno-religious chauvinism, against mostly Christian farmers – though I do note that elsewhere Shia Muslims are also victims, and that intra-Sunni conflicts also exist within the Muslim community as well,” Smith said.
Many of the reported attacks on villages are “massacres,” Smith said, as civilians are targeted for killings, injuries, and rape.
In 2017, Catholic bishops reported an increasing number and intensity of attacks by Fulanis, who were employing sophisticated weaponry not before seen in previous herder-farmer clashes.
Some bishops have emphasized the ethno-religious nature of the attacks, claiming that the largely-Muslim Fulani militants specifically target Christian villages and churches.
However, one Nigerian priest involved in conflict management recently told Aid to the Church in Need that the violence “is more of a resource conflict than a religious one,” as the nomadic herdsmen are in search of water and grazing land because of desertification.
U.S. religious freedom ambassador Sam Brownback said on Thursday that violence “often plays out along faith lines” even if the conflicts were not religious in origin.
Non-governmental organizations have warned of “increasingly religious undertones” to the conflict in the last year, he said, with reports of religious sites burned and forced conversions of some kidnapping victims.
Bishop Avenya charged the Nigerian government for failing to protect Christians in the Middle Belt.
“How can one explain a scenario where as many as a hundred innocent and defenceless villagers are killed in one single attack and no one says anything about it?” he asked.
“It appears that the system has not only permitted but is also aiding the enthronement of supremacist views of one religious group against the others,” he said.
Destro said that religious and political leaders and aid groups have emphasized the lack of security in the country.
“If a community calls the Nigerian equivalent of 911, nobody answers. There is no effective police protection,” he said. Local communities do not have the resources to protect themselves and prosecute the perpetrators of violence.
Destro noted that “the Nigerians themselves are beside themselves” over the violence, and that “[t]here is some denial that there’s religious violence, but I did not find that to be the case in most instances.”
The hearing came after two more attacks on civilians were reported in international media this week. On Dec. 15, the Islamist terror group Boko Haram admitted culpability for the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolboys at a school in northwestern state of Katsina, and in the country’s southeast a Nigerian priest was kidnapped by four armed men on Monday, and later released on Wednesday.
Due to the ongoing violence against civilians in Nigeria, the State Department last week designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern (CPC)” for the first time ever—a listing reserved for the countries with the worst records on religious freedom, such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
The CPC designation is “hopefully a true wakeup call” to the government, Smith said, noting that if there is no proper response to the designation, the U.S. should consider using sanctions.
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I hope the people of Israel come out of this safely. I had the opportunity to go there on a pilgrimage with my church in 2019. It was an immense privilege to walk in so many biblical towns and have daily Mass in all the churches. A beautiful and interesting place. The site of the crucifixion and the tomb was amazing to see and touch. Very spiritually moving. We were there during the Trump administration, and the American embassy had just been moved to Jerusalem. I was so sad to hear news of this attack this morning. Many of those living there are transplanted Americans. Please pray for them.
Israel will prevail, but at a cost. Things will get ugly. The Palestinians blame Israel for their misery and stupidity. Man for man, the Israelis put them to shame.
Palestinians are intelligent people but have been manipulated and misled by Hamas. It’s a tragedy.
Biden built this; he, Valerie Jarret and Obama. The finger prints are obvious. I wouldn’t be surprised at all that many of the munitions Hamas used were sold off from the Ukraine and have our insignias. There is no oversight and Ukraine’s government is the epitome of moral bankruptcy. This news just makes the Lacrimarum Vale that much deeper, darker and loathsome.
From Islamist anti-Semitism is behind Israel’s darkest hour since the Yom Kippur war, by Jake Wallis Simons, October 7, 2023:
Excerpt (with link omitted, bold style added):
In response, sensible voices must be absolutely clear: this was an anti-Semitic attack. It was of a piece with the pogroms carried out by the Cossacks, the Iraqi mobs during the Farhud, and the Nazis.
That last example is especially powerful, as a direct line can be drawn from Hitler to Hamas. During the Second World War, the extremist Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini, who compared Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes or bacilli, worked with Nazi officials to translate Third Reich ideology into an Arabic context and transmit it into the Middle East via radio, leaflets and other means. His twisted ideology rings loudly in our ears today.
Look at Hamas’s charter. Article 32 – a conspiracy theory which accuses the Zionists of wishing to take over the entire territory between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq, an area of thousands of square miles – says: “Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To describe Hamas as being influenced by Nazi propaganda is insufficient. This is Nazi propaganda.
I don’t believe that this was a surprise attack. It is likely a “playing the victim” strategy.
Interesting comment, considering the Jerusalem Post is suggesting the attack is a contender for the greatest intelligence failure in Israeli history. “How did Israel fall so far to such an inferior enemy?” the tagline asks. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-765254
Perhaps you will claim that the JPost story is also part of the same strategy? A rabbi in Jerusalem claims that the earthquake in Morocco was caused by their king’s call for Jerusalem to become the Palestinian capital. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-761707
Seems like there’s no shortage of dotted-line thinking on both sides.
Which side do you think is playing victim?
After the British occupiers left Palestine, the United Nations 1947 Resolution no. 181 mandated the creation of two nations, Israel and Palestine, each with almost equal land areas. After wars and perpetual tensions through the decades the land area has been disproportionately made unequal by continued Israeli grabbing of Palestinian lands in defiance of UN and international laws leaving the Palestinians with only small portions that is the West Bank and Gaza even as the state of Palestine remains not fully established and sovereign today. While the Western media portray the Palestinians as the bad guys and terrorists, it is actually the Israelis who are so by their continued dispossession and dislocation of the Palestinians in violation of UN and international laws. Even present day pilgrims to the Holy Land can readily see the continued construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank contravening UN and international laws. Seen from this perspective, the modern state of Israel can be compared to China defying UN and international laws like the International Court of Arbitration that judged China’s grabbing of Philippine maritime territory as illegal. Palestinian militants rising against Israel mighty army can be compared to the Filipinos’ decrepit coast guard standing up against China’s bully coast guard as seen more and more on TV news recently.
There are many, many questions that need to be answered about the attack on Israel yesterday. How could a country with intelligence agencies renowned for their ability to infiltrate its enemies and allies alike be caught so flat-footed? This was a major operation and the Mossad apparently had no inkling that it was coming. That is very hard to believe. The surveillance and detection systems at the border were reportedly jammed by Hamas. If that is true, why did this in and of itself not cause an alarm to go off? Where was the world-class Israeli Air Force, which must patrol the relatively short border around the clock? Paragliders sailed right across the border after dawn had already broken without a sign of an Israeli aircraft, which could have easily picked them off. Even more incredibly, there is video of Hamas troops casually cutting through the border fence later in broad daylight with no cover and then streaming through with their pickup trucks and motorcycles in the open desert. Again, an airstrike by jets that could have arrived in a couple of minutes would have wipe these people out in an instant. This is either an epic and astonishing failure of Israel’s entire security apparatus or there is more to this story than what we see on the surface. I don’t pretend to know what happened and am afraid that no one is going to be seriously interested in finding out.
If Israel’s intelligence was taken off guard it should give us pause to wonder where our own defense system may have gaps. There’s no perfect intelligence department. We become complacent at our own peril.
The Gaza strip, and all Palestinian territory, is heavily infiltrated by Mossad, Shin Bet, and IDF personnel. *No way were they surprised.*
Israel either made or allowed this to occur–so that they could draw sympathy upon themselves, divert attention from the impending victory of gentile Christian Putin over Jewish Zelensky (bad PR for the Tribe!), and use this event as a pretext to wipe out the Palestinians.
The evidence presented thus far of an attack (fan para-gliders? really? unblocked and unnoticed truck and AFV attacks? really?) with attendant massive Israeli deaths looks suspicious and stagey–though there are probably some real Israel deaths as well. The bigwigs in Tel Aviv–and now Jerusalem–don’t mind killing (or allowing to be killed) a few of the lesser Israelis in order to advance Israeli goals of total dominion over the mid-east.
The effect of this will be to get the US to pony up even more billions for Israel (while Americans in Maui get 700 dollars for their torched homes) and allow Netanyahu to do what he has always wanted to do–genocide the Palestinians.
Also, the linking of the Palestinians to Iran will (of course) be made, and the US will now be easily induced to attack that country, especially as Biden needs a victory–since his proxy war against Russia is faring so badly.
Many Americans, including Christians are waking up however. They no longer believe the traditional 70s and 80s propaganda about dem Evil Iranians and dem Evil Ay-Rabs and dose good Israelis.
The US is a fast-fading empire. It literally does *nothing* right (see Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine). It is ruled by wicked and foolish men (and now women). But it does have, unlike Iraq, many weapons of mass destruction, and a mad beast is always dangerous.
Anyway, break out the popcorn and enjoy the Apocalyptic show! (I’m kidding, pray and make sacrifices for peace!).