The Aid to the Church in Need Foundation (AIS) denounced this Thursday the “dramatic” situation of human rights and specifically the persecution of the Christian community in Nigeria, where the ratio of civilians killed is 7.6 Christians for every Muslim.
The situation has worsened over the last year and is at the center of the AIS Foundation’s World Religious Freedom Report 2023, not only because of the country itself, but also because, with over 200 million people, Nigeria it is the largest on the continent and “plays a fundamental role in the geopolitics of sub-Saharan Africa”, underlines the institution.
Victims of ethnic-religious nationalism and Islamic extremism, the Christian population – almost half of the country’s total – is “the most attacked amid an increase in violence against the civilian population” by “terrorists, armed groups’ jihadists’ and national criminals and transnational groups”, which also affects the “Muslim and traditional religions” population.
The ISA bases its assessment on data such as the Report on Violence in Nigeria (2019-2022), published in February by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, which revealed that “the global ratio of Christians/Muslims murdered is 7, 6/1”. .
This, he says, is largely due to legal measures that support discrimination against the Christian community in northern states: Islamic law (‘sharia’) has been introduced and has been in force for years in 12 of the 36 Nigerian states.
In these regions, the situation has worsened, as “ethnicity and religion have effectively become a means of gaining power, resources and privilege from Nigeria,” the report notes.
The foundation recalls cases where, in addition to legislation, there was brutality for alleged “blasphemous” conduct, such as on May 12, 2022, when a 22-year-old Christian woman, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, in Sokoto state, was “brutally assassinated by fellow Muslim students who burned his body” or that of Islamic cleric Sheikh Abduljabar Nasir Kabara, sentenced to death for blasphemy by a sharia court in Cano.
The AIS Foundation also condemns the “predominant narrative” of the national authorities, but also of the international community, often limited to “climate change and tensions between communities”, which it considers to deny “the reality and the true factors of violence on the terrain, in particular the fact of specifically targeting Christians”.
“The Federal Government systematically refuses to use the term ‘terrorist’ to recognize the horrifying nature of the acts, as well as their perpetrators, despite repeated calls from national and international civil society organizations, academics, political representatives and religious leaders”, writes the authors of the report.
The institution says the violence is “often unspeakable” with “atrocities committed by armed groups (Boko Haram, Islamic State in West Africa, or ISWAP, and Fulani militias) driven by a combination of toxic motivations, including territorial gain, criminality , ethnicity and radical Islamic terrorism, which, in certain states, addresses violence with genocidal elements”.
In 2022, Nigeria ranked sixth in the Global Terrorism Index behind Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Burkina Faso, and Syria, and ranked 143 out of 163 countries in the Global Peace Index.
Source: TSF
