The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, Intersociety, has accused Nigerian security agencies of working hand-in-hand with the Fulani terrorists who attacked several remote communities in North-central Plateau State between 23 and 24 December.
The bandits, suspected to be nomadic Fulani herders, butchered more than a hundred villagers, plundered farmlands and set several houses ablaze, displacing thousands.
In a statement made available to the press on Tuesday, the civil society organisation said the attacks are a “clear handiwork of Fulani jihadists (jihadist Fulani herdsmen and jihadist Fulani bandits) and conspiratorial security chiefs and operatives particularly the operatives of the Nigerian Army, the Nigeria Police Force and the Department of State Services, DSS.”
The statement was signed by Emeka Umeagbalasi and Chidinma Udegbunam, Intersociety’s board chairman and head of the campaign and publicity unit respectively,
Intersociety lamented that Nigeria’s Christian population are always the target of such heinous attacks while authorities look on complacently.
“The security forces turn blind eyes when Christians and non-Muslim others are attacked and massacred or terminally maimed by Fulani jihadists (.i.e. jihadist Fulani herdsmen and jihadist Fulani bandits) and turn around to protect the attackers and false-label the victims as ‘the attackers,'” the group said.
Intersociety estimates that over 4,500 Christians have been killed by Nigerian security forces and government-protected jihadists with the insurgents accounting for over 3,500 of the total deaths.
The group suspects that the country’s political bigwigs orchestrated the Plateau violence in reprisal of the Nigerian Army’s error-bombing that killed about 85 Muslims celebrating the birth of Prophet Muhammad in Tudun Biri, Igabi LGA, north of Kaduna city on 3 December.
“The Nigerian security forces and their commanders are crudely biased and partisan,” according to Intersociety.
“Apart from the country’s security forces and their establishments being manifestly biased and partisan, the policymakers in Nigeria since mid-2015; mainly drawn from the Muslim population have consistently worked to grossly undermine the religious freedoms and civil liberties’ provisions in the Constitution of Nigeria 1999 (as amended) and similar provisions in the country’s Treaty Laws such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981 (ratified and domesticated by Nigeria in 1983) and the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1976 (ratified by Nigeria in 1993),” it added.
The human rights group further lamented: “The situation of Christians and other non-Muslims in Nigeria or any part thereof has become so worrying and vulnerable that the slogan: ‘It is better to kill 100 Christians than to kill a Fulani herdsman’, has seemingly become the coded operational modus of the country’s security forces and their commanders.”
With the seemingly relentless persecution of Christians in Nigeria, Intersociety is calling for the immediate scrapping of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, and the establishment of a new and stronger central Christian association “capable of rising to the occasion in matters of defence of Christian faith and protection of the Christian faithful, worship centres and their properties.”
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