4.8.09

Riots

There was severe civil unrest in the north of the country last week and several volunteers were put on alert. Although Nasarawa State, where I am, is officially in the political north of the country, the problems were much further away in places called Kano and Maiduguri. I’ve caught snippets of the situation via BBC online and through VSO’s weekly country update. The unrest left several hundred dead, most of whom were young Muslim men killed by police as they tried to terrorise their communities. They had apparently been part of a group called ‘Boko Haram’, which roughly translates as ‘stop western education’. The events came to an end with the killing of their leader. Reports say that he had been captured by the military and handed over to the police. Sometime later, his bullet ridden was shown to journalists, throwing up questions about the circumstances surrounding his death.

My colleagues were fascinated by this story and we’ve been discussing it this week in the office and around the campus. It’s interesting to get a flavour of what people think about the issue and how faith seems to have drawn a line between the popular opinions. Many of those I’ve spoken to are glad that he’s dead and don’t care whether it was a just death in the eyes of the law. I’m finding religion a murky and difficult river to swim at the moment. That’s a whole other issue, one that I won’t go into now, but the line that has been drawn seems to divide Christians and Muslims. It’s a divide that shouldn’t really be there, but it seems to be an easy one to fall back on when people are threatened or powerless.

Funnily enough, the Christians that I work with were all for the sect leader’s death, regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. One man that I was speaking to said that he and the rest of his followers should be wiped from the face of the earth: ‘made extinct’. Of course, the death of the people that his followers murdered and the subsequent death of any ‘trouble-makers’, is an awful thing to happen, but I tried to interject by saying that whilst the violence needed to be stopped, the (alleged) unlawful killing of this man by the police only serves to make him a martyr and doesn’t look at the root of the problem. I also had an issue with the fact that we had, just 5 minutes earlier, been talking about how Nigeria had something to teach the rest of the world about dedication to religion (they were all strong Christians that I was talking to at the time).

An interesting point came with the arrival of a Muslim colleague. He said that the leader and followers of ‘Boko Haram’ were western educated themselves, which many point to as hypocrisy in the face of the violence that they incited in the rejection of it, and that the main catalyst for their action was the fact that they had no job opportunities despite obtaining degrees and masters. For me, he seemed to point at a plausible reason why people would resent government to the extent that they do. This opinion, which I know is shared by another Muslim colleague of mine, is in no way a defence of their action, as they do not condone any of the murders or violence that occurred and are themselves peace loving Muslims: it is an opinion that needs to be acknowledged and explored, however. After all, cutting the head off a weed doesn’t stop it growing again and doesn’t solve the problem of why the garden is full of weeds in the first place.