Nigerian Muslims and Christians clashes kill 8

Wilfred Mulliro

Kano (Alshahid) – Fresh clashes between Muslims and Christians have erupted in Nigeria, killing eight, wounding 40 and leading to the burning of six mosques and a church in the country’s east, police said Wednesday.

Taraba state police commissioner Aliyu Musa told AFP that the fighting erupted on Tuesday between Muslim and Christian youths in Wukari, a town in the remote eastern Taraba state, over the building of the mosque. But one observer said the violence which was said to have been sparked by the construction of a mosque at a local police headquarters, may be linked to elections due early next year.

A Christian mob opposed to the construction of the mosque razed it, Musa said by phone from Jalingo, the capital of Taraba, one of Nigeria’s 36 states.

Muslims responded by attacking a nearby church, leading to the eruption of violent clashes between the two sides, Musa said.

Police sent in reinforcements and the situation was calm on Wednesday in the town.

Roughly 60 percent of Taraba’s 2.3 million people in the state are Christian.

Sectarian clashes occur frequently in Nigeria, particularly in the country’s north and central regions, with hundreds of people killed in violence this year alone.

The clashes come just months before elections in Africa’s most populous nation, which has a history of poll-related violence. Many have said the Muslim-Christian clashes have less to do with religion than people exploiting the sectarian divide in the struggle for local power.

 Ethnic and religious differences in the run up to the elections are a mixture “too combustible for imagination”, said Chidi Odinkalu a rights activist working for Open Society Justice Initiative in Nigeria.

Nigeria a country with 150 million people is roughly divided in half between Muslims and Christians. The north is predominantly Muslim, while the south is mainly Christian.

Sultan Muhammad Saad Abubakar, Nigeria’s highest Islamic spiritual leader has called for inter-religious tolerance.

The Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan, told AFP most of the violence linked to sectarianism “has nothing to do with religion. It’s probably people who have other agendas and are using the mosque issue,” he said.

The new clashes also come weeks before the one-year anniversary of an uprising by an Islamist sect in the northern city of Maiduguri. Nigerian police and troops crushed the uprising by the Boko Haram sect — which has also been called the Nigerian Taliban — after four days of street battles that left more than 800 dead, mostly sect members.