President Goodluck Jonathan was reported in June to have said that statistics show that more Muslims than Christians have been killed by Boko Haram, an assertion that the Christian Association of Nigeria has refuted.
A new paper, produced for the World Watch List, argues that the situation in Nigeria is a classic example of what could be referred to as persecution eclipse. This where persecution and civil conflict overlap to the extent that the former is in a real or imaginative sense overshadowed or rendered almost invisible by the latter.
The paper argues that persecution eclipse minimises, overlooks or denies the suffering of a victim of persecution; encourages a causal analysis that provides vicarious justifications for the perpetrators’ actions; shifts the focus of interrogation from religious freedom violations to conflict analysis; and embraces an instrumental view of conflict in which religion assumes an insignificant place.
