A report was published on 15 June titled ‘Nigeria: Unfolding Genocide?’
It points out that the violence has claimed the lives of thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more. It has caused untold human and economic devastation and heightened existing ethno-religious tensions. Despite the scale of the violence, the conflict is much less well known internationally than the ten-year-long Boko Haram insurgency.
Baroness Cox, Co-Chair of the Parliamentary Group for Freedom of Religion or Belief, argued: ‘While the underlying causes of violence are complex, the asymmetry and escalation of attacks by well-armed Fulani militia upon these predominately Christian communities are stark and must be acknowledged. Such atrocities cannot be attributed just to desertification, climate change or competition for resources, as [the UK] Government have claimed.’
Vice-chair Lord Alton of Liverpool said: ‘Some local observers have gone so far as to describe the rising attacks as a campaign of ethno-religious cleansing. Armed with sophisticated weaponry, including AK47s and, in at least one case, a rocket launcher and rocket-propelled grenades, the Fulani militia have murdered more men, women and children in 2015, 2016 and 2017 than even Boko Haram, destroying, overrunning and seizing property and land, and displacing tens of thousands of people. This is organised and systematic.’
The report is dedicated to Leah Sharibu who, aged 14, was abducted from her school in Nigeria in 2018 by Islamist extremists. She was raped, giving birth to a child, and has been denied her freedom for refusing to convert to Islam. Her case, while extreme, is symptomatic of the wider treatment of some Christian women and girls in northern Nigeria, to which President Buhari’s government apparently turns a blind eye, even after a State Governor was caught on video coercively converting a young teenager to Islam.
