Nigerians across the religious spectrum on Monday rejected US President Donald Trump’s threats of military intervention over the killing of Christians in the country.
Africa’s most populous country, which is divided roughly evenly between a majority-Christian south and a majority-Muslim north, is home to countless conflicts that experts say kill both Christians and Muslims without distinction.
Accusations of Christian “persecution” in Nigeria have found traction online among the American and European right in recent weeks.
“Christians are being killed, we cannot deny the fact that Muslims are being killed,” said Danjuma Dickson Auta, a Christian and community leader. AFP.
Trump said on social media over the weekend that he had asked the Pentagon to draw up a possible attack plan.
asked by a AFP When a reporter aboard Air Force One was considering sending U.S. troops on the ground or using airstrikes, Trump responded: “It could be, I mean, a lot of things — I imagine a lot of things.”
“They are killing Christians and killing them in large numbers,” he said Sunday. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
Ethnic violence
Auta, 56, is a native of Plateau state, where Christians and Muslims have long lived side by side.
The state has also seen explosions of violence, including deadly sectarian riots in the capital, Jos, in 2001 and 2008.
In recent years, Plateau and other “middle belt” states in Nigeria have suffered deadly clashes between mostly Christian farmers and Muslim Fulani herdsmen over increasingly scarce land and resources.
The conflict has often led to large numbers of deaths among farmers and entire villages razed to the ground.
Smaller-scale attacks on herders (including retaliatory killings of Fulani people or their livestock) tend to generate fewer headlines in both the local and international press.
Although violence often transcends ethnic and religious lines, experts say the root causes lie in poor land management and police mismanagement in rural areas.
Words like “genocide” have been used by those in Plateau frustrated by the escalation of violence, although generally in ethnic, not religious, terms.
Meanwhile, separatist groups in the southeast have pushed claims of a “Christian genocide” in recent years.
The American firm Moran Global Strategies has been lobbying on behalf of separatists this year, advising congressional staff on what it called Christian “persecution,” according to disclosure forms.
Nigeria suggests meeting between Trump and Tinubu
Nigeria also faces a long-running jihadist conflict in the northeast and gangs of “bandits” in the northwest who carry out kidnappings and raids on villages.
The population of the north is majority Muslim, which means that most of the victims are also Muslim.
“Even those who peddle this narrative of Christian genocide know it is not true,” said Abubakar Gamandi, a Muslim who heads a fishermen’s union in Borno state, the epicenter of the Boko Haram conflict.
Chukwuma Soludo, the Christian governor of Anambra State, also rejected the US intervention, saying Washington “must act within the ambit of international law.”
Others have used the controversy to point to lingering insecurity in the country, and Trump’s rhetoric has resonated with some in Nigeria.
The Rev. Joseph Hayab, president of the Christian Association of Nigeria for the north of the country, said he rejected the framing of “violence between farmers and herdsmen” and called Trump’s comments a “wake-up call.”
“People are twisting history as if Trump is saying he is coming to fight Nigeria. No, he is coming to confront terrorists,” he said. AFP.
Amid Trump’s intensified rhetoric, the Nigerian presidency suggested a meeting between the two leaders to resolve the matter.
Daniel Bwala, spokesman for Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, said: “Donald Trump has his own style of communication.”
Bwala suggested AFP On Sunday, Trump’s post was a way to “force a meeting between the two leaders so they can hammer out a common front to fight their insecurity.”
Trump previously attacked South Africa for what he called a “genocide” against its Afrikaner community of Dutch descent and offered them refugee status.
The president’s critics said the rhetoric was part of Trump’s hardline diplomatic strategy.
