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NEWS & LETTERS, July 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryNigeria unrestIn June, the Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC) called a general strike against high oil prices. These have doubled since the government eliminated price controls a year ago, but the strike helped to restore those controls. However, the NLC’s opportunistic leadership has not offered much of a challenge to the underlying social and economic disaster in today’s Nigeria, an oil-rich land where nearly three-quarters of the population are forced to live on less than $1 per day. In recent years, mass anger has been diverted from local and international capital and into ethno-religious conflict. So far, 2004 has been a particularly bloody year. The hot spot is Plateau State, located in the middle of the country, where the predominantly Muslim North meets the largely Christian and animist South. The most serious outbreak occurred on May 2, when well-armed members of the predominantly Christian Tarok ethnic group descended upon the town of Yelwe. When they were finished with their murderous work, 630 Muslim civilians from the Hausa and Fulani groups lay dead. These racist attackers dare to call the Hausa and Fulani "settlers" rather than residents of the area, despite the fact that they have lived there for over a century! The entire region has been marked by conflicts over land between Tarok farmers and their pastoral Muslim neighbors. Predictably, retaliatory violence soon broke out in the North, in Kano, where Muslim rioters drove out 30,000 Christians and killed hundreds. There seems to be no end to this cycle. If it continues to deepen, Nigeria faces the prospect of a return to military rule in the name of stability. |
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