The Deadly Ongoing Crisis for Christians in Nigeria
By Rick Plasterer, Juicy Ecumenism.
The continued killing and violence against Christians in Nigeria by various radical Islamic groups is continuing unabated. This writer noted the severe problem in two articles two years ago, as well as the effective denial of a campaign of Islamization as its cause by the State Department. But there does seem to be more attention to it recently, as the continued failure to stop the violence raises the prospect of civil war in that country, and a refugee problem of unprecedented scale from Africa’s most populous nation.
The problem of violence, mainly against Christians, is longstanding, but in terms of massive killing it is basically a twenty-first century problem. The Silent Slaughter, a report by the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) in 2020 provided abundant documentation on the problem as it existed to that point. More recently, the Heritage Foundation recently posted an article outlining the problem, and besides the massive number of people being killed, one of its worst aspects – the denial of the essentially religious character of the killing by the current State Department and other commentators. It referred to a statistic from Open Doors that for 2022, 90% of the 5,621 Christians killed for their faith were in Nigeria alone. Besides the killing, the ICON report noted the massive landgrab, with Islamic militants driving (commonly Christian) farmers off 134,028 acres of farmland, preventing an estimated 120,000 people from making a living from farming.
Open Doors’ summary of the situation says the violence ultimately stems from “an ingrained agenda of enforced Islamisation” in the predominately Muslim north of the country, with the violence now spreading to the south. Its full report, issued this past April, provides abundant data on the scale and locations of the killing and violence, the Islamic groups involved (principally terrorists from the large, cross-national Fulani tribe, Boko Haram and ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) organizations). The Open Doors report notes that these organizations draw in other lawless groups (“bandits”), and then target Christian communities and Muslims non-compliant with Islamist agenda.
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