NIGERIA: A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.

In Nigeria, the two dominant religion are Christianity and Islam and both religious group have both had their share of violence and riot based on religious affiliation and religious policies the worst such being the two confrontations that took place in Kaduna between February and May 2000 in which so many people lost their lives.
After colonization, a number of the minorities, including the Gbagyi, who are the indigenes of the area where Kaduna city developed, converted to Catholicism and various Protestant sects. The situation in Kano is both simpler and more complex than that in other locations in northern Nigeria. Although the vast majority of the population is Muslim (perhaps as much as 90–95 %), many different Islamic sects coexist in the city.

In Kano new ethnic categories “southerner,” “northerner” arose when southerners, particularly Igbo, began to threaten economic interests of the far-flung Hausa commercial empire based in Kano. The policy of northernization, adopted by northern elites during the late 1950s, sought to open jobs for Hausa in commercial firms in Kano; gain greater access to government contracts, civil service posts, and financial services; and reassert control over produce export. The fear of losing out economically heightened the sense among northern indigenes of marginalization. Northernization established the predominance of politics over economics, which made political competition at the national level a matter of primary concern.
Despite these differences, Muslims in Nigeria’s North can act together in a disciplined manner when they consider it politically necessary. But groups and leaders in each state also pursue their own agendas, Part of the resentment felt for “settlers” (members of southern tribes, as opposed to “indigenes”) residing (and often born in) Kano stems from indigenes’ feeling that settlers are simply in Kano to make money. Settlers are perceived to be unwilling to adapt to the culture of Kano and to reject the values of Kano’s indigenous population. Indigenes see settlers as failing to commit or contribute to the community in either material or nonmaterial senses. Indigenes believe settlers look down on the indigenous Kano population. To some extent, Muslims feel marginalized, which fuels their sense of grievance against the southern Christian settlers in their midst.
In May 1999 violence erupted in Kaduna State over the succession of an Emir resulting in more than 100 deaths. In Kaduna in February-May 2000 over 1,000 people died in rioting over the introduction of criminal Shar'ia in the State. Hundreds of ethnic Hausa were killed in reprisal attacks in southeastern Nigeria. In September 2001, over 2,000 people were killed in inter-religious rioting in Jos. In October 2001, hundred were killed and thousands displaced in communal violence that spread across the Middle-Belt states of Benue, Taraba, and Nasarawa. Plateau State has the highest number of displaced people as a result of clashes between Christians and Muslim communities there. The predominantly Christian Tarok farmers consider the mostly Muslim Hausa cattle herders as outsiders, and accuse them of stealing land and trying to usurp political power. These had led to the burning down of 72 villages over between 2002 and the end of 2003. More than 1,000 people were killed in sectarian clashes between Christians and Muslims in Jos, the Plateau State capital, in September 2001.

By 27 April 2004 at least twenty people had died in three days of clashes between rival ethnic militias in central Plateau State. The clashes were between ethnic Tarok fighters and their Fulani rivals at Bakin Chiyawa in the Shendam district of the state. The fighting was intense, with both sides using guns, bows and arrows and machetes. The fighting was caused by a dispute over use of an area of land designated for cultivation by the agrarian Tarok and for grazing by the nomadic Fulani. Hausa fighters burned churches and killed nearly 100 people in a Tarok village. In early May 2004 Nigerian security forces restored order in remote areas of central Plateau State, where sectarian violence had left scores of people dead. Calm returned to the highlands town of Telwa, as hundreds of police reinforcements arrived to quash revenge attacks by Christian ethnic-Tarok fighters against the mainly Muslim-ethnic Hausa community.

Police said the death toll of eighty announced on 04 May 2004 underestimates the number of casualties. Muslim Nigerian leaders said they believe more than 200 people were killed in the violence on 01-02 May 2004, and more than 100 others were missing. They called it mass murder, and accused local authorities of organizing militia fighters, while withdrawing police from the area before they stormed the town. The Red Cross estimated as many as 600 people may have been killed in attacks on the town of Yelwa by Christian tribe militias in the first week of May 2004.
About thirty people were killed in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria with a population of eight million people. Religious violence erupted with Muslim protest demonstration on 10 May 2004 against the killing of several hundred Muslims in the small town of Yelwa in Plateau State in central Nigeria on 02 May 2004. A further 45 had been arrested and 40 had been injured after mobs of youths armed with clubs, machetes and jerry cans of petrol roamed the streets on predominantly Muslim Kano, attacking suspected Christians. An estimated 10,000 Kano residents, mostly Christians fleeing from their homes in troubled parts of the city, took refuge at the main military and police barracks on 11 May 2004. Recently around 200 people lost their lives to a fresh communal/ religious violence in Northern Nigeria. With the deaths and killings, it will be very difficult for the bereaved and people affected one way or the other, to forget the past and leave in peace and harmony, with suspected communities, individual or groups who partook in the various massacre.