by Eze Eluchie
The continued
silence of the Nigerian State and the civil populace to the continued acts of
ethnic cleansing going on in our Middle-Belt region is most unfortunate and regrettable.
On a daily basis, scores of our fellow countrymen are killed, hundreds of
houses destroyed and thousands are forced to flee their lands and assume the
status of ‘internally displaced persons’, and other co-travelers in the Nigerian
contraption act with seeming nonchalance, care-free disposition, as if to confirm the widely held believe that our
contraption is comprised of strange bed-fellows.
But for
goodness sake, the peoples being killed are also human. Today it is the Birom’s,
the Kataf’s, the Afizere’s, the Banda’s, the Chama’s and other relatively
numerically smaller tribes which are being attacked. Tomorrow, who will it be?
Your tribe or mine?
Nowadays, no
day passes without reports of gun-men invading, sacking and killing at will across
villages in the Middle-Belt region. Across the region, entire ethnic
nationalities have had to abandon their traditional homesteads and relocate to
refugee camps in so-called protected territories.
These
attacks have become systematic and are clearly targeted at ensuring that the peoples
of these regions, who are comprised of ethnic groups which have relatively small
numerical strengths, are forcefully removed from their lands.
The
culpability of the leadership of the Nigeria Police Force, currently headed by Inspector General of Police, MD Abubakar, a man who has been adjudged a religious extremist and bigot by a Judicial Panel headed by a respected Supreme Court Justice, in these heinous crimes is further underscored
by the unwillingness and refusal of the leadership of the Police Force to take
preventive steps to curb or arrest the situation.
The Police
authorities rarely make arrests. And in the few instances where the communities
attacked are able to identify and arrest their attackers, the authorities’ surreptitiously
admit such suspects to administrative bail without prosecution. From bail, the
suspects simply disappear into thin air, only to resurface in yet another
attack on yet another community.
Increasingly,
as happened in the Alakyo massacre of security personnel (see this blog entry of May 22nd 2013: http://ezeluchie.blogspot.com/2013/05/most-unfortunate-murder-of-security.html ), the peoples of these tribes are realizing that the only way they may be able to protect their own
lives and preserve the continued existence of their peoples in the face of abandonment
by police authorities, may be to resort to self defense.
Rather than
seek to address the endless bloodletting and bloodbath bleeding the very life
out of the peoples of the contraption, there has been a shameful clamor by often
recycled expired politicians to make a grab for the control of the treasury of
the State.
Let us talk.
Let us restructure and renegotiate our contraption now.
Picture: Mass burial of 66 victims of a recent episode of ethnic cleansing near Jos,
Nigeria. Unfortunately, a sitting Senator of the Feedral Republic of Nigeria (Sen Gwang Dantong) and several others were killed during the mass burial pictured here.
No comments:
Post a Comment