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Riots leave both sides hungry
22/05/2004 16:12  - (SA)  

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  • Bakin Ciyawa, Nigeria - Hunger loomed in Nigeria's breadbasket Plateau state where escalating battles for land have left hundreds dead this month. Many more were abandoning fields and herds - the region's main food source.

    Refugees on Friday were pouring into displaced camps in Lafia and Bauchi, cities already swollen with more than 40 000 displaced, mainly families of Muslim, Hausa-speakers bereft of their herds of long-horned cattle - and with it their livelihood.

    "It breaks my heart to find myself helpless to feed my children," said Murtala Hamza.

    The 55-year-old Muslim fled with his wife and five children to a makeshift refugee camp in a primary school in Lafia after attacks earlier this month by Christian, Tarok-speaking militants left hundreds killed in Yelwa town.

    At the heart of the conflict is a grab for land in fertile, central Nigeria's Plateau state, fought between indigenous Christian farming tribes and Hausa-speaking Muslim herders and long-horned cattle traders frequently accused by their counterparts of grazing cattle on Christian farmers' crops.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in Plateau on Tuesday, replacing the elected governor with a hand-picked former military officer and dissolving the state legislature.

    Many Muslims in Plateau are semi-nomadic while others migrated to the area more than a century ago.

    Christian and Muslim villagers have armed themselves with guns, bows and arrows and machetes. Neither side has expressed willingness to trust the issue to Nigeria's distant urban court system, which is legally empowered to decide land disputes under a 1978 decree that all land is owned by Nigeria's government, though citizens are allowed "occupancy titles" that can be sold, traded or given away.

    Decades of suspicion between Muslims and Christians deepened in 2000 when a dozen Muslim northern states began implementing strict Islamic Shariah law.

    Since then, cycles of revenge attacks have left thousands killed, including more than a thousand in Jos in September 2001.

    In all, more than 10 000 people have been killed in communal, ethnic and religious disputes since elections ended military rule in 1999.

    Fighting has surged again since February, after nearly 50 people - mainly Christians - were massacred in a church in Yelwa.

    This week, Christians were also fleeing their homes.

    Strapping a baby to her back, balancing a suitcase on her head and gripping the hand of her five-year-old son, 28-year-old Lucy Dawan joined a column of Christian women and children streaming out of the village of Bakin Ciyawa near sunset on Wednesday.

    They decided to flee their mud huts after they noticed soldiers and police deployed to protect the village were instead abandoning it each day after dark. The soldiers were deployed after an attack on Tuesday by suspected Muslim militants left an estimated 20 people killed in Bakin Ciyawa and surrounding villages.

    "If the soldiers who are armed can't stay, we also conclude it's not safe for us," said Dawan.

    Staying behind were bands of Christian, ethnic Gemai militiamen armed with homemade rifles, machetes and torches.

    John Yusuf, a Christian minister and farmer who also stayed in Bakin Ciyawa, spoke of worsening hunger.

    When dwindling stores of food from the 2003 harvest runs out, "we wonder what we're going to eat," said Yusuf, stressing it was unsafe for him and other farmers to plant this year's crop of yams and corn in outlying fields.


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