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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Nigeria’s Islamist war on Christianity.
Mar 19, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 26 • By PAUL MARSHALL
In Nigeria, thousands of people have been killed in recent months, and tens
of thousands in the last decade. It is a fissiparous country whose conflicts
have been exacerbated by the increased influence of radical Islam—&
#8203;beginning with attempts to apply Islamic law, then the growth of
militias, and now the depredations of the vicious al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram
movement.
Map of Nigeria
Nigeria has by far the largest population in Africa, some 150 million people
, comprising hundreds of ethnic groups, which produces dangerous tensions
even without the religious differences. The country is about equally divided
between Muslims and Christians, with another 10 percent following
indigenous practices. Christians are the majority throughout the South, and
Muslims in the North, though with substantial Muslim and Christian
minorities in each area, and the two are more mixed in the middle belt, the
scene of frequent violence. These conflicts often involve disputes over
resources and land use as well as ethnicity, but the religious dimension is
increasing.
Olusegun Obasanjo was elected president in 1999, ending 16 years of military
rule, but, as elsewhere, the transition to democracy has released
animosities hitherto brutally repressed by dictators.
Nigeria remains intensely corrupt—it ranked 143rd out of 183
countries in Transparency International’s 2011 corruption index—&#
8203;but federal politicians have usually tried to avoid exacerbating
regional, ethnic, and religious tensions. Obasanjo was a Yoruba, but drew
much support from non-Yorubas, and his bloated cabinet was carefully
composed to include at least one minister from each of the country’s 36
states. The parties usually choose their presidential candidates alternately
from North and South, Muslim and Christian, and pair them with vice
presidential candidates of a different religion and region. |
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