Violence in Maiduguri

This is to give an account of what is happening in Maiduguri in case all you have heard is a garbled sentence or two on a mainstream news channel.

Maiduguri Prison on Fire (Picture from Daily Trust - click for link)

What has happened has been misreported as “ethnic violence” which may bring to mind the “Moslem v Christian” clashes of the recent past. Early reports of many churches being burned in Maiduguri seem to be based on rumours (e.g. the first BBC report of all churches but one in Wulari being damaged) and the last I heard was that most Church buildings are intact (of course, this is hearsay on both sides). AMENDMENT: I have heard of a Christian Pastor being murdered and two churches being damaged since I wrote this.

The problem is with a loose knit group of Islamist fundamentalists and their violence is being directed to Police and other government agencies.

These people are sometimes called “Taleban” but have no links to Afghanistan. They are also called “Boko Haram” which means something like “Education is Taboo” because they see Western-style Education as Godless defilement. The leader for most of them seems to be a Mallam called Yusuf Muhammed. Funny enough, they have had a presence on the Unimaid campus for some years. They have been suspected of being involved in the 2006 riots and causing other trouble.

In the past the authorities have been fairly slow to close them down, preferring to watch them. But in the last few months they have been watched more closely by squads of policemen. The latest trouble seems to go back to six weeks ago when they went en masse to the funeral of a few of their number who died in a road accident. Police stopped the convoy and tried to arrest motorcyclists who were riding without crash helmets (!). The arrests turned into argument and – in the end – about a dozen of the sectaries were killed and some policement hurt.

Since then the group has been arming for a counter-attack. They seem to be targeting police stations and security personnel. The suspicion is that they want to grab more guns – particularly the AK47’s which are carried by some policemen – and they probably see it as appropriate revenge for the deaths of their associates.

There have been attacks in Bauchi, Biu, Potiskum and smaller disturbances elsewhere. A man died in Maiduguri over the weekend while in the process of making a homemade grenade in his house in Maiduguri and there have been widespread rumours of a battle coming.

The largest attack was in the night of Sunday/Monday on a Police Station in Maiduguri. It seems a lot of innocent bystanders suffered. A large number (around 100) of the sectaries have been shot dead and more arrested. It seems the attack was expected.

Police and army have gone on the attack. Mallam Yusuf’s house was attacked by tanks and shellfire has been heard all over the city. The latest story is that the house is destroyed and the occupiers killed.
There is a curfew which is officially dusk till dawn but no one is going out of their compounds unless forced by circumstance. No business activity at all. Many police and army are patrolling the city. There are roadblocks in abundance.

So far, the violence is mainly between Boko Haram and the uniformed authorities. Let us pray it doesn’t spread. Some links:
Daily Trust report
Leadership Nigeria article

Armed Intervention and “Peacekeeping” are not Peacemaking

More peacekeepers are dead in Darfur (click here for BBC report) where there is, sadly, no peace to be kept. There was a well argued case against foreign troops being sent to Darfur a few weeks ago on the BBC.

Why are our over heated politicians and media pundits crying for intervention in Darfur? Or, indeed, action against Mugabe, Burmese generals or other nasty governments? And why do we pretend we can bring peace to places like Afghanistan by parking soldiers there?

There is precious little that can be done when there is war – particularly civil war – by putting another army between the combatants. Iraq has shown the mess that follows regime change imposed by invasion.

Some people claim that the interventions in the dismembered Yugoslavia are a fine example of what intervention can do. Here is an article in London Review which might change minds. All we have done is crystallise many resentments. It does not take inspiration to prophesy that there is more grief to come in the Balkans.

When Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers” he was not thinking of men with guns or governments making economic sanctions and political gestures. Peacemaking is about making contact, giving respect and negotiating. And when peacemaking fails we have to admit that some problems may not have solutions.

Whatever you do, don’t overtake!

There is a narrow road with cars parked on both sides near my house. Buses and lorries often try to thread their way through and hold-ups are frequent. Sometimes careless drivers get stuck half way along the 200 yard “gauntlett” stretch facing a vehicle attempting to come the other way. The resulting standoff can last several minutes as cars queue up behind in both directions.

The result is fuming exhausts and even more fuming drivers while smirking pedestrians try not to show too much amusement at the resulting display of fallen human nature.

Yesterday, I pulled into a gap to let a delivery van pass in the opposite direction and a driver (gender unspecified to avoid prosecution) selfishly overtook me and blocked the way to oncoming traffic. I leapt out and tried to share a few choice insights about road etiquette but she pressed the central locking and stared straight ahead.

She is doubtless convinced she escaped death from road rage by a whisker and that my shapeless anorak was shielding at least a murderous axe or possibly a suicide bomb belt. My wayward beard may give the impression that I am a fanatical Jihadist after all.

Yes folks, overtaking in London can seem dangerous. Overtaking in Baghdad, however, is lethal. There was a news report about six months ago about a carful of men being shot up by US troops as they overtook them. Ironically, they were going home from a funeral but they all died because the nervous Americans thought they might be lining up for an attack. I was reminded of this story by this article on the BBC site.

So little real news is coming out of Iraq now and we have to thank one brave Iraqi reporter for this story. If there is one thing more dangerous than overtaking in Iraq it is truth telling.

Thoughts from the Dentist’s Couch

Lying under the drill today, I was playing the man and trying to show that it did not hurt at all.

While there, my thoughts turned to torture.

The project to provide a Christian rationale for war and oppression in the USA (and here in the Daily Telegraph – the NeoCons have hijacked my favourite paper) walks down the old sick road of defining “the lesser of two evils” and then turning that into a positive justification for evil.

As with the “Just War” so now moderate torture is now OK.

Experience shows that the torturer quickly regresses into going beyond official guidance just as “Just Warriors” in combat soon go beyond the decent limits which the intellectuals love to imagine.

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”.

Which part of that sentence is too hard for our Christian friends in the moderate torture camp do you think? Perhaps they just lack imagination?

A few minutes in the dentist’s chair without anaesthetic might remind them what pain plus helplessness feels like.

Sick unto death – What is wrong with evangelical thinkers?

A few days ago an amazing article by Wayne Grudem (US evangelical theologian) was being flagged in blogspace.  It was Prof Grudem inviting people to pray for a Republican victory in the recent elections.  What I found remarkable was the way he credited the President with successes using a grid of understanding which was astonishingly right wing.  Extremely liberal economic theories tied to a taste for legislation in areas of morality and medical ethics.

Here is the link to Wayne Grudem’s post.

Like Errol Hulse’s pro war rant I refered to earlier in the year it is the enthusiasm for the Iraq war and occupation which startled me.  He seemed to feel it was a reasonable response to Islamic terrorism and even believed it would help with Gospel proclamation!  The Prof really is in a high Ivory Tower if he thinks that.

Like so many Evangelicals he gets lathered up at the homosexual agenda and embryo research but seems to think that maiming and killing tens of thousands of people in a pointless war is just a peccadillo.  Trigger happy American kids are winning neither heart nor minds in Iraq and they just should not be there.   The same faction which predicted the war would be popular with ordinary Iraqis now tell us there will be a bloodbath if the troops leave.  They were wrong last time and that prediction may be wrong too.

There seems to be a belief that you really can figure out every matter of right and wrong from first principles and an assumption that warfare and oppressive legislation are easily justifed by such a process.  It is the rationalism of the madhouse.