"The city is the worst hit by religious riots that have killed at least 138 people across the country in five days.
Christian mobs, seeking revenge for the killings of Christians in the north, have attacked Muslims with cutlasses, destroyed their houses and torched mosques in two days of violence in Onitsha, where at least 85 people have died.
“We are very happy that this thing is happening so that the north will learn their lesson,” said Anthony Umai, a motorcycle taxi rider, standing close to where Christian youths had piled up the corpses of 10 Muslims and were burning them.
Dozens more corpses had been thrown into the back of pick-up trucks by security services overnight, residents said."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/World/Nigeria-riots-kill-138/2006/02/24/1140670228723.html
This north-south tension in , of course, mirrors Ibo-Hausa geographic contiguity, and looks to be the dessert on the world’s plate that currently is full of Middle Eastern intercomunal violence.
I must confess that I find chilling the frank expression of the proposition that, unable to reach the presumed parties guilty of atrocities at a remote spot, an appropriate exercise of initiative leads the speaker in search of surrogates from whom to exact vengeance.
Probably not coincidentally, Nigeria is a very big oil player.
It appears that virtually all geopolitical rivalries, real and imagined, are finding a communal subtext from which to draw enhanced fervency; in all of the most important instances of such rivalries, (at least in the last month…) the age-old rivalries amongst the adherents of the several cults of Yahweh inform that subtext.–even where the presence of those cults is of relatively recent provenance and unconnected (except by grafting onto them) to longstanding tribal affiliations,.
Once we get around to noticing it, what do we do about Nigeria?
Specifically, are we to continue to honor the principle that the geographical boundaries which have joined or separated (rather arbitrarily) tribal units are immutable.
Biafra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biafra) will resonate with some as a prior Nigerian episode that went badly for those seeking to redraw the map in favor of separating a part from the whole.
Don’t we BADLY need a supervening sovereignty council (like a continental *LAFCO). to formulate and then enforce a policy vis-a-vis african boundaries, given that the current system with its roots in pretty feckless conlonialism gives ongoing grief…
*LAFCO-Local Agency Formation Commission–the County level agency in California that decides, among other things, whether Stockton can expand its municipal boundaries and take in previously unincorporated territory)
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