Nenche Steven, a 7-year-old boy from Plateau State, sits in a hospital with his head bandaged after the latest Fulani killings of Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.
Seven-year-old Nenche Steven is lucky to be alive. Muslim Fulani militiamen broke into his home at night on the 13th of April. They shot his father dead, chopped off his mother’s arms and tried to behead Nenche and his two siblings with machetes. Only Nenche survived.
When my CSI colleague Franco Majok visited Nenche in hospital three days later, he was still vomiting from the pain and trauma. Franco reports that the killing spree continues – there has been no effective intervention from Nigeria’s extensive and well-funded security apparatus and no arrests.
Nenche and his family were among the victims of a Muslim Fulani massacre of indigenous Christians in Nigeria’s Plateau State. Over 50 “kuffar” (unbelievers) are known to have been murdered and over 2,000 have been forcibly displaced. This massacre was just one in the latest wave of such anti-Christian pogroms that have swept over Nigeria’s Middle Belt in recent years.
This violence is driven by the longstanding determination of Nigeria’s Muslim Fulani-dominated ruling class to gain dominion over the predominantly Christian Middle Belt. The Fulani militias are their instruments.
Eager to maintain their lucrative relationships with the rich and powerful Western world, they refrain, unlike Boko Haram, from openly declaring jihad and attacking moderate Muslims and Western political and economic interests. But they are waging jihad nonetheless – in pursuit of the same goals as their spiritual and political forefather, Usman Dan Fodio, the founder of Nigeria’s 19th century Fulani-led Caliphate. The expansion of his caliphate was halted by resistance from the indigenous people of the Middle Belt.
This massacre, like so many others of Christians and other non-Muslims, has been met mainly with indifference by the political and religious leadership of an increasingly post-Christian Western world. Christian leadership throughout the world tends to stay close to power. Christian victims like Nenche have no economic or political value that merits concern, especially if they are also black Africans.
We see elsewhere in the world what little value non-Muslim victims have today. Only last month, several thousand Alawite “kuffar” were massacred in Syria by the armed forces of Syria’s new jihadist dictatorship. The next week, representatives of this regime were received by the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and were pledged 2.5 billion Euros for state-rebuilding purposes.
The Western world remains indifferent to Muslim Azerbaijan’s ethnic and religious cleansing of 120,000 Armenian Christians from their homeland in Nagorno Karabakh – a crime that marks the latest phase of the violent jihad that eradicated approximately two million Armenian and other Christians in the Great Genocide during the First World War.
Christians and others of goodwill throughout the world should connect the dots and draw appropriate conclusions. As the old saying goes, “united we stand, divided we fall.” Now is the time for Christian solidarity.
John Eibner, Ph.D.
International President of Christian Solidarity International
