The victims of an attack in Bindi, Plateau State on July 25 are laid to rest. csi
Commentary by John Eibner, Ph.D.
German version published in the NZZ
There is a “mass slaughter” of Christians in Nigeria, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on social media over the weekend. The president threatened to cut all U.S. aid to Nigeria and to send the U.S. military with “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria “to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
President Trump’s communications are such a cacophony of bombast, truths, and untruths that it is often a challenge to make sense of them. But the president is right about one thing: Christians in Nigeria are being killed with impunity and on a mass scale.
Just three weeks ago, my CSI colleagues were in Plateau State in Nigeria when Fulani militias attacked a nearby Christian village. When my colleagues arrived at the village, they met a woman who had hidden her two young sons in an oil drum to protect them. When she emerged from her own hiding place after the attack, she found both of their bodies in the oil drum — riddled with bullets.
Such massacres are a weekly occurrence in the Christian villages of Nigeria’s Middle Belt region. Yet, they normally go unreported by Western media and scarcely acknowledged by the U.S. and European governments.
Caught off guard and perhaps embarrassed by their own ignorance of Nigeria — one of the most populous countries in the world — editors have cast about looking for a reason to show that President Trump is wrong. They seem to have settled on the narrative: Jihadists in Nigeria kill Muslims too, not just Christians. On Monday, the BBC reassured us that “there is no evidence to suggest that Christians are being killed more than Muslims in Nigeria.”
Certainly, transnational jihadist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) kill Muslims as well as Christians — often for being insufficiently Muslim, or simply for opposing their rule. Their operations are largely confined to the Muslim-majority northern third of Nigeria. It is also true that Christians live without great threat of sectarian violence in Lagos and the cities of the Christian majority South.
However, in recent years, militias from the Fulani Muslim ethnic group have replaced Boko Haram and ISWAP as Nigeria’s worst killers. These militias are well-organized and well-armed. And since 2018, they have been waging an extermination campaign against Christians living in Nigeria’s predominantly Christian Middle Belt region.
In Middle Belt states like Plateau, Kaduna, Benue, and Taraba, tens of thousands of Christians have been killed; millions have been displaced. Hundreds of Christian villages have been emptied or occupied by Fulani Muslim settlers. The goal is clear: to rid the region of Christians and occupy their land.
To the extent that the world has taken notice of the bloodshed in Nigeria, it has focused on the butchery of Boko Haram and ISWAP in the northeast. These transnational terrorist groups periodically capture Western attention because of their links to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. These jihadist networks attack the interests of the Western powers and the Nigerian government. The U.S. and other countries have provided military support for Nigeria’s government in its war against Boko Haram and ISWAP.
The Fulani militias in the Middle Belt do not threaten Western interests, nor do they release horrifying videos. But they appear to enjoy support from Nigeria’s Fulani Muslim-dominated security establishment.
Middle Belt Christians regularly report that the Nigerian military stands down while their villages are attacked, but that the same troops are quick to confiscate even the primitive rifles that these Christian villages keep for self-defense. The political goal appears to be to tip Nigeria’s 50-50 demographic balance decisively in favor of Islam.
The utter failure by mainstream media — and the international community — to address the killings in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, until a social media post by the U.S. president forced their hand, betrays the subtle contempt the world holds for African lives. So does the silence around jihadist massacres in Burkina Faso, Sudan, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere.
The U.S. — and the international community — should insist that the Nigerian government investigate links between its security establishment and the Fulani militias carrying out a slow-motion genocide of Christians and hold the complicit accountable.
The U.S. should also address the violence in the Middle Belt on the ground. President Trump should direct his State Department to partner with the Nigerian authorities, both federal and state, and with local communities, to provide security. As they have in many other parts of the world, the U.S. and its allies can provide directly the support these communities need to defend themselves.
What President Trump should not do is bomb a few Boko Haram camps on the Cameroonian border, like so many alleged drug ships in the Caribbean, and declare mission accomplished.
U.S. allies can help ensure that a more constructive approach is taken — but only if they stop denying the reality of anti-Christian massacres in Nigeria.
Dr. John Eibner
President, Christian Solidarity International
