EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was first published in 2013 by Flair Nigeria. From today till Sunday, the ICIR will reproduce the five-part series in the light of the resurgence of killings in Plateau State, to help readers understand the genesis, depth, brutality and possible solutions to violence in the state.

or 11 days in December 2013, ‘FISAYO SOYOMBO scoured the perilous villages of north-central Plateau State where more than a thousand people have been slaughtered in the last two years. After covering an estimated 13,117km, he returns, in this five-part series, to tell the chilling story of venomously-orchestrated serial killings that should worry not only the federal and state governments, but the ordinary people, including those living faraway from the plateau.

Marene Uttawal speaks slowly — sparingly. And when she does, it is with the help of an interpreter. She moves only sparingly as well. And, again, when she does, her motion is hardly beyond rotational. This is because she is paralysed in the lower region of the body.

Anyone who knew her nine months back would shudder now at how unkindly fate has dealt with her. Going on 105 years at the time, she roused from sleep at dawn every day to take her turn on the farm like nearly everyone else in the village. Working year-round in a manner that belied her old age, she more than subsisted on the maize, guinea corn and Irish potato farm she tended.

Then came the devastating halt. In March 2013, “unknown armed men suspected to be Fulanis” invaded Mile-Bakwai Village — located in Mangor, Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State — gunning down 18 people, among whom were her son and grandson. On hearing the news, Marene suffered a stroke, which resulted in partial paralysis of her lower limb. She has been bed-ridden ever since.

It is easy to curse Marene’s luck when her doom is reviewed in isolation. Not so in other circumstances. For sure, Felix Davou would have happily taken her place. Felix was only four months old when gunmen broke into his parents’ home in mid-November 2013 and fired at his stomach, disembowelling him and summarily snuffing life out of him before he even knew what “life” meant. Four other members of his family were also murdered in that raid. That was in Tatu Village, Jos North Local Government. In that attack, November 26, 2013, 15 people — mostly women and children — were murdered.

Elsewhere in Rawurum Village in Barkin Ladi Local Government (9°32′00″N 8°54′00″E), another nursling was being put to death. In one of the crudest manifestations of depraved thirst for blood, invaders placed a gun in the mouth of Julius Bula and pulled the trigger! At just five months old, there was no chance Julius would live for a split-second more.

It may be hard to imagine a harsher fate for an infant. But actually — and sadly — there is. Whether David or Gyang or Rotji, no one knew what the baby’s name would have been had he/she been born. The foetus was only “seven months” in its mother’s womb when the bullets of a cold-blooded killer hurled it back to just where it was emerging from. Those who would have known — the father and mother — did not survive the attack either, the former, in fact, dying in a most gruesome manner (He was shot twice, after which his head was “scattered completely” with a big stone.). The four other members of the family breathed their last that night as well. The family of 48-year-old Irmiya Chollom Deme was, simply put, exterminated.

As the latter parts of this real-life narration would authenticate, the killings in the villages of Plateau, when weighed on the scale of brutality, are unrivalled anywhere in Nigeria since the Civil War of July 6, 1967 to January 15, 1970. Not even killings masterminded by Boko Haram rank any close.

On the gauges of consistency and casualty figures, too, the Plateau killings offer sufficient reasons for any conscientious Nigerian to be troubled. In the five months of May to September 2013 alone, 67 Berom — one of the most populated ethnic groups in the state — were killed. So says the Berom Youth Movement, a group dialoguing with other ethnic communities to stem the killings.

In the same period, eight people were injured, 844 cows rustled, 45 farms destroyed, eight houses burnt, and nine motorcycles burnt or wrecked. The veracity of these claims was, subsequently, independently ascertained. In all, from January to December 2013, at least a total of 535 people were murdered. And in the 10 days leading up to the end of the year, there is scant assurance that the figure will remain unchanged.

GENESIS OF THE CRISIS

Hard as it is to imagine, Plateau State actually earned its epithet, ‘Home of Peace and Tourism’. While by 1985, each of Kano, Borno, Kaduna, the defunct Gongola, and Bauchi states had suffered at least one high-casualty bout of ethnicity or religious violence, post-Independence, Jos, the Plateau State capital, remained the quintessential bastion of peace in the north, notwithstanding its cosmopolitan ethnic and linguistic makeup.

It was Ibrahim Babangida, the then Military Head of State, who upturned that order. In 1991, Babangida, a Hausa from Niger State, sanctioned the creation of Jos North Local Government in a manner that the indigenes — most populated by the Berom, Anaguta and Afizere tribes — believed to have advanced Hausa-Fulani interests.

Both the indigenes and the Hausa-Fulanis were seething with pent-up rage that was ultimately unleashed three years after, following the seesaw appointment (and subsequent reversal) of Alhaji Aminu Mato, a Hausa and a Muslim, as Chairman of the Caretaker Management of Committee of Jos North Local Government.

When the appointment was announced by Mohammed Mana, a Lieutenant-Colonel and Military Administrator of the state, the indigenous ethnic groups revolted. And when it was overturned, the Hausa/Fulani community went berserk. The fusion of this two-way aggression was a riot on April 12, 1994 that claimed five lives, as well as two markets, an Islamic school and a mosque. Ever since, Jos has been soldierly in its emergence as a den of horror killings, zooming forward and never cowering in the battle of its diverse peoples for ethno-religious dominance.

National Caretaker Chairman of the Berom Youth Movement, Mr. Rwang Daylop Dantong provides an illuminating perspective to the 1991 rumpus over Jos North Local Government, which he says set the template for all other politically motivated killings in the state, Jos particularly, till date. He traces the 2001 crisis, during which more than a thousand were killed, to the same Jos North tussle.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI-mQgVisUI

READ MORE: https://www.icirnigeria.org/republished-blood-on-the-plateau-1-killing-the-living-re-killing-the-dead/

I feel so sad for the innocents caught in between...