100 Massacred In Nigeria’s Benue State, Amnesty Says (Worthy News In-Depth)
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
ABUJA (Worthy News) – Nigeria’s government was under pressure Sunday to end massacres in the country’s central Benue state after at least 100 people, many believed to be Christians, were reportedly killed there over the weekend.
The Nigerian branch of advocacy group Amnesty International spoke late Saturday of a “horrifying killing of over 100 people by gunmen that invaded [the village of] Yelewata from late Friday into the early hours of Saturday” on June 14.
“Many people are still missing, aside [from] dozens injured and left without adequate medical care,” Amnesty International Nigeria added. “Many families were locked up and burnt inside their bedrooms. So many bodies were burnt beyond recognition,” the group said on the social media platform X.
It stressed that the massacre shows “the security measures [that the] government claims to be implementing in the state are not working.”
Amnesty International Nigeria said Saturday that “the Nigerian authorities must immediately end the almost daily bloodshed in Benue state and bring the actual perpetrators to justice.”
Most, perhaps all, victims were believed to be Christians, according to a Worthy News assessment.
At least about 97 percent of Benue’s population identifies as Christian, according to several sources.
MORE KILLINGS
Details of the latest massacre emerged just weeks after last month, at least 42 people were reportedly shot dead by suspected Islamic herdsmen in a series of weekend attacks across the Gwer West district in Benue state.
Benue is in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, a region where most of the Muslim North meets the predominantly Christian South.
Several media outlets said Saturday that region faces “competition over land use” with “conflicts” between herders seeking grazing land for their cattle, and farmers, “who need arable land for cultivation.”
Reuters news agency reported that these tensions are often worsened “by overlapping ethnic and religious divisions.”
However, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, told the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on July 18, 2023, that the conflict is fueled by hatred towards the Christian faith.
He said he had to close 14 parishes since 2014 due to Islamic militants “masquerading” as herdsmen.
Farmers, who are mainly Christian, are also pushed out by followers of Islam seeking to establish a territory ruled by “Sharia” (Islamic) law, according to researchers.
‘ALARMING ESCALATION’
Amnesty International said it “has been documenting “the alarming escalation of attacks across Benue state, where gunmen have been on a killing spree with utter impunity.”
The group warned that the “attacks have been causing massive displacement and may affect food security as [the] majority of the victims are farmers”, many of them Christians.
Bishop Anagbe told U.S. legislators already in 2023 about the “killings, destruction of churches, schools, clinics, local markets and farms” and claimed this meets the United Nations criteria for genocide. “Since 2014, my fellow bishops in Benue and I have lost parishioners almost daily.”
He stated it was disheartening that neither the national government nor international stakeholders have shown any convincing signs of commitment to bring “this Islamist aggression” to an end.
Anagbe wondered why “Some persons in the West, especially, often question why we think the killings in Nigeria are faith-motivated or prompted by a jihad against Christians in the country.”
The answer, he added, is simple: “In 1989, a gathering of Muslims in Nigeria adopted what is today known as the ‘Abuja Islamic Declaration’. It is a declaration that has been adopted by the Islamic Council of Nigeria.”
The declaration outlines “a vision for the role of Islam in Nigerian society, and it calls for the establishment of an Islamic State in Nigeria.”
ISLAMIC PROMISE
The bishop acknowledged that at least “some Muslims” are killed.
However, he stressed that “The blatant killing and displacement of Christian communities in Nigeria is done in fulfillment of the long-time promise by fundamentalist Islamic groups in Nigeria bent on ‘dipping the Koran into the Atlantic Ocean’. [It is] a euphemism for conquering the Christian states of the Middle Belt and southern regions of Nigeria.”
Last month, Amnesty International said that, in the two years since Nigerian President Bola Tinubu assumed office, more than 10,000 people have been killed in attacks by gunmen, mostly in Benue. At least 6,896 people were killed in Benue over that period, followed by 2,630 murders in Plateau state and killings in other regions, according to Amnesty data.
The figures do not include the latest reported killings. At least 450,000 people in Benue have been documented as internally displaced.
In total, there were 3.7 million internally displaced people in Nigeria by the end of 2024, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), an international non-governmental organization.
Many, if not most, of those killed and displaced are Christians, according to several well-informed aid groups. Advocacy group Open Doors ranks Nigeria 7th on its annual World Watch List of 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.
With thousands killed annually, activists view Nigeria as the world’s most violent nation toward Christians, although not all figures are known from autocratically ruled countries such as North Korea.
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