Religious Cleansing Happening In Nigeria?
01/18/2012 Nigeria (International Christian Concern)-With more than 80 Christians killed by radical Muslims since Christmas, a Nigerian church leader believes that Islamists are carrying out religious cleansing against Christians in northern Nigeria.
In an exclusive interview with ICC (click here to listen to the interview), the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, called upon Nigerian Christians to defend themselves from the ongoing pogrom.
The Christian leader decried the Nigerian government’s failure to protect Christians from the killings and accused some security agents of taking sides. He said, “The security agencies are polarized along religious lines. Even when the security agents have information (concerning security measures to be taken against Boko Haram), some of them pass the information to these criminals. This is because some of the security agents are more loyal to their religion (Islam) than to Nigeria as a nation.”
In a disturbing development, the violence has also spread to southern Nigeria where Muslims and their places of worship have been attacked in apparent retaliation for the killing of Christians in northern Nigeria. According to a report by BBC, a mosque and an Islamic school were burned down in the southern Nigerian city of Benin on January 10. Five people were killed and six were injured in violence in the city, but the report did not specify the identities of the victims.
In a direct message to Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan, Pastor Ayo said, “You must muster the political will to make strong decisions. Any of the heads of the security agencies that are not performing, you should remove.”
Click here to listen to the audio recording of this interview. The audio may be somewhat difficult to hear – we apologize for the poor sound quality.
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