Gunmen kill 25 in restive central Nigeria
Benue has been one of the states hit hardest by violence between nomadic herders and farmers. (AFP pic)
JOS : Gunmen over the weekend killed 25 people in two attacks across north-central Nigeria's Benue state, local authorities told AFP today, the latest violence in a region known for deadly land disputes and reprisals.
Attackers killed 14 people yesterday in the community of Ankpali, said Adam Ochega, chairman of the Apa local government council, warning that 'there are still some threats here and there'.
Muslim ethnic Fulani nomadic herders have long clashed with settled farmers, many of whom are Christian, in Benue over access to land and resources.
In a recent report, Amnesty International tallied 6,896 people killed over the last two years in Benue, part of Nigeria's so-called Middle Belt, a mixed-religious region where such disputes often take on a sectarian dimension.
A police spokesman confirmed the attack but did not provide a toll.
In a similar attack yesterday evening on Naka village, of Gwer West local government area, 11 people were killed by what authorities said were suspected Fulani militias.
'So far we have recovered 11 dead bodies and five people are confirmed injured,' Gwer West council chairman Ormin Victor told AFP.
Last month, 44 people were killed in a span of four days in Gwer West.
Motives for the violence in that attack were not clear, but Victor blamed the 'coordinated attacks' on Fulani cattle herders.
Herders across the region meanwhile say they are also the victims of deadly attacks by farmers, land grabs and cattle poisonings.
Land used by farmers and herders in central Nigeria is coming under stress from climate change and human expansion, sparking deadly competition for increasingly limited space.
Benue has been one of the states hit hardest by such violence between nomadic herders and farmers who blame herdsmen for destroying farmland with their cattle grazing.
When violence flares, weak policing all but guarantees indiscriminate reprisal attacks, which often occur across communal lines.
A spate of attacks across Benue and neighbouring Plateau state left more than 150 people dead in April alone.
Land grabbing, political and economic tensions between local 'indigenes' and those considered outsiders, as well as an influx of hardline Muslim and Christian preachers, have heightened divisions in Plateau state in recent decades.
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New Straits Times
2 days ago
- New Straits Times
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
BULLETS and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few." "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around six per cent of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16 per cent. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win."
Rakyat Post
3 days ago
- Rakyat Post
Knowing The History Of Israel-Palestine: Which Israel? This Cannot Be Right
Subscribe to our FREE This article first appeared in Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's book Ten Myths About Israel relates how the diaries of the early Zionists are full of anecdotes about how the migrant settlers were well received by the Palestinians, offering them shelter and teaching them how to cultivate the land. ('Only, when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin.') But, as his The Idea of Israel tells us, the Jewish settlers were antagonistic and condescending towards the native Palestinians from the start. Reports back to Europe about the Palestinians were all about the Palestinians' unpleasantness and weirdness. '[The] Arabs assaulted us' was the phrase used to describe Palestinian boys' simple act of helping the arriving settlers into small boats, their shouting because of high waves, their asking for tips as a means of survival. Leading figures of the Zionist Jewish migration wrote in their diaries about their disgust in finding houses occupied by Arabs and being appalled at the sight of so many Arab men, women and children. The racist condescension is unmistakable. In fact, the constant odour of racism underlying the state of Israel displayed itself even among the migrant Jews themselves. Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab-Jew relates how non-European Iraqi Jewish immigrants to Israel were sprayed with DDT pesticides upon arrival at the airport in the early 1950s to disinfect them as if they were animals. It is revealing how such racism was also there from the start in the writings of Theodor Herzl, regarded as the founder of Zionism in Europe. Rashid Khalidi's, Hundred Years' War on Palestine describes how Herzl wrote that the Jewish state would 'form a part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism'. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has a penchant for positing Israel as being at the forefront of the battle between civilisation (read Western) and barbarism. But who really is the barbarian when starvation is weaponised against civilians and children in Gaza? Clearly, the plot has not changed. That running thread of racism continues today in Israel through apartheid, a tremendous ignominy that Israel bears in addition to everything else. In July 2024, apart from ruling that Israel's military occupation of Palestinian land is illegal, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel's occupation of the West Bank is based on ' In February 2022, Amnesty International concluded that 'the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an Which Israel? An irony, if not deceit, of Zionism is how, even though it is a secular nationalist ideology, it found utility in the Bible. Ten Myths About Israel describes how the Bible provided 'the myth for our right over the land'. The choice of the name Israel was not by accident. It allowed the dominant nationalist narrative to claim that Israel is the same land that was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. God was thus on the side of the state of Israel. Yet, it was Mahatma Gandhi who wrote that the 'Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract'. Writing in 1938, Gandhi expressed all his sympathies with the Jews who had been persecuted for centuries. But he also added, 'My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice…. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.' In a sense, we can see that the concept of the state of Israel has to strain to justify itself. It has thus been described as a marketing project. It has also been described as a state created out of a superstition. We can see how atheist Zionists use a particular God argument that they themselves do not believe in. Worse, they impose it on others who do not believe in their God argument either. This effectively makes it a superstition that thus has to be marketed. The imposition of the superstition has been at the expense of hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians who were forcefully displaced or killed during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). It is a Nakba that has not ended and in 2025 continues to unfold in Gaza and in other occupied Palestinian territories. In any case, promise by God or not, there can be no justification for the prolonged, continued, disproportionate carnage and starvation inflicted by Israel's armed forces on an entire population in Gaza. If we believe in God, then surely, everyone is a creation of God, and we cannot just go on killing them. The Zionist entity of Israel cannot be regarded as the encapsulation or representation of Jews and their tradition. It is a tradition which author and activist Naomi Klein, herself Jewish, She has spoken of Zionism as 'a deeply immoral path…now…justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.' Consider the above against Israel's total blockade (since 2 March 2025) of all food, medicines and supplies into Gaza. The wilful starvation, malnutrition and deprivation of an entire population including children is abhorrent (and illegal) by any measure. Surely, none of this represents the lofty ideals of the Jewish tradition. Again, who really are the barbarians? This cannot be right * holocaust – 'the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.' Consumed…whole…in open fires – we surely cannot avoid seeing the similarity with what is being committed now, 80 years later, by the state of Israel against Palestinians in Gaza. Many of us would have seen by now video clips of Gazans being burnt alive by fires created by American and other Western weapons. Those weapons have been put, with no constraint, into the hands of Israeli forces to be used freely on the population of Gaza. The Nazi consumption of whole Jewish bodies was carried out away from the public eye in extermination camps because, somewhat unbelievably, the Nazis had some sense that what they were doing was wrong and should be hidden. Even more unbelievable is that Israel, the supposed state inheritor of Jewish victimhood, now kills, maims, orphans and burns children and civilians en masse openly with little or no compunction nor desire to hide what they are doing. There is something highly depraved and vacant in such conduct – made worse by some Israeli soldiers' obsession with parading themselves in women's underwear taken from the homes they have destroyed. One has to believe that no one is beyond redemption. And that such badly deformed minds are the result of ideological indoctrination that seeps into educational and all aspects of life in Israel. Still, it is important for us to understand where the oppression is and where the justice is that needs to be supported, which is why we have to support the struggle of the Palestinians. Finally, by now it is obvious that the Israel-Palestine 'conflict' is not one based on religious or communal lines. This is especially relevant to us in Malaysia. Our own history of communal politics has trained us to see things through ethnic and religious lenses. The struggle of the Palestinians against their historical injustice needs our support no matter what our ethnic or religious background. In fact, cross-communal solidarity by all of us with the Palestinian cause is one way for us to exercise solidarity among ourselves. * As referenced in -by By Tong Veng Wye, Aliran member. Read Part 1: Read Part 2: Read Part 3: Share your thoughts with us via TRP's . Get more stories like this to your inbox by signing up for our newsletter.
The Star
3 days ago
- The Star
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
BELFAST (Reuters) -Bullets and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. 'CLEARLY TERRIFIED' The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few". "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around 6% of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16%. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win." (Reporting by Padraic Halpin and Amanda Ferguson; Editing by and Alex Richardson)
