Nigeria has experienced a surge in kidnappings, mass murders, and lynchings of Christians under President Muhammadu Buhari, who has made only “cursory” attempts to address the issue, David Curry, the CEO of the Christian aid organization Open Doors, told Breitbart News on Wednesday.
Curry described Buhari’s inaction as “suspicious” given that extremists from the president’s ethnic group, Fulani Muslims, are largely responsible for the attacks. He also accused Buhari’s government of superficial attempts to appear to be protecting Christians, such as sending soldiers out to protect churches but not giving them bullets.
The human rights expert noted that President Joe Biden’s administration should reconsider undoing the “puzzling” decision of removing Nigeria from its list of Countries of Particular Concern for religious freedom, which it did in November without any overt signs that the Buhari administration was meaningfully addressing the surge of anti-Christian violence in the country.
“There’s been a rise in kidnappings, hundreds of girls have been kidnapped in the last year already and raped by Fulani militants, that has continued on. There’s been more murders and executions of Christians,” Curry detailed, highlighting a particularly gruesome lynching last month at a university in northwestern Sokoto state. A mob beat and stoned to death a Christian second-year student, Deborah Yakubu, then burned her body after she posted a message to a Whatsapp group. According to Open Doors‘ sources, Yakubu had praised Jesus for her success in passing her exams. Muslims reportedly accused of her blasphemy for complaining that too many messages in the group were about Islam instead of about school assignments.
A Muslim mob protested the arrest of suspects related to the original lynching, looting and burning Christian businesses and brandishing machetes outside of the local police station, according to Open Doors.
Buhari responded to the killing by asserting that “Muslims all over the world demand respect for the Holy Prophets, including Isah (Alaihissalaam, Jesus Christ) and Muhammad (SAW) [sic],” rather than condemning the brutal killing.
“The latest one, which is quite notable, is this young college student,” Curry noted to Breitbart News on Wednesday. “It just kind of highlights yet again that this country of Nigeria is tolerating and allowing these extremists to attack Christian groups, villages, individuals, for nothing more than their Christian faith.”
The college lynching is an outlier in what has become the more common practice of radical jihadists kidnapping priests for ransom, mass abducting groups of Christian girls, and massacring entire Christian communities with little pushback from the Nigerian government. Some Christian organizations have called the continuous attacks a genocide.
“In a sense, this comes back to six months ago when the Biden administration removed Nigeria from the Countries of Particular Concern list. It was puzzling at that time. There was no reason to drop it,” Curry observed.
“What Nigeria has done is that they have not protected civil sites – places like churches, villages where Christians are known to be in the majority population,” Curry explained. “They’ll sometimes send military folks out, they may not even give them bullets for their guns.”
Nigeria is scheduled to elect a new president next year.
“It’s a major factor. The president, Buhari, is part of this tribal group, the Fulani, which has these extremist views. In my view, it’s suspicious that he continues to overlook them as a terrorist group,” Curry said, “that he allows these kinds of attacks to go on within the region in which they are prevalent, so I think they certainly need new leadership and hopefully one that will understand and honor international law.”
Currently, he continued, Nigeria is “making cursory attempts to seem as though they are complying with international law but clearly now this has gone on year after year the violence continues to escalate. They consider the problem solved, yet it keeps continuing to get worse.
“I think this is a clear violation of the law and therefore they should be on the list,” Curry concluded.
The current complete list of Countries of Particular Concern for religious freedom consists of China, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Eritrea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The list was created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act, which requires the State Department to update the list annually. Designates do not have to use state power to repress religious minorities directly; the law allows for listing a country if they either “engaged in” or “tolerated systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom.”
At the time Secretary of State Antony Blinken removed Nigeria from the list in November, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a government organization created by the 1998 act, described itself as “appalled.”
Curry told Breitbart News that Open Doors has “challenged both the White House and the State Department to reexamine this – we hope that they are going to step forward to do that.”
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