Nigeria's growing Fulani conflict stokes Biafran cause

NSUKKA, Nigeria, Tuesday

Fulani herdsmen struck at 6am, just after morning prayers in Nimbo, an idyllic village in southeast Nigeria where farmers grow yams and paw paws.

At first the villagers thought it was a joke. The nomadic cattle rearers, who have clashed with farmers over grazing rights in central Nigeria for decades, had never come this far south.

But then they saw 20 young men descend from the hills and emerge from the palm tree forest, shooting AK-47 assault rifles in the air and waving machetes.

“We started hearing the sound of gunshots everywhere. They shot so many people,” Kingsley Oneyebuchie, a 31-year-old civil servant, told AFP.

“They shot one of my brothers, they used a knife on my dad, they killed so many,” he said from his hospital bed in the nearby town of Nsukka, bare-chested and wearing only red athletic shorts.

Oneyebuchie ran his fingers tentatively over a 20-centimetre track of blue surgical stitches at the base of his scalp.

“They used a machete on me. After using the machete on me, they thought I had died,” he said.

Oneyebuchie was lucky to survive the attack on April 25. At least 10 people are thought to have been killed and scores of others injured.

In the past year, raids by Fulani herdsmen have increased in the southeast.

The worst happened some 200 kilometres away in Agatu, Benue state, in late February, where hundreds of people — most of them Christian farmers—were reportedly killed.

AFTER INDEPENDENCE

The bloodshed mirrors that after Nigeria gained independence in 1960, when Igbos dominant in the mainly Christian southeast, were pitted against Hausa and Fulani in the largely Muslim north.

The ethnic violence led to two military coups, hundreds of deaths — and ultimately a civil war, when the southeast broke away and declared an independent Republic of Biafra in 1967.

Some one million Igbos died either fighting for the fledgling nation or from starvation and disease in a brutal conflict that, by its end in 1970, left the southeast broken.

Now, stricken villagers maintain the only solution to the Fulani attacks—and perceived northern domination of political posts from the president downwards—is an independent state.

“We need to know that this is Igbo and this is Fulani,” said Oneyebuchie. “We want them to leave our place so that we will be free.”

According to the Global Terrorism Index 2015 report, “Fulani militants” killed 1,229 people in 2014—up from 63 in 2013—making them the “fourth most deadly terrorist group” in the world.

Most deaths happened in Nigeria’s religiously mixed so-called Middle Belt states.

But the apparent migration south into Igbo territory is being used by an increasingly hardline pro-Biafra movement as an indication the Nigerian government does not serve or protect the region and is stoking discontent in the southeast.

Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Hausa-Fulani who opposes the pro-Biafran movement, took until late April to speak out about the herdsmen, saying he had ordered military and police to “take all necessary action to stop the carnage”.

He has proposed setting up a grazing plan that includes establishment of cattle ranches and importing grass feed from Brazil.