Massacre of 500: caught in nets and hacked to death

The massacre of 500 Christian villagers in Nigeria yesterday is the latest outrage in a decade-long cycle of communal violence around the central city of Jos, which is situated between the Muslim north and Christian south of the country.

With a power struggle between an ailing president and his vice-president developing, and an election scheduled for 2011, the prospects for peace in this nation of 150 million Christians and Muslims seem bleak.

Accounts of Sunday morning's massacre vary, but it seems that at around 3.0 am, bands of machete-wielding Muslim nomads attacked three villages around Jos, the state capital of Plateau.

The attackers shot rifles into the air and set fire to the thatched roofs of mud huts, forcing the inhabitants outside where they were caught in fishing nets and animal traps and hacked to death with machetes. The dead were mostly women and children.

Survivors told AFP that the Fulani attackers identified their targets, Christian Beroms, by shouting 'nage', the Fulani word for cattle. Anybody unable to respond in the Fulani language was killed.

Local media claimed text messages had been sent to the few Muslim villagers two days before the attack, telling them to escape. Despite the region's history of inter-communal violence, the military response was too slow.

"We have been able to make 95 arrests but at the same time over 500 people have been killed in this heinous act," Dan Manjang, an advisor to the state government, told AFP.

Locals say the feud between the Fulani and the Berom can be traced back to an incident involving the theft of cattle, which escalated after a deadly revenge attack. In truth, the violence has been going on for years. In January, four days of riots in Jos led to the deaths of more than 550 people, mostly Muslims. Yesterday's attack is thought to be revenge for those killings.

The Fulani in Plateau are mostly nomadic cowherds, while the Beroms are farmers. Disputes over land between the two groups, therefore, are common.

Nigeria's divisive official classification system doesn't help. Under this, Fulanis are labelled 'settlers' while the Berom are 'indigenes'. In Nigerian law, settlers are not entitled to state education or certain provincial government positions - even if their family has lived in their adopted region for generations.

The resurgence of violence does not bode well with a general election scheduled for next year. It does not help that there is currently a power struggle at the very top of the Nigerian government, between the ailing (Muslim) president Umaru Yar'Adua, who is currently in hospital, and his (Christian) vice-president Goodluck Jonathan, who has taken over the reins of power in his absence and shows little sign of handing them back. ·