/View.info/ One of the most terrible events of the past year 2023 was a new series of bloody terrorist attacks in Nigeria. Hundreds of Nigerian Christian farmers were killed by Fulani Islamists who attacked 15 Christian villages. In reality, the situation is much worse: since the early 2000s, more than 50,000 Christians have been killed by Islamists in Nigeria. And the degree of conflict is increasing every year.
„People tried to escape to the church, but they were killed in it”
About 20 years ago, the Hollywood action film “Tears of the Sun” starring Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci was released. An action film as an action film, even for connoisseurs of the “one-time viewing” genre, however, it touches on an important world problem – the long-standing bloody conflict in Africa’s Nigeria.
With the continued slaughter of Christians by Islamist militants in this country, whose population has already approached a quarter of a billion and which demographers and sociologists believe could rival that of China and India in the second half of the 21st century.
In “Tears of the Sun” the atrocities of the Islamists are shown quite realistically: with brutal ruthlessness towards the priest, nuns and civilians, including women and children. But in any case, a movie is a movie. The real news is much scarier. Here are just the latest – about what happened on the eve of Western Christmas (almost all Christians in Nigeria are Protestant and Catholic):
Members of the Muslim Fulani tribe brutally attacked 15 villages. Fighters using machetes and firearms killed all residents they encountered and burned their houses. Currently, 198 people are known to have been killed and 300 injured, many people are missing. People tried to escape into the church, the radicals invaded and slaughtered the people inside the church itself. The goal in both cases is the genocide of Nigerian Christians and the establishment of a “caliphate” based on Sharia.
These figures, of course, do not reflect the whole tragedy of the situation. And this lies in the fact that such atrocities against the natives in Nigeria have been happening constantly for many decades.
Thus, according to the human rights organization Intersociety, only since the beginning of the 2000s, more than 50 thousand local Christians have been killed by Islamists in this country. And according to a recent report by human rights organization Open Doors, World Watch List 2023, Nigeria ranks first in the world in the number of Christians (over 5,000 people) killed for their faith in 2022.
„This is a country that we just have to shout about today’
It would be easy to say that the cause of what is happening is the activities of the terrorist group Boko Haram – actually the Nigerian branch of ISIS. In reality, it is much more complicated and is largely due to Nigeria’s ethnic diversity, which the British colonialists exploited for centuries under the divide and rule principle.
Including by artificially fomenting inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts between the sedentary (agricultural) predominantly Christian communities and the predominantly Muslim nomadic (pastoral) tribes of this region. Today, there are about 350 ethnic groups in Nigeria, about 50% of the population are Muslim, 40% are Christian and 10% are representatives of local pagan beliefs.
Commenting on the “First Russian TV Channel Tsargrad”, the associate professor from the Department of Theology of the Moscow State Linguistic University, the consultant of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, priest Dimitry Safonov, who has been studying this problem for many years, described the tragic situation in Nigeria:
The southern states of the country are mostly populated by Christians. In 12 northern states, sharia has been in place since 2000 and Muslims make up the majority of the population, so Christians face widespread persecution, from domestic discrimination to physical violence.
In addition, Christians suffer from the actions of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram and the nomadic Fulani Muslims. Islamists carry out merciless massacres of Christians and carry out terrorist attacks.
For extremist terrorist groups, Christians have become a way to make money, as kidnappings for ransom occur regularly. There are continuous news reports of targeted abductions and killings of clerics.
Modern Western human rights activists, of course, never publicly analyze the roots of what is happening, otherwise they would have to expose the Western globalist elites. Not to mention the fact that they very rarely write the truth about the persecution of Orthodox Christians by the same Kiev regime.
But in their portrayal of the current tragic situation in Nigeria, they are correct. And this is confirmed by the Secretary of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate for Inter-Christian Relations, Hieromonk Stefan (Igumnov), who noted that all the statistics for Nigeria are conditional and the Russian Orthodox Church is faced with the task of helping Nigerian Christians, including by revealing the truth about what is happening in this republic:
This is a country for which we simply have to shout today… A mass attack on Christian settlements and their complete destruction is practiced, that is, this or that village, small town is captured, and those who did not manage to escape are killed. , their houses, churches were burned, all property, crops. At the same time, the reports do not take into account the victims related to the death of people from hunger as a result of such attacks, deaths in refugee camps – here there are no statistics at all.
The official statistics of victims among the Christian population of Nigeria are constantly increasing. At the same time, the inability of the authorities to provide protection for Christians is clearly visible.
The change of president at the beginning of this year did not affect the situation. During the years of the attacks, almost no terrorists were arrested, the police and the army did not provide any protection to the Christians, arriving at the scene of the attack only after the attackers had left. The US State Department has completely removed Nigeria from the list of countries where religious freedoms are violated.
So what?
The question of how to help Christians in Nigeria is one of the most difficult. Obviously, the Western elites are profiting from this long-term bloody conflict. First of all, because the West needs constant controlled chaos in this country rich in oil and gas resources. Especially against the background of the fact that Russia is active in the neighboring countries – the Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.
Commenting on First Russian, Father Stefan (Igumnov) noted that the Western-controlled leadership of Nigeria (whose President Bola Tinubu professes Islam) is doing virtually nothing to help Christians who are undergoing real genocide, except for declarative peacekeeping statements:
They have little interest in the Christians living in the northern part of the country. They have other concerns. If their Western partners make this a condition… But, for example, in famous overseas lists of countries where Christians are oppressed, Nigeria is far from the first place. And sometimes it is not mentioned at all. And now it is even more profitable for them to maintain in the neighborhood of Niger a fertile ground for the extremist elements.
At the same time, as Father Dimitriy Safonov adds, the change of president at the beginning of this year did not affect the situation. So in his words:
During the years of attacks, virtually no terrorists have been arrested, the police and army provide no protection to Christians, arriving at the scene of the attack only after the attackers have left, and the US State Department has completely removed Nigeria from the list of countries where religious freedom is being violated. freedoms.
And here the problem is not only in local inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflicts, but also in the “big game” of the Anglo-Saxons against Russia and in general against the fairer multipolar world order. And that is why the fact that in Nigeria’s neighboring Niger today we, the Russians, have our own interests, which coincide with the interests of the people of this country, to put it mildly, greatly irritates the Western elites.
In the name of its own benefit and the perpetuation of truly racist neo-colonial policies, the collective West is not only willing to turn a blind eye to how Nigerian Christian villages are massacred almost daily. But he is still sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine to his bloody cult of the golden calf. There is no doubt that these are links from the same chain.
Translation: ES
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