Feb. 29, 2000

Kaduna, Nigeria ... [ANN]

Two Seventh-day Adventist Church members were among those killed in two days of religious violence in Kaduna, Nigeria, that began February 21.  More than 300 people were killed, and dozens of churches, mosques and homes destroyed, in clashes between Muslims and Christians over proposals to introduce Islamic law, or sharia, in the region.

Last week’s bloodshed began when members of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)-a coalition of local Christian denominations-marched toward the state’s Parliament in downtown Kaduna. According to news reports, what began with fistfights and angry words between Muslims and Christians spiraled into riots. Using guns and machetes, rioters took over the streets of Kaduna, looting stores, burning buildings and seeking out and killing religious rivals.  In the ensuing violence, two local Adventist Church members were slaughtered says Pastor Joseph Ola, president of the Adventist Church in Nigeria. The first victim, Jonathan Yohanna, was a teacher at the local Adventist nursery school. The second, Zacharia Idi Yango, was killed in front of his wife and children.

“Adventists have not been involved in the protest marches against sharia,” says Ola, noting that the CAN has often been perceived as militant in its methods.  “We do not believe in killing each other, in exacting retribution or having an avenging spirit.”

On the morning of February 22, a group of Muslims surrounded the Adventist headquarters in Kaduna, planning to destroy the building, Ola says.  “But one Muslim woman in the crowd spoke to defend the Adventists. It was her words and the later intervention of the police that saved our building,” says Ola.

On February 22, Pastor Ola and a delegation of Adventist leaders called on President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s head of state. Although the meeting had originally been called to discuss other matters, President Obasanjo took the opportunity to issue his first official statement about the Kaduna rioting. He urged “all Nigerians to show greater patience, restraint and tolerance in dealing with the sharia issue” and said that “neither the Christians nor the Muslims in Kaduna needed to resort to violence in defense of their positions on the sharia issue since God, whom they both claim to worship, is quite capable of upholding His own causes.” President Obasanjo also told the delegation that he owed a debt of gratitude to the Adventist Church.  “He told us that, when he was imprisoned, we were the only denomination that visited him and gave him books,” says Ola. “We gave him the Great Controversy and other books, and the President said that reading those books deepened his faith and helped him through a trying period of his life.”

President Obasanjo also commended the work of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, the Church’s international humanitarian arm.  He congratulated the Church on establishing the country’s only private university.

The army and police have restored calm to Kaduna, as the thousands who fled the violence return to their homes and begin the process of restoring their damaged neighborhoods. From 4 p.m. to 7 a.m., a curfew remains in effect, says Ola, who believes that the underlying disagreement over the introduction of Islamic law is far from resolved.

Sharia went into effect earlier this year in the neighboring Nigerian state of Zamfara, which has a large Muslim majority. Within the past 10 days, two other largely Muslim Nigerian states have also passed sharia laws. Tension over sharia is intensified in Kaduna, however, by the existence of a large non-Muslim population-more than 40 percent of those who live in the state are Christian. 

Although proponents of sharia have assured non-Muslims that they will not be bound by the strict code of conduct-which includes a prohibition on alcohol and careful separation of males and females in schools and in public areas-members of the local Christian community oppose the introduction of the law as an infringement of their Constitutional right to freely practice their religion. [Bettina Krause]

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