OLA AWONIYI, Makurdi | Friday
RESIDENTS driven by troops into the bush from towns in a central Nigerian state where officials said more than 130 were massacred have narrated their heart-rending experiences.
“Since I ran into the bush on Tuesday when soldiers attacked Zaki-Biam, I have not seen my two wives and nine children. I assume them to be dead,” Aondoakaa Ama, a farmer in the town, told journalists.
The bodies of dozens of civilians on Thursday littered streets in Zaki-Biam and some other towns in Benue, where state governor George Akume said on Thursday troops sent to halt tribal feuding had massacred more than 130 people in Gbeji town alone.
Hundreds of houses, including clinics and a police post, were razed in the town, where soldiers wreaked possibly the greatest havoc.
Jerry Iorngen, a student in Sankera, said that the soldiers drove him to the bush when they struck his town on Tuesday.
“I ran into the bush. Bullets were flying over my head. I could not stand up for fear of being hit,” he said.
A clinic owner in Zaki-Biam, Titus Madugu, said that his uncle was killed, while his clinic was burnt by the rampaging soldiers on Tuesday.
Zaki-Biam is more than 200 kilometres from state capital Makurdi.
“I did not remove anything from the clinic. I ran into the bush. I came out only today (Thursday),” said Madugu who added that he had counted 17 corpses before fleeing the town.
Ugoh Mson, a resident in the same town, said that when the soldiers came to the town on Tuesday, they addressed the people and assured them that they were there on a peacekeeping mission.
But shortly afterwards they started shooting from the town’s central market and left the town in ruins.
Massive destruction was wreaked on towns and villages along Katsina Ala-Wukari road, reported local and foreign journalists who visited some of the towns devastated by soldiers.
Virtually all the towns and villages along that major route were torched and residents had deserted them, they said.
“It is a real holocaust. It is like Armageddon has come,” one of them said.
At Tse-Adoor, near Zaki-Biam, about two dozen houses, including that of former army chief, retired Lieutenant General Victor Malu, were razed and bullet-ridden. His uncle and other relations were killed in the house, one of the most beautiful in the town.
The secretariat of Ukum local government council in Sankera was also burnt along with its guest house. Bullet holes were clearly noticeable on the walls of the buildings, they added.
Residents who had abandoned their homes in the troubled region on the border of Benue and Taraba States for fear of further bloodshed were yet to return Thursday afternoon.
But, surprisingly, no single soldier was sighted on Thursday in the towns and villages devastated by the soldiers, journalists said.
“The soldiers seem to have been withdrawn after the attacks on these towns and villages,” one of them said.
President Olusegun Obasanjo ordered the military on Thursday to stop firing on civilians, stressing that their role was to end feuding, Benue State Governor George Akume said.
Officials said the soldiers were deployed to curb bloodshed between the local Tiv and Jukun communities but army units apparently carried out reprisals for the murder of 19 soldiers by local militiamen on October 12.
Apart from the governor’s figures for deaths in Gbeji, an unknown number of civilians have also been killed in the neighbouring villages of Anyiin, Iorja and Vaase.
Local Benue State officials said the troops behind the killings came from neighbouring Taraba, which is the home state of Defence Minister Theophilus Danjuma.
Danjuma has been accused in reports in the Lagos press of fuelling the crisis. Officials in Makurdi, the capital of Benue, have suggested that the army or its unit has taken sides.
“The soldiers who carried out this massacre came from Taraba and we are sure about this,” said Benue State government representative Becky Orpin.
Benue state legislators on Thursday urged the United States and Britain to intercede with Nigeria’s federal government, alleging that “ethnic cleansing” was under way against the Tiv, the dominant group in Benue.
In a letter to the British High Commission and the US embassy in Abuja, they wrote: “Our prayer and appeal to you is that you please use your good offices to prevail on the Nigerian government to halt this gruesome act of ethnic cleansing.”
Army chief of staff Lieutenant General Alexander Ogomudia denied on Thursday in Abuja that soldiers were sent to attack border towns between Benue and Taraba.
He said the rampaging soldiers must have acted in “self-defence”.
Thousands of displaced people are taking refuge in Makurdi and some other towns. – AFP