The Miss World beauty circus fled to Britain on Sunday while in northern Nigeria the death toll continued to mount in bloody sectarian rioting fuelled by Muslim anger at the pageant.
As around 90 contestants arrived in London, the Nigerian Red Cross said that the toll in the flashpoint city of Kaduna had passed the 200 mark and that violence linked to the event was expected to continue.
Some 1 125 have been injured and 11 000 driven from their burning homes by mobs in violence between Muslims and Christians that broke out in Kaduna on Thursday, it said.
”There has not been calm overnight, there have been more killings,” Nigerian Red Cross president Emmanuel Ijewere said.
”More people are coming in for treatment. This has continued and we’re expecting more trouble today.”
Despite these fears, however, the situation remained calm in Kaduna during the day for the first time in four days, with a massive security presence and tough overnight curfew.
Meanwhile, a bitter row erupted over how a beauty pageant could have unleashed such a violent reaction.
The Nigerian government and Miss World president Julia Morley were united in blaming the media — both international coverage and a controversial article in the Nigerian press — for starting the trouble, then undermining Miss World by reporting it.
”There’s an international conspiracy just to show that an African country like Nigeria cannot host this thing,” Information Minister Jerry Gana told state radio. ”I think Nigerians should be really angry with the international press.”
Gana and Morley also criticised an article which appeared last week in the Nigerian daily ThisDay, which offended Muslims by claiming that if the Prophet Mohammed were alive today he would
have approved of the contest and might have married one of the contestants.
But Muslim leaders insisted that anger at the contest was not solely generated by press coverage, and that they had always considered it an immodest spactacle which should not have been brought to Nigeria during the holy month of Ramadan.
”The pageant was the root cause of the riots because if it had not been for the pageant hosting controversy, the blasphemous article would not have been written,” said Nabiu Baba Ahmed, secretary of the National Council of Sharia in Nigeria.
Hosting the beauty queens during Ramadan is unacceptable to Muslims, he said at his home in Kaduna, lambasting the federal government for supporting its organisers.
”Shifting the pageant from Nigeria is a wise decision, which should have been taken earlier, but it is unfortunate that the government doesn’t respond to the wishes of the people unless something unpleasant happens,” he said.
Muslim citizens in the riot-ravaged suburbs of Kaduna said that they had opposed the pageant from the outset. In the weeks leading up to the arrival of the contestants many influential Muslim leaders had called for it to be banned.
Residents in city flashpoints said that a measure of calm had returned to the city on Sunday following a tough overnight security operation, but groups including the Red Cross confirmed that sporadic fighting had continued in some areas.
Hospitals in the city were full to overflowing with residents injured in sectarian attacks by rival Christian and Muslim gangs, or shot by the security forces, whom many victims accused of firing indiscriminately.
At the Barau Dikko hospital in Kaduna on Saturday, the neighbour of 21-year-old Mary Ayuba stood beside her bed, looking down on her friend’s badly beaten head swathed in blood-clotted bandages.
”On Friday morning some youths broke into her house and killed the four people she was living with, three of them her brothers. This is what they did to her,” the neighbour said.
Fighting broke out in Kaduna on Wednesday when Muslim youths set fire to an office of ThisDay in protest at the Miss World article.
But on Thursday the trouble there spread to the city’s tense suburbs — scene two years ago of sectarian riots which left more than 2 000 people dead — as rival Christian and Muslim gangs battled it out. – Sapa-AFP