Douglas Murray on the Plight of Nigeria's Northern Christians

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray, writing for The Spectator (February 4,2017), asks, "Who will protect Nigeria's northern Christians?"

For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest. These tribal-led villages, each with their own 'paramount ruler', were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians - from the bishop down - sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. The international community pretends that this situation is a tit-for-tat problem, rather than a one-sided slaughter. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the press fails to report or actively obscures the situation. Christians in the south of the country feel little solidarity with their co-religionists suffering from this Islamic revivalism and territorial conquest in the north. And worst of all, the plight of these people is of no interest to their own government. In fact, this ethnic and religious cleansing appears to be taking place with that government's complicity or connivance.

I don't know that Murray is right in claiming that Nigeria's southern Christians "feel little solidarity" with the northern Christians, but there may be little that the southern churches can do if the government is supporting the Muslim Fulani in 'cleansing' the north of its Christians.