As Horrific Persecution against Nigeria’s Christians Continues, IRD Joins in Urging for Special Envoy

For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and at the last He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.  Job 19: 25-27

Persecution of Christians in Nigeria is not a new thing. Attacks on churches, imposition of Sharia, killings of individuals – even mass slaughter on Christian-majority areas – have been going on for decades. But currently the suffering of Nigeria’s Christians is like never before.  New reports of these attacks come almost daily. What can we do?

A great human rights activist, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, recently issued an urgent SOS for the Christians in Nigeria. If you have not read it, it is time to hear the truth that Levy learned in his visit. And a coalition to defend persecuted Christians has called for President Trump to appoint a U.S. Special Envoy for Nigeria and the Lake Chad region. You can add your voice to this call.

Boko Haram and Fulani Jihadists

Reports of attacks and deaths of Christians in the northern and middle belt states come at such a rate that I start to wonder if those areas will soon be completely “cleansed” of Christians. That is the point of all this killing, after all. The leader of Boko Haram, Abubakar Shegau (who should receive the same treatment from the United States as the other Abubakar) said some years ago that he had no more hesitation about killing a Christian than he did about “killing a chicken.”

In November 2013, the Obama State Department finally acknowledged that “midnight basketball” and rec centers would not stem the tide of Boko Haram and designated the jihadists as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), after three years of effort by Christian human rights and religious freedom activists. The jihadists have definitely proved our point now, declaring loyalty to ISIS and forming the Islamic State West African Province.

Boko Haram has been named one of the four top terrorist groups globally by the Global Terrorism Index.

Recently, Nigeria’s Christians have suffered even more violence and death because of “radicalized” Fulani “herdsmen.” The Global Terrorism Index reports, “In 2018, Fulani extremists were responsible for the majority of terror-related deaths in Nigeria at 1,158 fatalities. Terror-related deaths and incidents attributed to Fulani extremists increased by 261 and 308 per cent respectively from the prior year.”

Just as activists had to battle against a false narrative about the “impoverished, disenfranchised youths” of Boko Haram, a false narrative of false moral equivalence continues to exist about the Fulani jihadists. This narrative pits “herders” against “farmers” as if Nigeria’s central belt is Oklahoma.

But in this case, the “herders” and the farmers can’t be friends because the “herders” come with guns and RPG’s provided from the Gulf States and others happy to see the Christians go away. The “herders” come in the middle of the night and kill people in their beds. In fact, it is quite insulting to any normal Fulani herdsmen to refer to vicious jihadists in this euphemistic manner.

Numbers and statistics are overwhelming, but even more overwhelming is the realization that these statistics represent men, women, and children – individuals with their own hopes and dreams, with people who love them and now mourn for them. In just the past two months, enormous devastation has taken place in Christian communities in areas in such states as Plateau, Kaduna, and Borno.  Here are just a few of many, many examples:

• On the evening of Sunday, January 26, 2020, 14 people were killed in the village market square by Fulani jihadists in Bokkos local government area of Plateau State. (from local sources)
• January 20, we also received word of the murder of Lawan Andimi. The Chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), a Church of the Brethren pastor, was beheaded by Boko Haram after having been abducted by them on January 3.
• Also on January 20, a young Christian student from the University of Maiduguri, Ropvil Daciya Dalep, the young man in the cover photo for this article, was executed by a 10 year old terrorist brainwashed by ISWAP in Borno, “avenging” the death of Abubakar al Baghdadi during the US raid in Syria in October. He was abducted on January 9 with another student, Lilian Daniel Gyang, also from Plateau State, when returning to school from Jos after Christmas holidays.

One Nigerian Christian testified concerning Ropvil’s death, as videoed by the terrorists, that he “faced his death calmly:

no twitching, no hollering, no protestation, no groveling. Just a calm face. On strong knees. Surrendered not to his killers, but to the Maker of the very ground he was kneeling on. Ropvil looked into the lens of the camera in front of him. He stared calmly at mortal men playing god, but he turned his back on the messenger. . . the coward, who, though should be free, is trembling with the gun. Too afraid to face life, but embracing death, with stenchy rags covering his face. While he (the killer) cowers, Ropvil is the bravest. A true Plateau son. His face could hit the ground only in death, as he embraced his Savior.. . and lives on…and on…and on. (from local sources)

There are so many more stories. Not of people in combat, not of people killing and being killed, but of people living their lives, loving their Lord, and being killed in the most cowardly, despicable fashion. Two final heartwrenching stories demonstrate the craven, vile attacks taking place on Christians:

• On December 26, Martha Bulus and her two bridesmaids, were on their way to her wedding, traveling from Gwoza, Borno state to her hometown in Adamawa state. They were stopped, ordered from their vehicle, identified as Christians and then beheaded by suspected Boko Haram jihadists, church leaders said. Eight other Christians were killed in the same area on the same day, one church leader said.
• On December 16, Fulani jihadists killed a Christian woman, Mary Machief, and her baby daughter in Plateau state’s Bokkos County. There is a photo of Mary and her baby above.

An SOS from Bernard-Henri Levy

The great human rights activist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, known already as a defender of the Darfuri victims of the Islamist regime in Sudan, has taken up the cause of Nigerian Christians, as well. Levy visited Nigeria and issued an SOS for Christians in the Paris Match this past December. Having been familiar with Levy’s great work on Sudan in my own activism, I get the sense that he thought that he had seen it all, but then he went to Nigeria.

Journalist John Burger, in Catholic news service, Aleteia , recounted and translated Levy’s original French article, describing what Levy heard in Lagos (NOT the middle or northern belt!) from Fulani extremists themselves, radicalized by Islamist emirs who wooed them to the city to be able to finally “dip the Koran in the sea”:

“There are too many Christians in Lagos. Christians are dogs and sons of dogs. You say Christians. But, for us, they are traitors. They took the religion of the Whites. There is no room here for the friends of white people, these unclean people.”

Levy concludes, challenging:

There remains the terrible feeling, at the end of this trip, of having returned to the time, 2007, when the horsemen of Khartoum sowed death in the villages of Darfur; or, before that, in South Sudan, when the death of John Garang had not yet signaled the Islamists’ total war against the Christians; or, even before, in Rwanda, in those days of spring 1994 when no one wanted to believe that the fourth genocide of the 20th century was underway.

Will history be repeated in Nigeria? Will we wait, as usual, for the disaster to be consumed before being moved?

And will we remain idly by while the Islamist international, contained in Asia, fought in Europe, defeated in Syria and Iraq, opens a new front on this immense land where the sons of Abraham coexisted for a long time? This is the whole point of this trip to the heart of the Nigerian darkness. This is the whole meaning of the Christian SOS of Nigeria that I am launching here today.

An SOS from Save The Persecuted Christians. . . and you?

A similar SOS is now with President Donald Trump, issued in a letter asking for him to appoint a U.S. Special Envoy for Nigeria and surrounding region. The letter was sponsored by the Save The Persecuted Christians coalition, of which IRD is a founding member. Why a special envoy?

Years ago activists and religious freedom advocates wanted to help the people in southern Sudan – to stop genocide and slavery and what was a religious and racist jihad against black, African southern Sudanese Christians and Muslims. We urged President George W. Bush to appoint a special envoy for Sudan.

After great efforts to ensure that the wrong choice was not made on who should be the envoy, the U.S.’s first envoy for Sudan, former Senator the Reverend John Danforth was chosen. He was the right choice. On a sunny morning, September 6, 2001, (and that’s a whole other story) Danforth’s installation took place in a well-attended Rose Garden ceremony full of hope and promise. And it was the start of new efforts, new ideas that led to the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan.

In a January 27 statement upon the release of the letter, Save The Persecuted Christians explained:

STPC has urged the appointment of an envoy because of extreme violence against Christians there. At least 1,000 Christians were killed in 2019, with more than 5,000 killed since 2015, according to a recent U.K. report. The European Parliament, moreover, has just issued its own report decrying what it describes as “extermination of human beings or ethnic cleansing” in Nigeria noting that: “These attacks have continued with total impunity with perpetrators rarely being held to account whereas Amnesty International report has demonstrated (willful) negligence by the Nigerian security forces concerning deadly attacks against farming communities.”

The letter warns that “implications of this crisis extend far beyond Nigeria. Its potential implosion may result in a gargantuan bloodbath and send millions of refugees to nations near-and-far unprepared to support them.”

We told the President that we “consider the stakes in this matter, both for our own country and for our vital interests around the world, to be sufficiently great” that he should “appoint a prominent and highly respected champion of religious freedo as his Special Envoy to bring a redoubled effort to monitoring the situation on the ground in Nigeria and the Lake Chad region and, even more important, to forge and execute an appropriate U.S. strategy for ameliorating it.”

In the passage from Job quoted at the top of this article, we look at the grievous deaths of our brothers and sisters in Christ and affirm our only real hope, the truth of God’s redemption, the promise of Eternal life with Him, the vindication of the Lord against the evil done to His children. But here and now, WE who live in freedom can also make a difference, and, by the grace of God, help redeem the lives of Nigerian Christians.

Pray for the success of the letter to President Trump and for the right person to be chosen as Special Envoy. Share the letter with your church. Send a copy of your members of Congress and ask them to get behind this initiative to answer the SOS from Nigeria.