February 24, 2000
Paul Ejime
PANA Correspondent
LAGOS, Nigeria (PANA) - President Olusegun Obasanjo said he would "seek out and punish the perpetrators" of the bloody riots that have reportedly claimed up to 100 lives in Kaduna in northern Nigeria.
Press reports said Thursday that the violence has spread to neighbouring towns.
In a national broadcast, Obasanjo condemned the "destruction of lives and property" in three days of mayhem which erupted Monday in clashes between Moslems and Christians over the planned introduction of the Islamic Sharia administrative system in Kaduna state.
Reassuring his traumatised compatriots, he warned that his administration "is irrevocably committed to ensuring security and protection of life and property for all.
"We will leave no stone unturned, nor will we mind whose goat is gored in our determination to protect lives and seek out and punish the perpetrators of the terrible atrocities," he added.
He denounced the carnage as not only "criminal but highly unpatriotic, particularly now that the international community is beginning to regain its confidence in our nation."
Multi-religious and ethnically-diverse Nigeria is no stranger to sectarian violence, which has claimed thousands of lives in the past, especially in the northern part of the nation.
The country has a secular constitution.
But the Kaduna crisis would appear to have shaken the young democracy under "born-again" Christian Obasanjo.
Kaduna is now under curfew, with troops and police patrolling the streets, while normal life has grounded to halt.
The religious tension is said to have spread to the neighbouring towns of Zaria, Kachia and Kafanchan, displacing thousands of people in its wake, with dozens of churches, mosques, other public and residential buildings and vehicles set ablaze.
Television footage and press photographs of the destruction showed charred bodies on the streets.
Apart from Obasanjo, other Nigerian political and religious leaders have condemned the Kaduna riots, with the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the country's 469-seat national assembly, calling for a legal interpretation of the Sharia law in relation to the federal constitution, the supreme law of the land.
The Sharia issue was initiated by the northern state of Zamfara which introduced the system in October, amid strong protests from non-Moslems, especially Christians, despite assurances by the state authorities that the system would only apply to Moslems.
It was amid the national controversy that Kaduna launched its own process, while several other northern states also intensified efforts to follow the Zamfara example.
But in a legal twist to the crisis, a human rights group headed by Lagos lawyer Olisa Agbokoba, a senior advocate of Nigeria, has initiated a legal challenge to the Zamfara action.
A lawyer at the Agbokoba chambers in Lagos told PANA Thursday that the group, Human Rights Law Service, filed a suit Wednesday at the Zamfara High court in the state capital Gusau, seeking clarification on the constitutionality of Sharia.
The federal attorney-general and his colleague in Zamfara are joined as respondents in the suit which among other issues, raises the fundamental question of whether the application of Sharia "would not endanger the continuance of a federal government in Nigeria."
This is in relation to provisions of the 1999 federal constitution, which forbids state religion.
No date has been fixed for the hearing of the landmark case, which the group said could go to the supreme court to try and resolve a sensitive and potentially dangerous religious crisis.