As the Lindisfarne Centre’s recent report showed, attacks on Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt have in recent years both significantly increased in number and spread geographically from being predominantly in the area around Bauchi and Plateau states to now affect much of the Middle Belt. The victims are overwhelmingly Christians or adherents of African Traditional Religions (ATR) and the alleged perpetrators are overwhelmingly Fulani Muslims. Whilst climate change driving Muslim Fulani herders further south undoubtedly forms part of the context, as our report demonstrated the killings also appear to be driven by a radicalisation of some Fulani that has encouraged them to view raids on Christian villages as part of a jihad legitimised by interpretations of Islam which have traditionally been taught in many west African madrassas. The killings have reached such a level that in 2018 the Nigerian House of Representatives declared that them to constitute “genocide”.

It is therefore extraordinary that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)’s latest annual report issued this month, in its treatment of Nigeria entirely omits any reference to these attacks on Christians in the Middle Belt. As we stated in our report, the sheer number of attacks on Christian villages which often specifically target churches, combined with the repeated      failure of Nigerian security forces to prevent such attacks, has regrettably led to a small number of young men from the Christian community beginning to engage in vigilante attacks on innocent Muslim communities. Such attacks are unquestionably to be condemned. But it is extraordinary that the USCIRF report on Nigeria gives two examples of such attacks – although one is not even from the Middle Belt - while at the same time entirely ignoring the vastly greater number of attacks on Christian villages and deliberate destruction of churches.

To put the significance of this omission into context

-          According to the Global Terrorism Index during 2014 Nigeria’s Boko Haram became the world’s deadliest terrorist organisation, killing more people than even Islamic State – which was then at the height of its power in Syria and Iraq. However, by 2016 the Fulani militias were killing even more people than Boko Haram.

•          Since then the numbers killed by Fulani militias have continued to increase, and whilst the numbers killed by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) which split from it, have roughly equally targeted military and civilian targets, the Fulani militia have focused on non-Muslim civilian targets.
•  

In just the last fortnight, reports from the Nigerian press have included the killings of at least 130 people in Plateau State by Fulani herders. While in Benue State “scores” were reported to have been killed as a result of having been burnt alive in their houses when attacked by a group of around 50 armed Fulani militia on a Sunday. Even at the time of writing, the Nigerian press were reporting a further ongoing attack currently taking place on other villages in Benue State where Christians had been killed earlier in the month. It simply cannot be argued that there is a lack of evidence as to what is happening.

The USCIRF has for many years been regarded as something of a gold standard in reporting on international freedom of religion or belief and has independently reported on situations which Western governments were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge. For example, its report published in February 2012 clearly called out Boko Haram as being a terrorist organisation which was specifically targeting Christians in Nigeria. At the time, Western governments tended to repeat the Nigerian government’s line that what was happening in northern Nigeria was “communal tensions” between Christians and Muslims due to socio-economic differences. Yet not much more than a year later in June 2013 the Nigerian President designated Boko Haram a terrorist organisation, a move followed by the UK government in July 2013 and the US State Department that November, only a year before the Global Terrorism Index listed it as the world’s most deadly terrorist organisation.

Yet this time it is different. In its 2018 annual report, the USCIRF clearly called out the large scale of the violence in the middle belt and the claims of Nigerian Christians living there that they are being subjected to large scale ethnic and religious cleansing. Yet since then, it has increasingly downplayed this to the extent that the Nigeria section of its 2021 annual report contained the dissenting individual judgements of three of its then commissioners.  Commissioners Gary L Bauer and James W Carr each individually voiced their profound concerns that the report had failed to adequately address the scale of attacks being experienced by Christians in Nigeria. While Commissioner Johnnie Moore also voiced a more general concern that the international community was simply ignoring the scale of what was happening in Nigeria asked the question “will it take a caliphate in West Africa to awaken the international community?”

However, in this latest USCIRF report, no such dissenting voices have been published. There is simply no reference to what many in Nigeria have already referred to as a genocide. Whether or not what is happening to Christians in Nigeria meets the specific legal criteria for a genocide prosecution – which is likely to largely be determined by whether evidence of genocidal intent can be proved - it is indisputable that large numbers of unarmed civilians, including women and children specifically targeted and killed, while hundreds of Christian churches have also been deliberately destroyed. These have long been recognised to constitute “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes” respectively in international criminal law regardless of whether they are undertaken by state or non-state actors.

As such the US Commission on International Religious Freedom urgently needs to explain why it choose to omit all references to these targeted killings of Christians in Nigeria’s Middle Belt from its latest annual report.