Sharia debate reignites violence in Nigeria

Nigerian security forces intensified efforts yesterday to halt renewed religious violence in the northern city of Kaduna, in which more than 200 people have died.

Hundreds of buildings - including mosques and churches -have been burned to the ground since fighting broke out Monday.

These intense religious clashes are a reprisal of the bloodshed sparked in February by protests from the Christian community against Muslim demands for the imposition of strict Islamic law.

This comes a year after President Olusegun Obasanjo - the country's first southern Christian president in more than 20 years - wrested rule from the long-ensconced military. But despite his advances toward civil society, the religious and ethnic divisions now surfacing threaten to derail Mr. Obasanjo's attempts to redress a legacy of institutional collapse, political oppression, and economic ruin.

And some observers say the country's spiritual leaders are partly to blame.

"No one has really been able to coordinate the religious leaders," says James Wuye, joint leader of a Christian-Muslim conflict resolution association in Kaduna. "The bishops and sheikhs should have been seen on the streets together preaching peace with megaphones."

Nigeria is divided about evenly between Christians and Muslims. In Kaduna, where the two meet in roughly equal numbers, the cultural divisions have proven particularly explosive.

The dilemma at the heart of Nigeria's religious differences remains: the desire among the Muslim population in the north, to live according to the strict edicts of the sharia penal code, which includes the use of amputation and capital punishment.

In areas where they are in the minority, many Christians fear that sharia will lead to their subjugation to the laws of another faith. Moreover, across Nigeria most Christians believe that the country's religious and ethnic diversity necessitates an essentially secular constitution.

And Obasanjo seems to be delivering on that call. In recent weeks, his combined use of military muscle and low-profile negotiations through religious and traditional leaders appeared to have allayed the immediate crisis. There seemed to have been a relatively stable hiatus in the fighting.

But that appears to have been a false hope. "People have been exploiting the continuing tensions," says Shehu Sani, a leading Kaduna-based human rights activist. "In such a climate rumor-mongering can have an explosive effect. Not enough has been to done to reconcile the two groups since [February's violence]."

Since the turn of the 20th century, when the British conquered the Sokoto caliphate and extended colonial rule into what is now northern Nigeria, the application of sharia in Muslim communities has been restricted largely to civil and customary law.

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