…urge sack of chief of army staff
Hundreds of Birom women from Plateau State resident in Abuja on Thursday stormed the National Assembly protesting Sunday’s attack on Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Rasat villages in the state, where over 500 persons were killed. The women also called for the removal of Abdulraman Dambazzau, chief of army staff, over alleged culpability of the military in the crisis.
Plateau State governor, Jonah Jang, had on Tuesday blamed the military for failing to respond to his warning that movements of armed men had been reported by villagers shortly before Sunday’s attacks.
The women dressed in black carrying placards and singing Christian songs arrived at the sprawling National Assembly complex as early as 8 a.m. demanding to have audience with Senate President David Mark.
Some of the placards read: ‘Dambazzau, the chief of army staff must go’, ‘GOC Jos masterminded killing in Jos’, ‘stop genocide in Plateau’, ‘please save us from home-made terrorism’ and ‘outright execution of culprits, a lasting solution”.
Deborah Kanmor, spokeswoman of the group, demanded that indicted persons in past and present crisis should be made to face the full weight of the law, saying “notable people indicted in the past are walking the town free and are yet to be brought to book”.
She demanded that following the alleged complicity of the military in the massacre, the chief of army staff should be removed alongside those who went to sleep when they were supposed to enforce the curfew that had been imposed in the area since January after the last crisis.
More than 300 people were arrested in January and about half of them were due to be sent to the capital, Abuja, for prosecution, but it is unclear how many actually faced justice.
Local officials said many of those responsible for January’s violence were the same people arrested but not prosecuted after similar unrest in November 2008.
Dimeji Bankole, speaker, House of Representatives, who was asked by David Mark to address the women, said he did not believe in setting up of commission of inquiry since previous panels failed to stem the recurrence of the crisis.
According to him, “I want you (Kanmor) to select some of your women and come up to meet with us so that we can work out measures to resolve this crisis. We should go beyond religious divide; we should go beyond ethnic divide; this country belongs to all of us and we all must sit down to resolve the problem”.
Officials of the National Assembly served bottled water to some of the women who were carrying babies and who had been in the sun for long. Some of the women cried uncontrollably throughout the period of the protest with some of them sitting on bare floor at the car park.
In the city of Jos, dressed in black and wielding wooden crosses, thousands of women marched on Thursday to express grief at a new bout of sectarian carnage and anger at the failure to stop it.
The demonstration in the flashpoint city of Jos coincided with the start of a three-day fast ordered by the authorities in central Plateau State in a symbolic commitment of reconciliation between Muslims and Christians.
“We are mourning because of the children that were killed on Sunday, we are coming as a mass to cry out,” said 32-year-old Rebecca Adiwu as she joined in the mass protest in Jos.
Some carried Bibles, others wooden crosses, and some held the branches of mango trees in a sign of solidarity.
“We do not want soldiers! No more soldiers!” the protesters chanted, waving their Bibles and crosses in the air.
Helen Laraba, a 26-year-old tailor who was among the women in black, also vented her anger at the military which has been accused of failing to respond to reports that gangs of machete-wielding Muslims had gone on the rampage.
Troop reinforcements are now patrolling the city and the surrounding villages but locals said it was too little, too late.