Sunday's killings in Jos, were an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, writes the New York Times' Adam Nossiter in a vivid report from the scene.
Jos and the region around it are on the fault line where the volatile and poor Muslim north and the Christian south meet. In the past decade, some 3,000 people have been killed in interethnic, interreligious violence in this fraught zone. The pattern is familiar and was seen as recently as January: uneasy coexistence suddenly explodes into killing, amplified for days by retaliation.
While Nossiter's chilling account of the cold blooded testimony of the killers as they sit in police captivity is compelling, he does not delve into the causes of the conflict, beyond point to the obvious religious divide in Nigeria.
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In fact the conflict In Jos, as elsewhere in the region, especially in neighbouring Niger is caused by a struggle for resources amid explosive population growth.
As the AFP reporter Aminu Abubakar has pointed out (and Nossiter reaffirms) the the original cause of the bloody clash was the theft of cattle.
As is common in these cases settler-farmers were blamed by cattle herders. Peter Cunliffe Jones whose "My Nigeria: Five Decades of Independence was published by Palgrave MacMillan in September wrote recently in the Guardian "Often the fighting in the north is between the semi-nomadic cattle herders (who happen to be mostly Muslim) and settler-farmers (who happen to be mostly Christian), fighting about the diminishing access to land."
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