Election Fuels Deadly Clashes in Nigeria

Ethnic and religious tensions between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, discrimination by southerners against immigrants from the north, and frustration over corruption in a country where most subsist on less than $2 a day while top officials have access to billions in oil revenues have set off the latest round of clashes, much as they have in the past.

While more than 300 were killed in Nigeria’s presidential election four years ago, the death toll appeared to be higher this year, as the violence that flared in the wake of the re-election of Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the south, instigated a cycle of action and reaction.

Mobs of Muslim youths in the north began rioting after the defeated opposition candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the north, failed to rein in his supporters. That set off a wave of retaliation against Muslims in Kaduna State in the north, according to Shehu Sani, the head of a leading Nigerian civil rights group.

Mr. Sani, who lives in Kaduna, said Sunday that more than 500 people, mostly Muslims, had been killed in three villages in Kaduna alone since the April 16 presidential election. There was no independent verification of the figure; the authorities have been chary of releasing death tolls for fear of inflaming further violence.

Human Rights Watch said that about 140 were killed in political violence between November and April 17, the day after the election, while acknowledging that many more had died since. Mr. Sani said the total number of victims in the recent violence could top 1,000.

“For presidential elections, on this scale, it’s new,” said Chidi Odinkalu of the Open Society Justice Initiative, adding that the only comparable episodes of violence occurred in the mid-1960s and early 1980s, both times leading to the overthrow of incumbent governments.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch said Sunday that one village in Kaduna “looks like a war zone,” with “not one building standing” and a mosque that had been “gutted.” The researcher, Eric Guttschuss, said he had seen a mosque in another village, Marada Rio, that had been burned down, with anti-Islam graffiti scratched into the ruins, next to inscription reading, “Jesus is Lord.” In other villages, entire streets had been burned down, Mr. Guttschuss said.

Sunday was a day of relative calm in the worst-hit areas like Kaduna, as residents observed a curfew, cleared debris, buried their dead and attended Easter services amid a heavy military and police presence. But there were fears that next week’s elections for governors might bring a renewal of the mayhem.

Mr. Odinkalu said that it was “difficult to come up with a single organizing theory” for the violence. But the persistent cleavage between the country’s relatively wealthier, oil-producing south and its impoverished north, fueled by the intermingling of populations and religions, appeared to lie at the base of this episode, as in previous ones.

Riots in the Muslim north followed Mr. Jonathan’s decisive defeat last week of Mr. Buhari, 57 to 31 percent, in a vote that foreign-observer groups said was perhaps Nigeria’s fairest ever. Mr. Buhari, a former military dictator, swept the north, and after his defeat knife- and machete-wielding youths in northern towns like Kano rampaged through the streets, chanting the general’s name and attacking supporters of Mr. Jonathan’s majority party.

Unlike Mr. Jonathan, Mr. Buhari had refused to condemn, in advance, a possible violent reaction to the election result — a silence analysts said nearly amounted to an invitation to his supporters to take to the streets.

Analysts said the rioting reflected, in part, northern frustration that the dominant party did not allocate its slot on the presidential ballot to a northerner, as would have been expected under an unwritten practice of alternating northern and southern rule of the country.