GBEJI, Nigeria - It's won plaudits for foreign peacekeeping efforts, but Nigeria's army is becoming feared at home after village massacres and the heavy-handed suppression of religious and ethnic unrest in five cities. Soldiers are being steadily drawn into the sectarian turmoil that has plagued Africa's most populous nation since President Olusegun Obasanjo's 1999 election ended more than 15 years of military rule. The massacre of hundreds of villagers in late October has raised concerns about how much control Obasanjo, himself a former military ruler in the 1970s, wields over the troops in coup-prone Nigeria. "Is the chain of military command being obeyed?" asked Ogaba Oche, a political analyst at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. "This is a question that the president should answer."
Obasanjo's government faces a complex web of ethnic, religious and regional divisions that have bedeviled all previous civilian governments. Since winning independence from Britain in 1960, Nigerians have never seen an elected leader last in office more than four years. Generals have successfully staged seven coups over the years, capitalizing on public anger about corruption, violence and political wrangling to install dictatorships. Nigeria's latest violent upsurge includes Muslim-Christian fighting in cities that has killed at least 5,000 people, and perhaps twice that many, according to some estimates. In rural areas, tribal bloodletting is on the rise. An attack by ethnic Tiv militants that killed 19 soldiers reportedly led to army retaliation against at least seven villages in the eastern Benue state. During an Oct. 22-24 rampage, soldiers rounded up and gunned down hundreds of unarmed men and a few women and children, mainly Tivs. Troops also burned houses, schools, clinics even police stations. Obasanjo ordered a judicial inquiry into the violent episode, yet also suggested the soldiers responsible for the killings "may have been defending themselves."
Tiv leaders accuse the defense minister, Theophilus Danjuma, of ordering the killings and say soldiers have long been hostile to Tivs in their dispute with ethnic Jukuns, rivals in a two-decade-long fight over land rights. Danjuma, a Jukun who has publicly blamed Tivs for the ethnic conflict, denied ordering the massacre. Soldiers also are enforcing curfews and other judicial measures in five cities where religious fighting has razed entire neighborhoods. The cities Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Makurdi and Warri have an estimated combined population of more than 6 million. Oche, the political analyst, said Nigerian troops have been sent on peacekeeping missions to such places as Liberia, Sierra Leone and Bosnia-Herzegovina in a bid to prevent ambitious officers from hatching coups. Now, he and other observers worry, the interventions in crises at home could kindle ethnic and religious differences within the military itself. Two weeks after the Benue massacre, a soldier who was apparently drunk gunned down seven Muslim worshippers after a cleric refused orders to stop preaching in a taxi park near an army base in the city of Kaduna, where Nigeria's religious rioting began last year. "Nigerians are afraid of divisions in the military pushing our trained soldiers to take sides," Oche said. "On a large enough scale, it could unstick the glue holding Nigeria together." Regional divisions also are tugging at Nigeria, which is a member of OPEC. Politicians are calling for increased powers and oil revenues to be given to state and local governments, an idea Obasanjo's government is resisting in fear of boosting the influence of regional leaders, many of whom have hired tribal and religious militias to fight rampant crime. A few politicians have even spoken of regional separatism a prospect that Obasanjo's government has labeled "treason." "What is happening in Nigeria shows we aren't really a nation, just a lot of individual nations juggled together," said Beko Ransome-Kuti, a prominent human rights activist in Lagos.
Despite fresh memories of corrupt and brutal military juntas, recent instability has prompted a few Nigerians to talk nostalgically of the days when the army squelched freedoms and factional fighting. "We never saw this kind of bloodshed even when Abacha was in control," lawmaker Gabriel Suswam said, referring to the late dictator Sani Abacha, whose death in 1998 paved the way for the return to civilian government. Although Obasanjo's government has launched badly needed reforms of telecommunications, water and power infrastructure that were left to decay by successive dictators, average people often see little reason to celebrate democracy. "I prefer the military to a civilian government. I can see no difference in democracy, except that we have all this violence," said Kafilat Ibrahim, a 24-year-old sales clerk.