The murder of Shiites

Last week, a Kaduna State government official gave the shocking detail of how he spent five hours burying 347 victims of last December clash between soldiers and members of an Islamic sect, the Islamic Movement in Nigeria otherwise known as Shi’ites. Yes, you read correctly, yet-to-be-identified agents of the state using bullets paid for by the same citizens in the year 2015 gunned down 347 Nigerians and were it not for the judicial commission set up by the Kaduna State government, it is doubtful if a word of this would have come out.

As painful as this gory revelation is, greater pain for some of us who insist on the rule of law as the basis for conducting our affairs in this country is the lame defence being put up by some people that Nigeria, and by implication, Nigerians, deserved to be treated differently. Indeed, some people have advocated the suspension of our constitution for President Muhammadu Buhari to govern. That it takes more than one person, however, to change the fortunes of a country surely must rank as the major revelation of Buhari’s government just we equally need more than body language to put things in order. That’s why we need more than diplomatic queries from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which have affiliation with the Shi’ites, and a damning report by Amnesty International to get justice for those murdered. Amnesty, in a statement, wants to protect the burial site and calls for a full forensic investigation following what it called “horrific revelations of the slaughter and secret burial.”

Namadi Musa, the director-general of Interfaith agency in Kaduna, said the burial of these victims took place between 12:30 and 5:30 am on December 14. To show that he knew what he was saying, Musa added that he counted the bodies as they were being put in the mass grave with an army major named Ogundare leading three military trucks with corpses while he had five trucks loaded with corpses from the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, Shika, Zaria. The report of Musa’s testimony as published by this newspaper: https://www.thecable.ng/spent-5-hours-burying-347-shiites-victims will melt even the most stone-hearted individual. It was so detailed that the man must have kept meticulous records probably knowing that a day like last Monday will come. The Shi’ites have actually claimed that 705 of its members were killed in the clash because of an altercation between the group and the chief of army staff, Tukur Buratai’s convoy.

It is so easy to demonise the Shi’ites especially because of their unconventional life style. But as far as their activities are carried out within the ambits of the law, we must learn to co-exist with them. If they fell foul of any law of the land, we can only resort to diligent prosecution in a properly constituted court of law. It is also good enough that President Buhari in his last media chat in December shortly after the incident happened, said he was waiting for the investigations to be concluded by both the military and the police. He added that he would equally wait for the report of the commission of enquiry by the Kaduna State government. Fine, but how well positioned is the military to investigate its own atrocity? What about the obvious conflict of interest since their chief of staff was involved? Can Buratai appear before any panel headed by one of his soldiers knowing well that the latter’s career trajectory depends largely on the army chief? The president in that media chat said, “There are some teenagers I saw stoning Generals, I don’t want to talk too much about it,” which could be interpreted to mean espirit de corps remembering that he is a general too. Good enough that he admitted that “the deaths are not justifiable” but we have to do more than a judicial commission of enquiry. Who is the Ogundare that Musa named in his testimony? For whatever it is worth, how far with the army investigation, if any? What about the police investigation?

We cannot build a prosperous and just society when we resort to the law of the jungle, a reason why we must all condemn and demand full investigation into what happened in Zaria. The Shi’ites have repeatedly claimed that their leader, who is reportedly being held incommunicado in Abuja, has gone blind and have been denied access to his lawyers, their reasons for shunning the Kaduna State commission of enquiry. How true is this?  It is amusing and painful that the usual crowd of grandiloquent human rights community in Nigeria is keeping mute on this matter particularly when majority of those murdered were women and children. The Shi’ites have their excesses no doubt, but we cannot keep quiet over the deaths of 347 people just like that, the least our government can do is to ensure that perpetrators are brought book and justice served.