Acting President Goodluck Jonathan had promised that the fighting would stop after more than 300 people were slain in January. Jonathan fired his national security adviser late Monday night following the weekend violence. “After the January killings, the villages should have been properly protected,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said. “Clearly, previous efforts to tackle the underlying causes have been inadequate, and in the meantime the wounds have festered and grown deeper.”
Human Rights Watch also urged Jonathan to provide protection for those in the small villages surrounding Jos, a central Nigerian city that has become the fault line for religious violence in the region.
Those who survived attacks on Sunday in three mostly Christian villages said security forces never provided them any guards, even though Jos itself has remained under a dusk-to dawn curfew since January’s fighting. “It’s time to draw a line in the sand,” Human Rights Watch researcher Corinne Dufka said in a statement on Tuesday.
