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Africa
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("allAfrica.com," December 5, 2002)
By unanimous vote of its holy synod, the Eritrean Orthodox Church has anointed Abune Yacob as its second patriarch.
Yacob's coronation as patriarch comes two and a half months after the death of the first patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Church, Abune Filipos. He died at the age of 102 of natural causes following a brief illness in September.
Filipos was widely regarded as the spiritual father of the country, and was highly respected for his outspoken criticism of Italian, British, and Ethiopian control of Eritrea prior to its independence.
With his coronation as patriarch, 76-year old Yacob is now the spiritual leader of more than a million Eritrean Orthodox Christians, who constitute slightly less than half of this tiny Horn of Africa nation's 3.5 million people.
Eritrea is divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians. The vast majority of Christians in the country follow the Orthodox Church.
The Eritrean Orthodox Church split from its Ethiopian counterpart after Eritrea declared independence in May 1993.
by Mildred Mulenga (AP, December 5, 2002)
LUSAKA, Zambia - A Zambian archbishop, who horrified the Catholic Church when he wedded a Korean acupuncturist, returned home on visit from Italy Thursday, and declared that his marriage had been a mistake from the very beginning.
"I do realize that there are hundreds of thousands of supporters who depend on me for pastoral guidance and as such I belong to them all," Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo told reporters at Lusaka International Airport. "There is no way in which a single individual can be allowed to own or consume this body of Christ alone."
When the Vatican heard of Milingo's marriage to Maria Sung in a mass wedding ceremony blessed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon last year it summoned him to Rome.
Milingo subsequently rejected his marriage on an appeal from Pope John Paul II and was then sent on a year-long spiritual retreat to Argentina to make peace with the Church.
Milingo, 72, maintained Thursday that he had not initially intended to marry Sung, but said he was merely trying to expand his pastoral mission.
He admitted he had later erred, but said he had since reconciled with the Church.
Long before his marriage, Milingo caused controversy in the Church by conducting unorthodox religious ceremonies.
He was summoned to Rome in 1983 after resigning from his post as archbishop of Lusaka, for performing faith healing and exorcisms. Large crowds of people then flocked to Rome seeking cures from Milingo, and the Vatican removed him from his post there.
Milingo said had agreed to abide by church conventions and was happy to serve his new parish in Zagarolo, 30 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of Rome.
While in Zambia, Milingo is scheduled to celebrate a a public mass Dec. 14 and visit family members.
Two months ago Sung traveled to Lusaka for a highly publicized visit, during which she accused the Vatican of holding her husband in a cell against his will and meddling in their marriage.
(Reuters, November 28, 2002)
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigeria's supreme Islamic body said Thursday Muslims should ignore a fatwa issued by a northern state calling for the death of a journalist whose article on the Miss World pageant sparked bloody riots.
The statement by the Jama'atu Nasril Islam was circulated as President Olusegun Obasanjo faced angry church leaders in the riot-torn city of Kaduna who said most of the more than 200 dead in the unrest were Christian.
Conservative Zamfara state issued the fatwa against Isioma Daniel, a female journalist in her early 20s, whose article on the Miss World pageant enraged Muslims. The Kaduna office of her newspaper ThisDay was razed by irate Muslim youths at the start of the riots on November 20.
"The Zamfara state government has no authority to issue fatwa and the fatwa issued by it should be ignored," the statement said.
The story in ThisDay angered Muslims by suggesting the Prophet Mohammed would have approved of Miss World and possibly married one of the contestants. The journalist has since fled Nigeria.
The rioting triggered by the report led to the beauty pageant being hurriedly moved to the United Kingdom.
More than 3,000 people died in Kaduna in two bouts of Muslim-Christian clashes in February and May 2000 over plans to introduce Muslim sharia law there, in Nigeria's worst sectarian upheaval.
The latest violence in the oil-rich African state has cast a shadow over plans for the first presidential and national elections since the end of military rule in 1999, which are due in the early part of next year.
Colleagues at ThisDay newspaper say she is now in the United States, according to Reuters news agency.
On Tuesday, authorities in the northern state of Zamfara issued what they said was a "fatwa", urging Muslims to kill her for writing the article, which sparked religious riots in the northern city of Kaduna.
At least 220 people were killed in several days of clashes between the city's Muslims and Christians. Kaduna is now reported to be calm.
A fatwa is a religious decree which is normally made by an Islamic scholar but a spokesman for Zamfara state said that any leader could issue one.
Opinion is divided among Muslim leaders about whether the Zamfara fatwa is indeed valid.
Some say that because Ms Daniel has apologised and also resigned from her job, she does not deserve to be killed.
Political divide
The new journalism graduate wrote an article in response to Muslim objections to Nigeria's hosting of the Miss World beauty contest, saying that the Prophet Mohammed would not have complained about the pageant and indeed, may have chosen to marry one of the beauty queens.
This infuriated many Muslims, who destroyed ThisDay's Kaduna office and went on to burn down churches and hotels last week.
Correspondents say this is the latest example of a split between politicians in the Muslim north and the federal government, which is largely made up of southern Christians.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian, is seeking re-election next year.
The federal government has said that it will not allow the death sentence to be carried but no action is being taken against the deputy governor of Zamfara state.
'Null and void'
Mamuda Aliyu Shinkafi told religious leaders in Zamfara state capital, Gusau: "Like Salman Rushdie, the blood of Isioma Daniel can be shed."
The speech was rebroadcast on local radio in Zamfara state, which was the first state in Nigeria to introduce Islamic law in January 2000.
"It is binding on all Muslims wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty".
The Miss World contest was moved to London after the riots.
A Muslim cleric in the capital, Abuja, said that Ms Daniel could only escape the death penalty by converting to Islam.
Hussein Muhammed told the BBC Focus on Africa programme that if he saw her, he would kill her, even if that meant going to prison because Islamic law is more important to him than Nigerian law.
"I would be willing to kill my parents for Mohammed," he said.
But other Muslim leaders have a different view.
"ThisDay newspaper has apologised on her (Ms Daniel's) behalf, so the fatwa has to be withdrawn," Kaduna-based Islamic scholar Ali Alkali told Reuters.
Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said: "We are extremely concerned about her safety. In this whole controversy, I think something that has been completely lost is the universal right to free expression."
THE Osun State Police Command has arrested seven students of the Osun State College of Technology (OSCOTECH), Esa-Oke and shot dead one over their alleged membership of a cult and engaging in cult activities.
The state’s Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO), Joshua Olayemi (DSP) while parading the alleged cultists before newsmen in Osogbo, on Wednesday, said they were arrested while trying to initiate two new members.
The PPRO said the suspects were arrested at Excel Private Secondary School, Ijebu-Jesa on Wednesday, during the initiation.
The PPRO disclosed that one of the suspects was shot three and two others wounded when they attempted to escape.
He said three empty shells of cartridges of double barrel gun, shoes and dangerous weapons were recovered from them.
Olayemi stated that when police stormed their hideout in the early hours of Wednesday, the suspects opened fire on the police but when they discovered that they could not withstand the firepower of the police, some of them fled.
The PPRO explained that thrde of the suspects were arrested at the spot while others were picked up at various locations.
One of the cultists, Adedoyin, who spoke with newsmen confirmed that they were arrested while trying to initiate new members into the Buccaneer Association of Nigeria (BAN).
Meanwhile, the command has debunked the claim that 16 people including the Chief Personal Assistant (CPA) to Governor Bisi Akande, Gbenga Adebusuyi were arrested with arms and ammunition.
The PPRO said in a statement in Osogbo yesterday that only charms were recovered from the people contrary to what was reported by some newspapers.
(Reuters, November 25, 2002)
ANKARA (Reuters) - President Ahmet Necdet Sezer warned Turkey's new government on Sunday against lifting a ban on wearing the Islamic-style headscarf in public offices, saying such a move would threaten the country's secularism.
The remarks highlighted friction between Sezer and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which traces its roots to two parties banned for Islamic fundamentalism, in a Muslim nation that strictly separates state and religion.
Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, whose wife covers her hair, has said he would work to lift a ban on women wearing headscarves in universities and state offices, but that it was not a top priority for the new administration.
"It benefits no one for the headscarf issue, which has reappeared on the agenda, to create problems again," Sezer said in comments carried by local television.
"Allowing the headscarf in public-sector areas is impossible because it is unconstitutional... (Wearing) the headscarf in the private sphere is a freedom, but Constitutional Court decisions have already solved the issue of whether it is acceptable or not in the public sphere," he said.
Secularists like Sezer and the influential military see the headscarf as an Islamist challenge in Turkey, a candidate for European Union membership as well as being a NATO member and close ally of the United States.
Turkey's generals, self-proclaimed guardians of the secular order, pressured the first Islamist-led government to quit in 1997 for what they saw as a dangerous tilt towards religious law.
The AKP, which won a landslide victory in November 3 elections, has fought off the Islamist label and says it is a conservative and secular party.
Gul has said he sees the headscarf issue as a matter of religious freedom. His government has pledged to expand political and human rights in order to meet EU criteria.
by David Finkel ("Washington Post," November 24, 2002)
FUNTUA, Nigeria
In the continuing search for justice, comes now Case No. 88/2002: "Theft of Sheep and Ram."
The facts, as outlined in the court files, couldn't be more ordinary.
There was a sheep. There was a ram. They were worth about $30. They were stolen.
The trial, which has just begun, seems unexceptional as well.
"Did you steal them?" asks the judge, who sits at the front of a hot, heavy-aired, cement box of a room whose wall decorations are an out-of-date calendar, a leather bag with a copy of the Koran inside, and a whip.
"Yes," says the first defendant.
"Yes," says the second.
"Yes," says the third.
But what happens next does have significance -- not only to the three defendants, but to Funtua, a town with a history of religious riots, and the state of Katsina, where a woman faces a death sentence for committing adultery, and the nation of Nigeria, where a population nervously split between Muslims and Christians reflects rising religious and ethnic tensions worldwide. It is in this context that the judge reads aloud from Katsina's penal code, which was recently rewritten to conform to the Islamic system of laws called sharia.
"Whoever commits the offense of theft," he says, "shall be punished with amputation of the right hand from the joint of the wrist."
He stops reading and glances around a courtroom filled with several dozen onlookers whose deal in life is a ragged town in an impoverished state in a country where nothing ever seems quite right. Even the court records -- handwritten because there are no computers, not to mention working phones or lights -- are amiss. "Eighteen," is the age listed for the youngest defendant, Mohammed Abubakar. "Thirteen," he will whisper later. But for now he folds his hands and sits quietly as the judge announces his sentence.
"I have decided to be lenient," the judge says, and with that the three are led outside, followed by everyone else in the courtroom who form a ring around a bench where the first of the three, the 13-year-old, is directed to sit.
Take off your shirt, he is told.
Now, sensing what is about to happen, dozens of passersby join the crowd as the last person emerges from the court, a man who has stopped at the wall and taken down the whip.
Crack.
The first lash slices across the left side of the boy's upper back. He arches in surprise as the man swings again.
Crack.
This one, harder, cuts a long mark into the boy's skin.
Crack.
Another slice. The boy, in pain, curls forward.
Crack.
"This is God's justice," one of the onlookers says approvingly.
Crack.
God's justice, then, in "Theft of Sheep and Ram":
"I felt it deep inside my flesh," the boy says after 10 lashes, and swears he will never steal again.
In Nigeria, a nominal democracy of 130 million people, they don't just steal sheep. Some people also drink alcohol, engage in prostitution, commit adultery and go outside after midnight.
People dress in short sleeves, too, and ride in taxis that aren't segregated by sex.
And double up on motorbikes, even though that may involve a woman sitting with, touching, holding onto, a man who is not her husband.
For Nigeria's 50 million Christians, there are no criminal penalties for such behavior. But there are penalties for many of its 65 million Muslims, particularly those who live in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim northern states.
This is because of sharia, which, to Muslims, is a God-given code for how a life ought to be lived. Used in varying degrees, for most Muslims it is a guide to such individual activities as prayer, fasting and donating to the poor. Beyond that, many Muslim countries have adopted sharia as their civil law, governing such things as marriage and inheritance. And then there are the countries that use sharia as their criminal law, applying its judgments and penalties to such offenses as theft and adultery, which are known in sharia as Hadd offenses.
While the list of countries that use sharia as their civil law is lengthy, the list of countries that use it to judge Hadd offenses is a much smaller part of the Islamic world. There's Saudi Arabia. There's Iran. There's Sudan. Perhaps most famously, there was Afghanistan under Taliban rule. There are a few other places where criminal sharia is applied regionally, such as in parts of Pakistan. And now there's Nigeria, where Muslims in 12 of the country's 36 states find themselves facing sentences that differ greatly from the sentences handed out to the country's non-Muslims.
Theft? That's amputation of the right hand. Theft a second time? That's amputation of the left foot. An unmarried person who has sex? That's 100 lashes. A person who commits adultery? That's burial up to the waist and being pelted in the head with stones until death.
So far, since the first state implemented criminal sharia three years ago, at least four death sentences have been handed down for adultery, one of which came from a judge named Bawa Tambuwal, who has also sentenced six people to have amputations. "I believe in sharia," he says. "It is ordained by God."
But Nigeria is also home to Christians such as the Rev. Linus Awuhe, a Catholic priest who says, "I, as a Christian, cannot accept sharia" -- and in that divide between Awuhe and Tambuwal is why the introduction of sharia hasn't been without problems.
There have been riots between Christians and Muslims that have left several thousand dead. There is growing concern of a looming constitutional crisis as the pending death-by-stoning cases work their way toward the federal appellate system, bringing guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment in conflict with guarantees that states may enact their own laws. And there is a widening gulf between governors who say they implemented sharia because of divine instruction, and disbelievers who say it was a move by the political elite to tighten power over a population variously described as Nigeria's poorest, most marginalized, most vulnerable to oppression, and most victimized by Nigeria's endless corruption.
Which, of course, is why many of those very Muslims view sharia as a literal answer to their prayers. Not only do they see it as God's word, they say, but what has been their alternative? They live in a country so corrupt that even though Nigeria is one of the world's largest oil producers, there are chronic gasoline shortages and all-day lines. The non-sharia court system? It's a system brought by the British when they took over Nigeria a century ago, which, to the poor, seems to hinge on unaffordable lawyers and judges demanding bribes. Their penal system? Filthy, disease-ridden and overcrowded prisons in which nine out of 10 inmates aren't convicts but people who can spend years waiting for a court date they have been unable to buy their way out of.
By contrast:
"Next case," says Attahir Dan-Ayya, the judge in "Theft of Sheep and Ram," moving on. Speedy trials and instant decisions: that's what justice is in Dan-Ayya's courtroom. Criminal defendants are here because, as Muslims, they have no choice; those in civil cases, who are filling the benches and sitting shoulder to shoulder, are here because they prefer to avail themselves of a judge who relies on two Islamic scholars rather than law books and rockets through a dozen or more cases a day.
A man rises from one of the splintering benches and takes a seat at the front, joined by a woman who enters from a crowded side room, where she has been sitting on the floor. It is a divorce case. Never mind that only men sit in the courtroom and women enter only when their names are called, or that a man can get a divorce simply by saying three times to a woman, "I divorce you," while a woman has to go to court. The point is the woman is getting her chance to be heard without having to hire a lawyer or offer a bribe.
We don't talk, she says, speaking in Hausa, the language here in northern Nigeria. He doesn't eat what I cook, she goes on, and we haven't had sex in weeks.
I have two wives, the man answers, in his defense.
And maybe the judge notices how distraught the woman is when she says in a voice that sounds beaten down, "I don't want to be married to him any longer," but what he's paying attention to is the sight of a man on bended knee, beseeching his wife not to divorce him.
"He loves you very much," the judge says.
"God forgives this man on one knee. You must, too," adds one of the scholars.
Divorce denied.
Next case.
Up to the front comes a man who looks to be in his thirties, and in from the side room comes his wife of three months, who is 13.
He's starving me, she says.
Not true, he says.
We've only had sex once in three months, he says.
Not true, she says, blinking away sudden tears.
Try to reconcile, the judge decides, after consulting with the Islamic scholars. "Every divorce affects Islam," he says, and in this manner the cases go on until court is adjourned, and everyone again goes outside, including the court's criminal prosecutor, who looks across the street at another court in Funtua, the non-sharia court, the court that's never busy these days, and says, "Here is better. There, you can lie. You can play with the judge's intelligence. Here, your religion does not allow you to lie. You must tell the truth."
The truth:
"He confessed," says Bawa Sahabi Tambuwal.
"I gave him an opportunity to withdraw his confession several times, but he declined. I told him the consequences of his actions. I told him he could appeal. I told him he could have a lawyer free of charge."
The judge with the most stoning and amputation sentences since sharia's implementation, Tambuwal can be found in the very northwestern reaches of Nigeria, in the city of Sokoto, which is the capital of Sokoto state. On his docket this day is the case of a 19-year-old defendant named Bello Ali, who is accused of theft and is waiting for his trial to begin. He is in a holding cell, head resting in hands that are unblemished except for a nickel-sized sore on the outer bone of each of the wrists.
Tambuwal will get to him in a moment, but first he wants to finish talking about a man named Umaru Aliyu, who was convicted last year of stealing a sheep.
"He said that as a Muslim, he would submit to the sharia and whatever sentence that was prescribed," Tambuwal says.
"So," he says of what happened next, "the hand was amputated."
He won't say any more -- "I will not disclose how or where" -- except to say that when the hand was severed Aliyu said, "Thank God," and that "when I watched the procedure, I remembered what thieves do. The way they break into people's houses. Attack them. Kill them sometimes. I felt this is exactly what they deserve."
And one more thing. Because of the amputation, he says, Aliyu, upon death, can go to paradise -- but not with the hand. "The hand will go to hell," he says.
He heads into his courtroom. He listens as a policeman swears to tell "the truth before God" and outlines the case against Bello Ali: that three people broke into a house late one night and stole a 14-inch TV and a suitcase stuffed with clothing, that as they ran off they were spotted by a tailor who was working late, that a friend of the tailor's gave chase, that they dropped the TV and suitcase and scattered, that two escaped, that Ali was discovered soon after lying low in a car, that the police told Ali anything he said could be used against him as evidence and that Ali signed a confession in which he wrote, "I'm in position of a good leather whipping. Such is life."
Next, Tambuwal asks to see the evidence, and when the suitcase is opened, the courtroom is suddenly filled with the powdery smell of children's clothing, a reminder that, as Tambuwal said, thieves do break into houses, houses that are homes, homes where children wear freshly laundered clothing while watching 14-inch TVs.
Next, Tambuwal asks Ali, who is acting as his own lawyer, if he has anything to say, and Ali asks the policeman for the names of the people who found him in the car. "You don't have to know," the policeman responds. He then tries another question, something about the location of the car being a mile away from where the people who found him said it was. But Tambuwal says, "Where you were arrested is not on point," adjourns the case for the day and instructs Ali to be taken back to the holding cell.
Back he goes.
Where, out of earshot of the judge, he says that he didn't do it, that he was asleep in his father's car when he was suddenly dragged out, that "the police beat me up so I would confess."
He holds out his hands and exposes his wrists. This is the spot, of course, where an amputation would occur -- but Ali's point is the sores.
"They hung me up using ropes."
Now he turns around, lifts his shirt, and shows a back striped with long, black marks.
"They used sticks on me."
He lowers the shirt and tries to explain why he didn't bring this up in court.
"If justice is done, I will be released," he says, but "whatever the court decides under sharia, I will accept it."
Even amputation?
He shrugs. He is a Muslim, he says. He believes in God. He believes in destiny. And, like most people, he doesn't know much about amputation -- not the law, not the procedure, and not what happened to Umaru Aliyu -- largely because the few people who do know about it have agreed not to say anything. Abubakar Sanyinna, Sokoto's attorney general, will only say that Aliyu was given anesthesia, that the amputation was done as a surgical procedure by a doctor named Shehu, that when Aliyu awakened he seemed somewhat unhappy, and that the removed hand was put in a refrigerator.
A surgeon at Specialist Hospital named Shehu Bello, while not confirming that he performed the procedure, says of why he would: "As a Muslim, whatever your profession, whatever your work, your religion comes first, and that is the meaning of sharia." As to how he would do an amputation, he will only say, "In Islam, in any punishment, you're expected to show leniency in mode and manner."
As to what leniency means specifically, he won't say. Neither will Sanyinna and Tambuwal, both of whom watched. As for Aliyu, they will only say that after his release from the hospital, he likely went back to his home in a village called Jamwake, forever to be a chastened advertisement about the consequences of thievery.
In Jamwake, however, which is a few dozen mud huts on a dirt road in southern Sokoto, the men of the village, gathered under a shade tree, say that, yes, Aliyu returned but soon realized he was being shunned and so slinked away to another village, called Gidankare.
In Gidankare, same story. Gone. "Because of the shame," says a relative, Hantsi Umaru. "He was never angry," Umaru says of Aliyu's reaction to the amputation. "It was from God. He took it in good faith." Nonetheless, he says, "he was isolated from society," and he departed for a village called Gigane, in northern Sokoto, almost at the border between Nigeria and Niger.
Except he's not in Gigane, either.
Try Sakamaru, people say.
Sakamaru, then -- where Isa Kwama, the village's Islamic scholar, who is blind from cataracts and sitting under a tree on an animal skin, says of Aliyu: "When he was a small boy, his father brought him here from Niger to learn to read the Koran." Three decades later, he says, Aliyu came again, this time missing a hand. He kept to himself, said little, stayed a few months, and then, not long ago, alone, left Sakamaru, left Sokoto, left Nigeria and went back to Niger.
Why?
"He didn't say," says Kwama, who is surrounded by people from the village. Did he say anything about what had happened to him?
There is a boy who has a piece of sugar cane in his right hand. There is a woman who is using her right hand to balance a sack of grain on her head.
"No," Kwama says.
What happens when the hand is lost because of sharia? he is asked. Can the person be accepted by other Muslims? Can he live a good life? Can he go to paradise after his death?
There is a man using his right hand to wipe sweat off his forehead, and a man using his to swat at mosquitoes, and a girl using hers to hold the left hand of her friend.
"Yes," Kwama says.
What about the hand? he is asked. What happens to it? Will it be reattached to Aliyu in paradise? Does it go by itself to hell?
A boy twirls a stick. A woman adjusts her head covering. A boy pets the ear of a donkey.
And Kwama points a finger.
"Man cannot know what God is going to do with a hand," he says.
In the city of Gusau, which is the capital of Zamfara state, which is where sharia is at its severest, what some men do is causing others to grab machetes and sticks.
"For our own protection," one says. "In case of thieves."
They are vigilantes, officially sanctioned to help enforce sharia. This particular night brings out 50 of them, members of such groups as The Legion, Man O' War, and Civil Defense. They have the power to detain and permission to carry pretty much any weapon other than a gun. Every night -- "even in the rainy season," one says -- they gather at 10 o'clock outside the police station. By 10:15 they are aligned in groups of five, by 10:30 they are on their way by foot and car to scattered points around the city, and by 11 they are ready to start patrols that will last until daybreak.
This has been going on for nearly three years, since Zamfara became the first Nigerian state to implement criminal sharia. Before then, as officials describe it, the streets of Gusau were infested with brothels, gambling parlors and bars. Two amputations and a thousand nights of vigilantism later, wherever the prostitutes, gamblers and drunks are, they aren't clogging the streets of Gusau. Instead, the symbols of Gusau and Zamfara are Ahmed Sani, the governor, whose decision to establish sharia has brought him national prominence, and Buba Bello Kare, Nigeria's first sharia amputee, once a two-handed cattle thief and now an asymmetrical portrait of redemption, who tells visitors, "When I regained consciousness, I felt I was one of the happiest people on earth."
The schools in Zamfara are now segregated by sex. The taxis are, too. Buses aren't, but men and women sit separately, with women confined to the rear because, as a sharia advocate named Abubakar Mujahid explains, "If you put women behind, you free men from looking at them." As for motorbikes, the most popular way for people to get around this poor place, men and women who aren't related can no longer ride together because if they did "a woman would be touching another man's back."
Mujahid is the leader of one of the largest radical Islamic groups in Nigeria, called Jaamutu Tajidmul Islami, or the Movement for Islamic Revival. A student of Nigerian history, he is well aware that the implementation of criminal sharia, which had existed in Nigeria before it was interrupted by British rule, "is not a sudden occurrence. It is something that has been boiling up." Particularly important, he says, was the 1979 Iranian revolution that led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. "We figured if Iran can do it, why not here?"
A generation later, the student revolutionaries of 1979 are now some of the people in power in Nigeria's predominantly Muslim states, and while "the sharia implementation has just started," says Mujahid, "the ultimate is to have an Islamic state, where we are not bound by the West." By "West," he means the United States, which he describes as "arrogant" and "a symbol of injustice in the world."
"What is the difference between justice in democracy and justice in Islam?" he says. "The answer is justice in democracy is because the people want it, it's the mandate of the people, but justice in Islam is that the people feel the creator, Allah, wants it. We are doing it because we are feeling this is what the creator wants us to do. In democracy, the interpretation of justice can be adapted. In Islam, it cannot."
Not everyone in Zamfara agrees with Mujahid. "Sharia is a religious law, an Islamic law, but it is not a Christian law," says Linus Awuhe, explaining one reason he opposes sharia's implementation. In addition to being a priest, Awuhe is the Zamfara chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria. "I am not saying they're not entitled to their beliefs. What I am saying is they should not force their beliefs on me.
"Secondly," he continues, "the manner in which the sharia law is implemented goes against my own fundamental human rights. When you talk of the issue of sin and punishment, you don't amputate a sinner, you don't stone a person to death, you bring a person about by grace."
And third, he says, "Let me tell you that sharia will not achieve justice, not in Nigeria, because the Nigerian is still the Nigerian. Nigeria needs to be renovated from within. In the past, sharia was used in the north to harass political opponents, to oppress them. Today, too, sharia is being used by the elite to oppress the masses. It is the masses who will suffer, not the elite.
"Tell me, how many hands of officials have been amputated?" he goes on. "These people are looting the economy. How many of their hands have been amputated? They are amputating the hands of petty thieves, who do what they do because of social disorder. There are no good roads. The educational system is collapsing. Health care is zero. There is a great poverty in this land. The people are made to live miserable lives. So how can someone bring in a system of justice when that justice doesn't apply to him, who sends his children to school out of country? Who drives the road in a heavy jeep? Who lives in air conditioning? Who doesn't queue up for fuel? Who goes to Germany for health care? And above all uses his pen to rob the country? And who is amputating his hand?"
Mujahid, though, says that people who would agree with Awuhe are missing the point. Under sharia, he says, embezzlement falls under the category of breach of trust, not theft, so amputation wouldn't apply. As for stoning, he says, it is ordained, which is argument enough, but a secondary argument concerns the lessons he learned when Nigeria was still under military rule and he spent nearly two years in detention for his political views. Who else was in prison? Men whose mothers were prostitutes, men whose fathers had abandoned them, men who had grown up with no parents. "So this is an angle," he says. By stoning to death an adulterer, "you stop him from committing adultery. If he lives, he goes on to commit many many more adulteries, and those result in children being born who grow up and become drunks or armed robbers who kill people." Clearly, what Nigeria needs isn't less, sharia, he says, but more.
His goal? "Justice," he says.
His model? The Taliban. "There are one or two things I have an argument with, but generally I think they did very, very good."
His proof that sharia works? "Look around," he says.
10:30 p.m.: All over Gusau, market stalls are open, and people are walking around streets lit by oil lanterns. "We give people till 11:30 to shut down," one of the vigilantes says, adding that after midnight they can be arrested on a charge called Late Hour.
11:30: Most of the stalls are closed, most of the lanterns are out.
11:45: Streets are quiet. Dark. Soundless. Empty.
11:54: Here comes a car with one headlight and a squeaky fan belt, lit up suddenly by a vigilante's flashlight.
11:56: The only sound is of a metal door being slammed shut and locked.
11:57: Another car, pulling to a stop. A man runs from it and disappears inside a house.
11:59: Nothing.
Midnight: "Time for people to sleep," says one of the vigilantes, and off they go on patrol -- past dark houses and closed doors, past what was the city's one movie theater and is now the Ministry for Religious Affairs Islamic Center, past stray dogs and no prostitutes and no drunks and, if it ever comes to that, no shortage of rocks -- through streets given over to 50 men with machetes and sticks.
Once, when a 32-year-old man named Ahmadu Ibrahim was 16, he got in a fight with a friend, who threw a rock at his head. "Blood gushed," Ibrahim says. "I cried."
So he knows what it's like to be hit by a rock.
"But there's no way to compare it to sharia," he says, "because with sharia they will keep throwing and throwing until I am dead."
Somewhere in the world are people who know what Ibrahim will go through if the sentence he received for adultery is carried out. The rocks are supposed to be fist-sized. The face is an acceptable target. And the head, according to some accounts, keeps snapping back until, if it hasn't caved in, it is knocked free of the body.
In Nigeria, though, no one knows firsthand what happens, not yet. The only execution since sharia began was of a murderer, who, despite the judge's suggestion that he be stabbed to death with the knife he used on his victim, was hanged.
The first person to be sentenced to death for adultery was Safiya Hussaini, of Sokoto, whose sentence was eventually overturned on a technicality.
The second was Amina Lawal, of Katsina state, who is in hiding while her case is being appealed.
The third was a woman named Fatima Usman, of Niger state, who one day said, "I like you," to a man who was not her husband.
And the fourth was Ahmadu Ibrahim, who remembers replying to this woman who wasn't his wife, "I like you, too."
And maybe what happened between them could have been handled as two ordinary divorce cases. But in Nigeria, where nothing is ordinary, what did happen can best be summed up by Hauwa Ibrahim, a defense lawyer involved in all of the stoning cases, who says, "Justice can mean 100 things to 100 people in Nigeria."
Meaning that Fatima Usman's version has so far included a pregnancy, a divorce, and the birth of a girl who would eventually fall ill and die. And her husband's version included saying "I divorce you" three times and demanding back the dowry he'd paid of 10,000 naira (about $40). And so it escalated, version by version. Fatima's father demanded the 10,000 naira from Ahmadu Ibrahim, who could only come up with 5,000, which led them to court, where the judge let it be known that he wanted a bribe, which Fatima's father said he paid, only to have the judge announce that he was fining Fatima and Ahmadu 15,000 naira apiece for having sex and that if they couldn't pay they would go to prison for five years. Off they went to prison, which caused Fatima's father to beg the court to reconsider, which it did, saying the sentence was indeed wrong, that the court was now a sharia court and under sharia both should have been sentenced to death.
So, in absentia, they were sentenced to death.
And two months later, Fatima's father, beside himself, is saying, "I never thought it would degenerate to this."
And Ahmadu's wife, who sold her sewing machine, the family's motorbike and most of their clothing while Ahmadu was in prison, is wondering what can be sold next so she'll have enough money to feed their children.
And Ahmadu, just freed on bail, is at his lawyer's office, describing what prison had been like.
Seventy-three days. That's how long he was in. "Hunger," he says of the first 72. "Hot." His bed was the floor, his blanket "was full of lice," the toilet was a bucket shared by 70 men. Then came Day 73. He was taken to the prison office. "I thought maybe my family had come to see me," he says. Instead, there was the warden, and Fatima, and a lawyer, and a friend of theirs who told them that they had been granted bail and then broke the news that they had been resentenced, in absentia, to be stoned.
"I groaned," Ahmadu says, continuing to describe what happened.
And Fatima? "She just kept quiet," he says, while the warden said to them, "When you get home, continue to pray to God so that God will forgive you. I wish you the best."
And with that they were released.
Outside: "Give me 10 naira to buy some peanuts," Ahmadu, dazed, said to Fatima as they waited for the car.
"I don't have any change," she said.
That was all they said to each other. They got in the car and rode in silence back to their village. Ahmadu got out. Fatima remained in her seat and was driven away by the lawyer. Ahmadu watched the car until it disappeared, went to his home where his wife told him she had sold most of their clothes, then walked to his farm where he saw that everything was dead, and broke down.
Sharia in Nigeria:
"Yes, it's God's law," Ahmadu says, "and I believe in it, but the way it is implemented. . . ." He trails off.
"I need help," he says.
He gets up. Time to go home.
First, though, there's someone his lawyer asks him to meet. He is given an address, which brings him to a gate with a bell. He waits until the gate swings open and enters the hiding place of Amina Lawal.
Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to death soon after she gave birth, while the man she swore on the Koran impregnated her was freed because there weren't the required four eyewitnesses to testify they'd seen him having sex.
Who can't remember how old she was when she first married but knows it was before her first period.
Who is now 31, twice married, twice divorced and the mother of three, including 10-month-old Wasila, the proof of her guilt.
Who is to face the stones next fall, once Wasila is no longer breastfeeding.
Who is Nigeria's most infamous adulterer, and who now says to Ahmadu, "Congratulations on your release."
"Thank you," he says.
They look at each other. They are a man and a woman. Unmarried to each other. Alone in the land of sharia.
"May God make us be free," she says, bowing her head in prayer.
Ahmadu bows his head as well. "Amen."
For the contestants, the change in venue means a return to simply vying for the title of the globe's most beautiful woman. But they leave in their wake a Nigeria gripped by increasing social and political tensions that find expression between religious and ethnic groups.
Violence that started last week in response to the contest, and continued into the weekend, left as many as 200 people dead. Earlier riots have also taken place unhindered by civil authority, and the government seems to hold little sway in large parts of the north, where Islamic law has governed for the past two years.
For a country that has tried to portray itself as emerging successfully from 16 years of military rule, the recent violence is the latest indication that it has miles to go in achieving that goal.
The challenge for the government and the international community, analysts say, is to resolve some of the seemingly intractable problems that make Africa's most populous country appear to the world as if it is falling apart.
"The image of Nigeria is poor and this will make it worse," says one state government official in Lagos, the country's commercial capital. "We must address the question of our [internal] relationships."
The Nigerian newspaper that lit the fuse last week has tried to take some first steps. ThisDay cleared one-third of its front page and all of page two Sunday to run an apology to the nation's Muslims over an article that suggested the prophet Muhammad might have married one of the contestants in the Miss World beauty pageant. The mea culpa said the newspaper's ethos was "not to be offensive to any religion" nor "to denigrate the cultural and religious values" of the country's people. "We can only plead that we meant no harm," ThisDay said. "The error was totally unintended."
The length and scope of the apology - the fifth made by ThisDay on its front page in the last week - highlights the continued fragility of the country's political system and social life three years after the return of civilian rule. But ThisDay's response had little effect on the rioting.
Local residents say the trouble began in the northern city of Kaduna on Wednesday, when a mob burned down ThisDay's office in the city, and attacks on churches triggered reprisals from the area's large Christian population.
"It was terrible," says Shehu Sani, president of Civil Rights Congress, a Kaduna-based nongovernmental organization. "There was burning and looting everywhere."
The demonstrations came in apparent response to a Nov. 16 ThisDay article about the Miss World contest, which began earlier this month and was to conclude on Dec. 7 in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. The article, written by Isioma Daniel, a style reporter who has since resigned, questioned the sincerity of Muslim groups who had attacked the pageant as indecent.
"The Muslims thought it was immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity," the piece said. "What would Muhammad think? In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them."
The provocative nature of the statement, made by a newspaper based in the southwest of the country, played on longstanding tensions between Nigeria's north and south, analysts say. The two regions have had an uneasy political coexistence since the British created the modern state of Nigeria from its northern and southern halves in 1914. The south is more wealthy, more urbane, and more religiously cosmopolitan than the populous north, which nonetheless is politically powerful and has provided most of Nigeria's presidents since independence in 1960.
Observers say the north has become the center of a political power struggle since the 1999 elections that brought President Olusegun Obasanjo to office after a decade and a half of military rule. A dozen northern states have unilaterally introduced severe forms of sharia, or Islamic law, with punishments such as amputation for stealing and being stoned to death for having sex outside marriage.
The application of northern sharia, which led to the deaths of an estimated 2,000 people in rioting between Muslims and Christians in 2000, has attracted support from Islamic religious leaders and from ordinary people desperate for a release from everyday poverty and violent crime.
"I am really pleased about it," says Muhammad Sanusi Khalil, an imam in Kaduna. "What democracy means, to the best of our understanding, is that every individual should be given the chance to lead their life in the way they want."
Observers point to the actions of Muslim leaders during the latest violence as evidence of a desire to entrench the Islamicization of the north, and to turn a volatile situation to political advantage. On Thursday, the Supreme Council of the Ulema, an influential group of Islamic scholars, said that unless the authorities took action against ThisDay, it could "not restrain the Muslims here from taking whatever action they deem appropriate." One analyst, who asked not to be named, says the comments were inflammatory given previous examples of mobs "taking to the streets and killing people in northern Nigeria - and not being held accountable for it."
The government has made little public comment on the Kaduna riots beyond condemning the ThisDay remarks and appealing for calm. Mr. Obasanjo, a Christian southerner, is seen as reluctant to alienate the Muslim establishment that supported his election and whose backing he wants for polls due next year. His government has responded to international criticism of severe sharia punishments by saying no stoning sentences will be carried out, although it has yet to challenge the sharia decisions in the federal courts.
Meanwhile, the beauty queens that landed in London Sunday seemed to be relieved. "I am so excited, I feel so happy," said Daniella Luan, this year's Miss England. "I am so pleased to be back in Britain, and that's the general feeling among all of us."
TANTA, Egypt - The din rises above the main square of this Nile Delta city. Near the mosque, crowds jostle at claustrophobic density for blocks, illuminated by lights that make every building appear to be hosting a wedding simultaneously.
Mixed in the wall of sound is the crowd chatter, the blaring music, and the shrill microphones of the hawkers selling toys, party hats, jewelry, smoked fish, and sticky sweets. Somewhere - nearly submerged in the chaos - is the faith, generosity, and infectious communal vibe that makes it all possible.
The raucous setting was the country's largest moulid, or religious festival, one of the cornerstones of Egyptian Sufism - the mystical segment of Islam with an estimated 6 million Egyptian followers. Each summer and autumn, Egypt's urban neighborhoods and rural villages play host to a series of such festivals.
In Western terms, the moulids are a hybrid of a rural evangelical tent revival, a Grateful Dead show, and Mardi Gras.
Sufism is practiced throughout the Muslim world, but the Egyptian moulid tradition has developed into a phenomenon. Some speculate that Egypt's moulids are a mixture of Sufi tradition and ancient Pharaonic celebrations - a perspective reinforced by the fact that Egypt's Coptic Christian population hosts its own moulids.
But for something that is, at its heart, a religious festival, a solid 75 percent of the activities at any given moulid seem to have very little to do with religion. This year's festival in Tanta was held from Oct. 15 to Oct. 18.
''People come for the party, to get drunk, to make some noise. Some of them even come for religion,'' Mahmoud, a 60-year-old Ministry of Irrigation employee, said recently while sitting in a packed coffee shop facing Tanta's Sayyed Badawi Mosque. The mosque was named for the 13th-century holy man and spiritual father of Egypt's largest Sufi order.
''Three-fourths of these people are like me. I come for a change and some fun ... to see friends that I only see at moulids,'' Mahmoud said.
All of which is just fine for Ali Darwish, a sheik in the Shazliya Sufi order. Darwish, who works in the press office at the US Embassy in Cairo, acknowledges that the vast majority of modern Egyptian attendees are either out for a good time or looking to sell something.
''That's the way it is with every human activity. There's the center, and there are the waves of activity around it that often have nothing to do with the center,'' he said.
''There's people who come to make money. There are people who come to have some fun,'' Darwish said. ''It's not a problem. It all adds to the joviality.''
At most moulids, the spiritual and the temporal coexist. The sheer size of the affair at Sayyed Badawi - the country's largest, with an estimated 1 million participants - means that the ''center'' of the moulid actually takes place along the edges. From the Sayyed Badawi Mosque, it's a solid hour's walk through choking crowds to the field on the edge of Tanta where the religious events are taking place.
Along the way one passes dozens of hastily assembled sales booths, shooting galleries, carnival tests of strength, bumper cars - even a few freak shows promising magic, levitation, and the chance to view two-headed cows.
At the end of the carnival road lies a massive open field, ringed by the brightly colored enclosures of the Sufi orders. The tents play host to charity tables, passing out food and drink to all comers, and to the zikr - the marathon sessions of music, swaying, and chanting that help the Sufi attain a mystical state of joy and unity with God.
Sufism in modern times enjoys a complex relationship with the state. The movement has the stamp of approval in the form of the Supreme Council of Sufism, and no Badawi moulid is complete without a few government dignitaries coming to pay their respects to the saint. Former president Anwar Sadat made regular appearances at the Tanta festivities.
But the country's increasingly austere religious sensibilities regard Sufi mainstays, such as the veneration of saints and the belief in miracles, to be a corruption of Islam. As a result, government expressions of approval must be slightly muted.
Apart from the religious objections, the Sufi traditions also suffer from a certain, largely class-based misperception. The practice of moulids is considered backward village superstition among most middle- and upper-class Egyptians.
In the 1999 book ''Moulid! Carnivals of Faith,'' essayist Tarek Atia wrote, ''The sheikh's feasts that dot the average Egyptian social calendar remain a mystery to the wealthier, more modernized citizens of this ancient land, as well as to a growing number of urban and rural Muslims who have come to understand that such celebrations actually go against the grain of the religion.''
Darwish shrugs off questions about Sufism's detractors.
''Sufism is the spirit of Islam.... It makes you a wonderful human being,'' he said. ''You can't be arrogant. You can't be selfish. You can't be cruel.''
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - At least 105 people have been killed in riots in Nigeria stoked by Muslim fury over the country's staging of the Miss World contest next month, Red Cross officials said on Friday.
More than 500 people have also been injured in the street riots in the northern city of Kaduna, where enraged youths have torched churches and mosques.
The violence, sparked by a newspaper article suggesting the Prophet Mohammad would probably have married one of the Miss World beauty queens, resembled massive sectarian bloodletting in the region two years ago that killed thousands.
The bloody mayhem then stemmed from non-Muslim opposition to plans to introduce Islamic sharia law in Kaduna state in the predominantly Muslim north, but this time Muslim fury has been touched off by the Miss World pageant set for December 7.
Nigeria won the right to stage the contest after Nigerian Agbani Darego won the last event in South Africa.
Residents of Kaduna, a city scarred by burned out buildings and with overturned cars littering its streets, said sporadic shooting could be heard on Friday morning as soldiers and police battled rioters despite a 24-hour curfew.
Kaduna residents said Muslims were accusing authorities of trying to bar them from Friday prayers with the curfew.
"The 105 are identifiable deaths," Nigerian Red Cross president Emmanuel Ijewere told Reuters by phone from the capital Abuja, adding that the tally came from his field officers in Kaduna.
He suggested the toll could rise further, saying: "There are some houses that have not been entered. It is possible that there are injured in these houses."
Red Cross spokesman Patrick Bawa said 521 injured people had been evacuated to Kaduna hospitals by Thursday night.
The riots erupted on Wednesday when rampaging Muslim youths burned the Kaduna offices of the independent Lagos-based daily This Day, whose November 16 article sparked the violence.
The unrest quickly turned into a general protest against Miss World contest, to be held in Abuja.
RESIDENTS DEFY CURFEW
After the shooting on Friday morning in Kaduna, the streets of the city of four million people were teeming by midday. Residents said they were defying the curfew in anger at the local governor.
"People are angry because the governor refused to receive a group of protesters who came yesterday to deliver a petition against the newspaper article," one resident said.
"Instead security forces fired teargas and opened fire, killing five people right there at the gate of government house," said the resident, asking not to be named.
Witnesses said angry youths tore down the re-election campaign posters of Governor Ahmed Makarfi, a political ally of President Olusegun Obasanjo.
"Muslims are angry about the curfew. They believe the governor is trying to prevent them going to the Mosque today," another resident said. Friday prayers are often a flashpoint of unrest in the volatile region.
Soldiers and police have been put on the alert in northern Nigeria's biggest city of Kano, just north of Kaduna. Relations between the Muslim majority and a significant and assertive Christian minority in Kaduna state have always been tense.
BEAUTY QUEENS CONFINED TO HOTEL
More than 90 Miss World contestants, who arrived in Nigeria on November 10 despite raging controversy around this year's pageant, were confined to their hotel in Abuja on Friday.
Pageant organizers have insisted the event will go ahead.
The Miss World contest, which Nigerian officials hope will showcase the country and add to its tourist appeal, initially ran into trouble amid worldwide publicity over Amina Lawal, a 31-year-old woman who was sentenced under Islamic law to death by stoning for bearing a child out of wedlock.
Following assurances by the government that no one would be stoned, some 90 contestants arrived in Nigeria last week, with many voicing support for Lawal and other women sentenced to death by courts enforcing Islamic sharia law.
Obasanjo's government has appealed for calm, and said that anyone found fomenting disorder would be decisively dealt with.
This Day newspaper ran its third apology for its controversial report on Thursday's front page since it first published the story. It said the article went out in error.
by Obed Minchakpu ("Christianity Today," November 20, 2002)
The growing fraud problem in Nigeria threatens to undermine churches' growth and credibility, according to Suleiman Jakonda, executive director of rurcon, a pan-African Christian development ministry.
Jakonda says 419 scams are active inside Nigeria, not just internationally, and Christians have been both victims and accomplices. Some church leaders lend their names to schemes that defraud trusting charitable organizations.
Jakonda said the resulting publicity damages the credibility of honest religious leaders: "On one occasion, [Nigerian] officials took my Bible and searched every page to ensure that I was not involved in any criminal activity."
Christian businessman Mike Abdul, managing director of Nigeria's Lion Bank, blamed the epidemic of fraud on chronic poverty, government mismanagement, and a culture of official corruption.
"Many get into such fraudulent activities in order to survive," Abdul said. "Those that plunder Nigeria's wealth are seen as heroes and are honored by the government and the society. The churches and the government [should] embark on a crusade to rid the society of such greed."
(Reuters, November 21, 2002)
KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) - Rampaging youths looted shops and lit bonfires in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna as Muslim anger over the country's staging of the Miss World pageant spread on Thursday, witnesses said.
Armed police fought street battles with rioters, firing volleys of teargas as unrest spilled into the central district of the city where thousands died in sectarian riots in 2000. No deaths have been reported so far this time.
"The protesters made bonfires on major highways. They broke into shops and destroyed more than 15 vehicles in Tudun Wada area," a resident told Reuters by telephone.
A worker at a newspaper office in the city said: "The fundamentalists burned two hotels. They then attempted to burn our office, and we had to jump the fence of the building to hide in the house of a Muslim neighbor."
Rioting flared on Wednesday, initially over a newspaper report linking the name of the Prophet Mohammad to the pageant. But it quickly turned into a general protest against the December 7 event in the nearby national capital, Abuja.
Irate youths armed with stones and clubs on Wednesday burned the Kaduna office of This Day, a leading independent daily which carried a report on Saturday that triggered the unrest.
The story on Muslim protests over the staging of the pageant in Nigeria included a line that said the Prophet Mohammad would have married one of the beauty queens.
The paper on Thursday ran a front-page apology, the third since publication of the story, which it said went out in error. But this has not appeased Muslim groups in the largely Islamic north of the country who have decreed a ban on the daily.
The disturbances in Kaduna have added to raging controversy over Nigeria's staging of its biggest show business event ever.
Many beauty queens had threatened boycott the pageant in Abuja to protest the sentencing of Muslim women in northern Nigeria to death by stoning for adultery.
Following assurances by the government that no one would be stoned, some 90 contestants arrived in Nigeria last week, with many voicing support for the condemned women.
Islamists terming the pageant "a parade of nudity" had vowed to disrupt the event. President Olusegun Obasanjo last week canceled a scheduled meeting with the beauty queens for fear of offending Muslims, pageant organizers said.
by Tom Rachman (AP, November 21, 2002)
CASAMARI, Italy - A Zambian archbishop who horrified the Catholic Church by getting married only to reject the union and then return to the fold celebrated his first public Mass since the scandal, although tight Vatican (news - web sites) security ensured that his warmly supportive followers kept their distance Thursday.
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo was married last year to a South Korean acupuncturist in a group ceremony led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. He subsequently rejected the marriage on an appeal from Pope John Paul (news - web sites) II, and then vanished from public view for a spiritual retreat to make peace with the Church.
Milingo's long-awaited reappearance after a year out of view delighted some 800 faithful gathered beneath the vaulted stone ceilings of an 11th-century abbey in Casamari, a town 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) southeast of Rome.
Milingo did not speak directly about the scandal, but did stress the importance of obedience and forgiveness and said he bore no grudges.
"Within faith, there is obedience. Not just belief, obedience," he said. "I don't have enemies, I don't hate anyone. This brings me much joy."
"I am so happy to love all of you," he said during his homily. "It gives me so much joy. I always know I can walk in this world with my head up."
"I want no one to go home as you were when you came here," he said. "I hope you will go home knowing you have a new friend — who is Milingo."
Security guards kept an eye on the crowd, and a white rope ran down the edge of the pews to prevent people from approaching Milingo. During communion, Milingo sat at one side as priests walked down the aisle to hand out the wafers.
The Rev. Rocco Aloisi, a friend of Milingo for several years, complained about the tight security. At the end of the Mass, Milingo approached him and took his hands, but they had no time to talk.
"Many things are strange," the priest said. "When will we be able to really speak one-on-one with him? I don't know."
The woman Milingo married, Maria Sung, has complained bitterly that the Vatican was keeping the archbishop from her against his will. However, Milingo has said that his spiritual retreat in Argentina was voluntary.
Long before his marriage, Milingo caused controversy in the Church by conducting religious ceremonies that troubled some Vatican officials.
He was summoned to Rome in 1983 after resigning from his post as archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia, for performing faith healing and exorcisms. Large crowds of people then flocked to Rome seeking cures from Milingo, and the Vatican removed him from his post there.
Now that Milingo is back, Church officials say he will conduct only traditional ceremonies, with no more faith-healing prayers during Mass or public exorcisms. During Thursday's ceremony, he led a prayer for the healing of tumors, rheumatism and a host of other ailments, but he did so before the Mass began.
Many among Thursday's congregation came because of Milingo's reputation.
Franca Roma, a 51-year-old cook, said the archbishop had cured her husband's heart disease.
"I just can't explain how he (the husband) is normal," she said. "The cardiologist told me he couldn't understand either how in such a short time he got better"
Another follower, Franco Mazzoli, 48, said that perhaps Milingo's great charisma had a psychological effect on healing.
"If someone can influence people so positively they have to be respected," he said.
Before Thursday, Milingo had not appeared in public following the scandal, although he spoke via TV linkup on a late-night Italian talk show in September.
He has now been set up in at a new home in Zagarolo, 30 kilometers (20 miles) southeast of Rome. He will go to Zambia in December for several weeks, to reconcile with family, followers and Church members there.
A top Vatican official, Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone, told Vatican Radio last week that Milingo had agreed to take a quiet ministry away from too much publicity.
by
Shaka Momodu
("This Day," November 20, 2002)
Lagos
The ongoing war against HIV/AIDS has received an added boost with the launching of a non-governmental organisation (NGO), Inter-Faith HIV/AIDS Council of Nigeria, by Christian and Muslim leaders to fight the deadly scourge. The new NGO was formed in conjunctionwith The Balm in Gilead, an African American NGO in the United States.
The Inter-faith HIV/AIDS Council was formed by the leadership of Nigeria's Christian and Muslim communities to address HIV/AIDS issues in response to The Balm In Gilead's call to the communities to come together to address the ever-growing problem of the desease in Nigeria. The first meeting of The Interfaith HIV/AIDS Council of Nigeria was convened by The Balm In Gilead on April 16, 2002 in Abuja. The now NGO, which has as its motto "In Love, Unity and Hope we fight HIV/AIDS", stated that its mission is to empower religious organisations to play a leadership role in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria and to support those infected and affected by the virus. The constitution of the NGO was adopted on October 30, 2002 at the fourth planning committee meeting held in Maryland, Lagos, where Rev. Kaine Nwashili was selected as the national director. Dr. Agatha Ogunkorode was selected national monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator. The Ven. Dr. Bode Akintade was selected as the chairperson of the advisory council.
Dr. Lateef Adegbite, secretary general of the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, Most Rev. J. Onaiyekan, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Nigeria and Archbishop of Abuja, The Rt. Rev. Dr. Peter Adebiyi, Anglican Bishop of Lagos West and The Christian Health Association of Nigeria (CHAN), along with other key leaders of the Christian and Muslim communities have been very instrumental in the development of this national organisation in Nigeria.
Nzira Warned Against Interfering With Witnesses
("The Herald," October 15, 2002)
A HARARE magistrate yesterday warned the leader of the Johane Masowe Sect in Chitungwiza Godfrey Nzira that he risked being thrown into jail if he continued to interfere with witnesses.
The spiritual healer is facing trial at the magistrates' court for allegedly raping two of his followers on several occasions.
Nzira is out of custody on $10 000 bail granted him by a Chitungwiza magistrates' court.
Regional magistrate, Mrs Betty Makazhe, told Nzira that if he continued with such behaviour he might find himself in custody until the matter was finalised.
"Such behaviour may cause the court to incarcerate you," she said.
Mrs Makazhe ordered the spiritual healer to control his followers and warned the followers that they also risked being jailed if they interfered with witnesses.
The magistrate also threw out an application by Nzira's lawyer Mr Taurai Mapfunde of Manase and Manase to have the matter postponed to a later date. In dismissing the application, Mrs Makazhe said Nzira's trial should commence on October 28 this year.
Earlier, everyone in the small packed courtroom had eagerly waited for the magistrate to deliver the ruling on an inquiry held on Monday.
The court held the inquiry to investigate alleged threats of witnesses by Nzira and his followers.
Court officials including prosecutors, interpreters and members of the public jostled for seats in Court 16 where the hearing was held.
A tense Nzira, clad in a green designer suit, a matching shirt and tie, quietly sat in the dock awaiting his fate.
After the court adjourned, Nzira, who was a bit relaxed, walked out of the court building under heavy guard provided by his followers.
His followers who were gathered outside the Rotten Row court and composed of mainly women dressed in white regalia, were briefed about the outcome and then boarded buses hired by the church.
Charges against the prominent healer arose on February 17 and April 7 this year after he allegedly raped two of his followers who had sought spiritual healing from him. He is also accused of having assaulted a policewoman who is a member of his church.
by Daniel J. Wakin ("NY Times," October 28, 2002)
CAIRO, Oct. 28 — Inside a run-down building in a middle-class Cairo neighborhood, a hybrid group of eager young dot-commers and idealistic religious messengers produces one of the Islamic world's leading Web sites, Islam-Online.net.
"We all consider this an act of jihad, how to liberate people's minds from ignorance," said Ahmed Muhammad Sa'ad, using "jihad" in its sense of spiritual struggle. Mr. Sa'ad is a recent religious school graduate and a prize-winning reciter of the Koran who helps channel readers' requests for religious rulings, or fatwas, to Islamic legal scholars around the world.
Islam Online says it wants to present a positive view of the faith to non-Muslims, to strengthen unity in the Muslim world and to uphold principles of justice, freedom and human rights. Scholars of the region say they see the Web site as a leading example of efforts by moderate Muslims to push for the Islamization of societies by nonviolent means.
"There's a desire to make it a one-stop shop," said John L. Esposito, a professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University. "But obviously no single Web site can do that for anything, let alone the Islamic world."
The Web site also has an English version, aimed at Muslims living outside the Arab world. Professor Esposito points out that only about a quarter of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims speak Arabic, and that for the rest, English is an increasingly common second language.
The site is ambitious in content. Along with news articles, there are in-depth discussions of Islamic issues, political analyses, discussion groups, advice pages and a "fatwa corner," where readers can ask questions or look up past edicts from religious scholars. That is where Mr. Sa'ad works.
The promulgation of fatwas by call-in shows and Web sites has spread in recent years. Islam Online provides private responses for personal issues, and public ones for questions of general interest. One recent day, the Arabic site advised a questioner that killing women and children in war was forbidden unless they were warriors; that a woman could appear unveiled before her son-in-law; that abortions of deformed fetuses were wrong if the condition was one that could be lived with.
The site's news section reflects the point of view of most media in the Arab world, emphasizing the suffering of Palestinians, criticism of Israeli policies and opposition to the United States' policy on Iraq. The commentary section is generally mild in tone. The site appears to steer clear of touchy doctrinal issues, like traditions that separate Shiites from Sunnis.
During a reporter's recent visit to the offices here, young employees sat at work over computer keyboards behind a series of closed doors. About 100 people, mostly Egyptians, with a sprinkling of others from across the Arab world, work here; most of the women on hand wore head scarves.
In the newsroom, Eman Ahmed, 24, a graduate of Cairo University in her first job, was rewriting a correspondent's account of the Bahraini elections. "I am doing good things for Muslims and Islam," she said. In the fatwa room, a group of graduates of the prestigious Islamic university Al Azhar, including Mr. Sa'ad, dealt with requests for religious rulings. Later, work stopped throughout the offices for evening prayers.
Mutiullah Tayeb, the Web coordinator, said Islam Online was receiving about 250,000 page views a day, which he said made it the leading Islamic site. "We have to have mutual understanding, conversation," he said, "and not allow other people just to describe Islam on behalf of Muslims."
The Web site began operating three years ago in Doha, Qatar, where its technical and corporate offices are located. Qatar's leader, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has made efforts to create a more open, liberal atmosphere. Another prominent result of that openness is Al Jazeera television, which has broadcast messages by Osama bin Laden and his confederates, and has drawn criticism from governments across the Arab world for its outspoken ways. The Qatari royal family, which finances Al Jazeera, is a major supporter of the Web site, according to its deputy editor, Hossam el-Din el-Sayed.
Islam Online and Al Jazeera are both feeling the influence of an Egyptian-born cleric, Sheik Yusuf Abdulla al-Qarawadi. In addition to acting as the Web site's spiritual guide and chairman of its board, he has gained prominence through a regular call-in show on Al Jazeera, in which he expounds on theological topics and answers questions about Islamic practices and principles.
He has given mixed signals on the subject of women, saying that nothing in the Koran forbids their voting or driving but that a woman's main role is as a mother.
Sheik Qarawadi, who has a history of anti-American views, condemned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as a "heinous crime," saying on the Web site that the killing of innocents is a "grave sin" under Islam. But the sheik also condemned Egypt's leading Muslim scholar for rejecting terrorist attacks that killed Israeli civilians. The perpetrators were fighting colonizers, he said, and in Israel all men and women are "soldiers."
But Mr. Sayed, the site's deputy editor, said that Islam Online was by no means a mouthpiece for the sheik. He, like others interviewed at the site's offices, emphasized that it was a vehicle for a broad range of mainstream Islamic views.
"I have this idea about sharing the principles and concepts of Islam with humanity," he said. "We are defending justice, not only Muslims."
Communities in northern Tanzania along the shores of Lake Victoria are stepping up their efforts to eradicate the murder of old people, mainly women, who have been accused of witchcraft.
The women often become targets of attacks when traditional healers identify them as the cause of an illness or other misfortune.
The healers suggest that if the so-called witch is killed, then it will help to remedy the problem.
Attack
One victim of an attack was 80-year-old Magdale Ndila, who is fortunate to be alive.
Seven years ago a man broke into her house intending to murder her.
She said that she heard a noise in her bedroom, then a light was shone in her face.
"I tried to get up but couldn't. Suddenly I felt a terrible pain and I realised my right hand had been cut off. It fell to the ground."
"I screamed in pain. My daughter was next door and heard me, but she was too scared to come as she knew I was being attacked. I was struck again on my other hand and then I felt blows to my head. The attacker wanted to kill me."
To this day, Magdale doesn't know how she survived, but she does know why she was singled out.
"The reason why they attacked me was because they thought I was a witch.
"I think this because there was a boy in the neighbourhood who was ill and then died. They said I had bewitched him.'
Healers
There are no statistics for the number of murders, but it is thought it could be more than 100 a year.
These deaths have occurred in areas in the north of Tanzania, like the Sukumaland region by Lake Victoria where Magdale lives.
Here the belief in witchcraft is still strong and traditional healers continue to wield great influence.
Mbula Habuka is a traditional healer. He sings songs aimed at chasing evil spirits away.
He has never incited one of his clients to murder, but admits there are many traditional healers who have suggested murder as a remedy.
He says that healers are playing on deeply held cultural beliefs in the power of witchcraft and the superstition that an illness is the result of a misdeed rather than a medical problem.
The murder of older people due to the belief in witchcraft is a relatively new development dating back just 30 years.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of incidents has increased recently due to a worsening economic situation.
Targets
The non-governmental organisation, Help Age International has been working in Sukumaland in an attempt to stop the practice.
Sixbert Mbaya, the Help Age project co-ordinator, says scapegoating someone as a witch is a convenient way to explain illness in the family or economic hardship.
"With increased hardship the accusations of witchcraft increase. So we believe if livelihoods improve they will decrease, but the fact remains that when people have problems they look to blame someone else."
He says that old women are targeted the most.
"They're often the most vulnerable members of the community. In Sukumaland they also typically live longer than men so are frequently widows living alone. But communities are now being mobilised to change attitudes."
Plays
There are 25 troupes of actors supported by Help Age who tour the region educating villagers and performing plays which mock the absurdity of witchcraft practices.
But Mr Mbaya says changing traditional beliefs is not easy.
"In the Sukuma community, if you kill a witch it is not really considered a crime. It's like you are doing something for the community. It's a culturally acceptable thing to do."
The key to changing beliefs is the traditional healers. More than 120 in Sukumaland have attended training sessions and now their diagnoses and remedies are changing.
Some are even recommending that a good deed towards an old person can help to cure an illness.
The expectation and hope is that in the future fewer old women will be murdered as witches.
Witness Denies Framing Church Leader in Rape Trial
("The Daily News," October 31, 2002)
A key State witness in the rape trial of Godfrey Nzira, the leader of the Johane Masowe weChishanu church, yesterday denied she had framed him because she owed him $17 150, borrowed from the churchs bank at the shrine in Chitungwiza.
Nzira, appearing before Harare regional magistrate Betty Makazhe, is alleged to have raped two women members of his sect, at the shrine on several occasions between February and May this year.
Under cross-examination by Wilson Manase, Nziras lawyer, the woman, a former teller with the churchs bank, admitted owing Nzira the money but accused Nzira of lying when he denied he raped her. Manase alleged she had not receipted a loan repayment of $1 083,40 from a client.
He said: Perhaps that is why you are levelling false allegations against Madzibaba Nzira.
She said she did not recall anything about that money. Manase said Nzira would deny ever threatening her and telling her that his security officers would monitor her movements.
The other alleged victim would come to court and deny that she was raped, Manase said.
The woman said: She may deny it but she said it herself.
In what has become their normal practice whenever Nzira comes to court, crowds of Nziras followers, mainly women, gathered at the court on Monday and yesterday but they were not allowed into the courtroom.
The woman told the court that she is scared of Nzira because he had threatened to kill her.
She said that on the occasions that he raped her she had tried to resist but he had overpowered her. She had not screamed or shouted for help because of the alleged death threats.
She said she had not told anyone, not even her husband.
She said: I was afraid my marriage would break up. I was concerned about my husbands reaction and the death threat. The main reason I did not report is I was afraid. Even now I fear for my life. She said she had finally told an elder of the church after another woman had alleged that Nzira raped her. Vivian Mandizvidza prosecuted.
Burundi
Massacre Stirs Little Reaction Worldwide
Up to 1,200 Civilians Feared Dead
("Zenit.org," September 24, 2002)
The papal nuncio in this
central African nation is shocked that the massacre of possibly more than
1,000 civilians has caused little international outcry.
"I am stunned by the silence surrounding the Itaba hills massacre,"
said the nuncio, Archbishop Michael Aidan Courtney. The Catholic Church and
its media appear to be virtually alone in reporting the scope of the Sept. 9
killings.
Numerous civilians, the majority women and children, were killed in Itaba, in
the province of Gitega in central Burundi.
"I am surprised by the international silence, although the European Union
is following the matter closely," Archbishop Courtney told the Misna
missionary agency.
The Vatican diplomat indicated that the first public news of the event was
given by the authorities nine days later.
The nuncio said the silence is inexplicable, "given that both the
government and the army report promptly on the outcome of guerrillas' actions,
broadcasting bulletins on the war every afternoon from one or another area of
the country."
The Burundi government denied the version of events given to some news
agencies by army spokesman Colonel Augustin Nzabampema. He admitted the army's
involvement in the killings.
The government Ministry of Information reported that 173 people died,
specifying that the civilians died during the fighting between the army and
the Forces for the Defense of Democracy (FDD) guerrillas. Burundi has 6.2
million people.
Sources consulted by Misna give another version of the events. One source
close to the political realm sent the agency a list of telephone numbers of
survivors and relatives of the victims.
These witnesses of the massacre give a much different picture of the events.
Civil and political sources also confirmed that testimony.
According to these sources, the army's responsibility for what happened is
undeniable, and the killing took place after the guerrillas had withdrawn from
the area. These sources say the real death toll could reach 1,200.
Most of the victims were killed in cold blood, witnesses said. The slaughter,
they added, was in reprisal for the enormous losses suffered by the army in
previous days in clashes with FDD guerrillas.
by Glenn McKenzie (AP, September 25, 2002)
ABUJA, Nigeria - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton asked Nigeria to spare the life of a mother condemned by an Islamic court to be stoned to death for having sex outside marriage.
Amina Lawal, 31, was sentenced in March by a court in northern Nigeria, after she gave birth to a girl. An Islamic appeals court upheld the judgment in August although her lawyers have since launched a second appeal.
"I hope and pray that the legal system will find a way to pardon a young woman convicted to death for bearing a child out of wedlock," Clinton said Tuesday in a public lecture to an audience that included Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The plea was personal, "as a fellow human being," and not "on behalf of the United States government," the former president stressed.
Clinton said he hoped Lawal's case would end in a similar way as that of Safiya Husseini, the first Nigerian woman to be similarly tried and sentenced. Husseini successfully appealed her conviction in March.
"This is something you've done once before and I hope it will happen again," he said.
Clinton said Islam had a tradition of "protecting such rights for women and protecting children." Prophet Mohammed, the religion's founder, was married to a successful businesswoman, a sign he respected women, the former U.S. president added.
"I can tell you the world will be cheering" if Lawal is released, Clinton said. "It is a small thing for a great nation to forgive."
Clinton made the comments during a speech on democratization to an audience that included several other West African leaders. Clinton earlier visited Ghana and is also expected to visit Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa.
Lawal's case has provoked international outcry by governments and human rights organizations who have urged Obasanjo's government to intercede. The European Parliament has urged a boycott of the Miss World pageant, set for November in the Nigerian capital, in protest of the stoning sentence.
Anger over the imposition of Islamic law, or sharia, by a dozen northern states since 2000 has resulted in several outbreaks of Muslim-Christian violence resulting in thousands killed.
by Emily Wax ("Washington Post," September 23, 2002)
RUHENGERI, Rwanda -- The villagers with their forest green head wraps and forest green Korans arrived at the mosque on a rainy Sunday afternoon for a lecture for new converts. There was one main topic: jihad.
They found their seats and flipped to the right page. Hands flew in the air. People read passages aloud. And the word jihad -- holy struggle -- echoed again and again through the dark, leaky room.
It wasn't the kind of jihad that has been in the news since Sept. 11, 2001. There were no references to Osama bin Laden, the World Trade Center or suicide bombers. Instead there was only talk of April 6, 1994, the first day of the state-sponsored genocide in which ethnic Hutu extremists killed 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
"We have our own jihad, and that is our war against ignorance between Hutu and Tutsi. It is our struggle to heal," said Saleh Habimana, the head mufti of Rwanda. "Our jihad is to start respecting each other and living as Rwandans and as Muslims."
Since the genocide, Rwandans have converted to Islam in huge numbers. Muslims now make up 14 percent of the 8.2 million people here in Africa's most Catholic nation, twice as many as before the killings began.
Many converts say they chose Islam because of the role that some Catholic and Protestant leaders played in the genocide. Human rights groups have documented several incidents in which Christian clerics allowed Tutsis to seek refuge in churches, then surrendered them to Hutu death squads, as well as instances of Hutu priests and ministers encouraging their congregations to kill Tutsis. Today some churches serve as memorials to the many people slaughtered among their pews.
Four clergymen are facing genocide charges at the U.N.-created International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and last year in Belgium, the former colonial power, two Rwandan nuns were convicted of murder for their roles in the massacre of 7,000 Tutsis who sought protection at a Benedictine convent.
In contrast, many Muslim leaders and families are being honored for protecting and hiding those who were fleeing.
Some say Muslims did this because of the religion's strong dictates against murder, though Christian doctrine proscribes it as well. Others say Muslims, always considered an ostracized minority, were not swept up in the Hutus' campaign of bloodshed and were unafraid of supporting a cause they felt was honorable.
"I know people in America think Muslims are terrorists, but for Rwandans they were our freedom fighters during the genocide," said Jean Pierre Sagahutu, 37, a Tutsi who converted to Islam from Catholicism after his father and nine other members of his family were slaughtered. "I wanted to hide in a church, but that was the worst place to go. Instead, a Muslim family took me. They saved my life."
Sagahutu said his father had worked at a hospital where he was friendly with a Muslim family. They took Sagahutu in, even though they were Hutus. "I watched them pray five times a day. I ate with them and I saw how they lived," he said. "When they pray, Hutu and Tutsi are in the same mosque. There is no difference. I needed to see that."
Islam has long been a religion of the downtrodden. In the Middle East and South Asia, the religion has had a strong focus on outreach to the poor and tackling social ills by banning alcohol and encouraging sexual modesty. In the United States, Malcolm X used a form of Islam to encourage economic and racial empowerment among blacks.
Muslim leaders say they have a natural constituency in Rwanda, where AIDS and poverty have replaced genocide as the most daunting problems. "Islam fits into the fabric of our society. It helps those who are in poverty. It preaches against behaviors that create AIDS. It offers education in the Koran and Arabic when there is not a lot of education being offered," said Habimana, the chief mufti. "I think people can relate to Islam. They are converting as a sign of appreciation to the Muslim community who sheltered them during the genocide."
While Western governments worry that the growth of Islam carries with it the danger of militancy, there are few signs of militant Islam in Rwanda. Nevertheless, some government officials quietly express concern that some of the mosques receive funding from Saudi Arabia, whose dominant Wahhabi sect has been embraced by militant groups in other parts of the world. They also worry that high poverty rates and a traumatized population make Rwanda the perfect breeding ground for Islamic extremism.
But Nish Imiyimana, an imam here in Ruhengeri, about 45 miles northwest of Kigali, the capital, contends: "We have enough of our own problems. We don't want a bomb dropped on us by America. We want American NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] to come and build us hospitals instead."
Imams across the country held meetings after Sept. 11, 2001, to clarify what it means to be a Muslim. "I told everyone, 'Islam means peace,' " said Imiyimana, recalling that the mosque was packed that day. "Considering our track record, it wasn't hard to convince them."
That fact worries the Catholic church. Priests here said they have asked for advice from church leaders in Rome about how to react to the number of converts to Islam.
"The Catholic church has a problem after genocide," said the Rev. Jean Bosco Ntagugire, who works at Kigali churches. "The trust has been broken. We can't say, 'Christians come back.' We have to hope that happens when faith builds again."
To help make that happen, the Catholic church has started to offer youth sports programs and camping trips, Ntagugire said. But Muslims are also reaching out, even forming women's groups that provide classes on child care and being a mother.
At a recent class here, hundreds of women dressed in red, orange and purple head coverings gathered in a dark clay building. They talked about their personal struggle, or jihad, to raise their children well. And afterward, during a lunch of beans and chicken legs, they ate heartily and shared stories about how Muslims saved them during the genocide.
"If it weren't for the Muslims, my whole family would be dead," said Aisha Uwimbabazi, 27, a convert and mother of two children. "I was very, very thankful for Muslim people during the genocide. I thought about it and I really felt it was right to change."
Since the early hours of this morning, Eritreans have gathered at the main orthodox church in Asmara to pay their final respects to Abuna Filipos.
The first Patriarch of the Eritrean orthodox church died after a short illness on Wednesday at the age of 101.
Inside the church, His body lay in state, dressed in his official robes and a gold crown, as priests led the people in prayer and religious chants.
Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki and other top government officials came to the ceremony.
The Patriarch of the Egyptian Coptic church to which the Eritrean orthodox is affiliated was also in attendance.
Patriot
Outside women clad in white, stood alongside priests dressed in their bright robes as the prayers were broadcast on loud speakers.
Roughly half of Eritrea's population is Christian, the vast majority belong to the orthodox church, which was established in Eritrea and Ethiopia by the end of the fourth century.
The patriarch Filipos began life as Berhane Tewolde and entered into religious life in 1912, at the age of 11, when he moved to the monastery of Debre Bizen, perched atop a high mountain on which women and even female animals are forbidden to set foot.
This is where he will be buried on Saturday, his body flown there by helicopter.
Made a Bishop in 1927 he served in Ethiopia until 1991.
He was known to be an advocate of Eritrean independence.
In reporting his life the Eritrean government press called him the spiritual father of resistance to Ethiopian oppression.
After the liberation war he took charge of the Eritrean orthodox church after its separation from the Ethiopian church.
At the age of 97, he was elected as the first Eritrean patriarch in 1998.
However, following the recent war he led efforts by religious leaders to reconcile the two peoples.
The church in Eritrea plays a fundamental role in daily life for many Eritreans.
As one mourner said, "the patriarch Filipos was like a father, not just in religious affairs but also political , he was a like father of Eritrea."
The church is especially important during times of difficulty. During the war mass services were held as people prayed for peace, as the rains failed churches were packed as people prayed for rain.
Spiritual Healer Nzira to Stand Trial
("The Herald," July 23, 2002)
CHITUNGWIZA spiritual healer Godfrey Nzira facing nine counts of rape and another charge of assault, will face trial at the Harare magistrate's court today.
Nzira, the leader of the Johane Masowe Chishanu Church, was supposed to plead to the charges yesterday but his lawyer, Mr Wilson Manase of Manase and Manase, applied for more time to prepare for the case. The trial was initially set down at Chitungwiza Court but was referred to Harare for security reasons.
The spiritual healer yesterday arrived at the Rotten Row magistrates' court in his Mercedes Benz vehicle and was immediately whisked into the courtroom by his bodyguards who blocked photographers from taking pictures. A group of his followers, mainly women, who attended the hearing, jostled for seats in the small courtroom where the matter was heard.
Mr Manase had in his application for postponement told the court that he had only been served with State papers last week and needed more time to go through them.
However, Prosecutor Mrs Vivian Mandizvidza, opposed the application arguing that it was a ploy to delay the proceedings.
While only granting a one-day postponement, the magistrate, Mrs Betty Makazhe, said she would not tolerate any more delay by Nzira. She said if he continued playing tricks the court would be forced to remand him in custody.
Charges against Nzira arose early this year when he allegedly raped two women who had sought spiritual healing from him. He is also alleged to have severely assaulted a policewoman, also a member of his church.
Cult Leaders Convicted
by
Maurice Okore ("New Vision,"
July 25, 2002)
SIX leaders of the Jjajja Ndawula cult were yesterday convicted of unlawful operation of a religious organisation. The magistrate, however, sentences them today. They were remanded in Luzira Prison.
The convicts admitted to operating the cult.
John Ssemanda, 42, Mary Nakalema, 26, Godfrey Kizito, 26, Geoffrey Wasajja, 25, Vincent Musoke and Agnes Namazzi admitted operating an unregistered organisation called "Katula Kebisse Buka Cultural Group Limited."
The convicts
were arrested from their shrine in Wakiso district.
(AP, July 19, 2002)
CAIRO, Egypt - The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church criticized the Jehovah's Witness faith and said a Copt's conversion to the sect was a ground for divorce, Egypt's Middle East News Agency reported on Friday.
Pope Shenouda III said conversion to the Jehovah's Witness faith was a ground for divorce within his church. The only other ground for divorce is adultery.
The Coptic church allows people of other Christian denominations to intermarry, but disapproves of their divorce, which still can be achieved if taken to the courts.
Copts marrying Muslims, who make up most of Egypt's 68 million population, are also excommunicated.
Speaking in his weekly lecture, the 78-year old patriarch said Jehovah's Witnesses have been active in Egypt for years and have grown more active recently. The faith is "independent and unrelated to all the monotheistic religions," MENA reported him as saying.
"Jehovah's Witnesses have been rejected by all Christian groups," he added.
Church officials and Shenouda's office staff were unavailable for comment Friday. The church is hosting a regular retreat outside Cairo.
Shenouda has been waging a campaign against dissident groups within the church. On July 4, he excommunicated 13 clerics for contesting his authority. The pope accused the clerics, including Deacon Atef Mikhail and a monk, of making claims they were in direct contact with God.
The Jehovah's Witnesses, who have 6 million practicing members worldwide, is a millennialist sect that began in the United States in the 19th century. The sect mandates doorstep proselytizing and its followers routinely knock on doors and ask to talk about religion. They often offer biblical tracts and say they accept donations but do not ask for them.
Shenouda, speaking on Wednesday, said Orthodox Copts should obey the religious leadership and principles of the 2,000-year-old church.
Copts make up less than 10 percent of the population in Egypt, where Islam is the state religion, but the Coptic community worldwide is estimated at 27 million.
Anglican Church Will Not Bury Secret Society Members
("This Day," July 09, 2002)
The church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, has expressed disgust about the ravaging cultism practice, especially in the tertiary institutions of learning and urged priests to intensify efforts at stamping out the menace; saying there would be no church burial for any secret society member.
The message was contained in the second session of the seventh synod of the Diocese of Akure delivered at Ilare by Bishop Omojeyegbe Ipin-moye.
Just last week in Ondo and Ekiti states, more than six students were murdered in a clash among rival cult groups.
In Ekiti, two students were killed at a restaurant along Dalemoh road after an exchange of fire between rival groups while a similar clash claimed four lives at the Ondo State Polytechnic, Owo.
The church in a bid to stem the tide has therefore prohibited any of its members to be in any secret society or cult.
Ipinmoye said that anybody caught in such societies would not enjoy church burial at death.
"We urge all members to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the way, the truth and the life. We urge all our priests to continue to make this known to the members. It is resolved again that no known member of any secret society should be entrusted with any position in the church of Nigeria. No such person should enjoy church burial at death;" he said.
Talking about the state of security in the country, Bishop Ipinmoye called on the government to check all militant groups in the country and advised on the re-orientation of the police for greater efficiency.
He said that convocation of a national conference at this time would be an ideal move to resolve various problems besetting the nation.
"We acknowledge the progress made so far by the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) in resolving, through reconciliation, many intra and inter diocesan disputes. Still, Christians are called upon to unite in the spirit of this standing committee meeting: "that they may be one."
Stop Engaging in Politics, Moi Tells Religious Leaders
("East African Standard," July 01, 2002)
President Moi yesterday advised clergymen to keep politics out of the pulpit, adding that many of them have turned their churches into political grounds.
He advised clergy who dabble in politics to quit their churches and join the game if they have political ambitions.
The President said the role of the clergy was to provide spiritual guidance. President Moi reiterated that he was ready to retire from active politics when his tenure constitutionally ends after the General Election.
President Moi was speaking at Tala Boys Primary School grounds in Kangundo where he helped raise funds for the construction of the African Inland Church (AIC) Kangundo regional church council offices.
The President had earlier attended a special Sunday service at the same grounds.
Meanwhile, President Moi said yesterday that only by Kanu's leadership could Kenyans be assured of a secure future.
President Moi said the ruling party Kanu had distinguished itself in matters of public administration and maintenance of peace, love and unity since independence.
We'll Not Be Cowed, Catholics Say
by
Francis Openda
("East African Standard," July 02, 2002)
The Catholic Church will continue to intervene in social, political and economic issues with the aim of ensuring good governance despite efforts by leaders to stifle its voice.
Catholic bishops, priests and laity drawn from five African countries meeting in Nairobi said the church has a legitimate concern in issues of governance.
They said the church attaches importance on the respect of human life, the need for full human development and freedom which are the pillars of Catholic teachings.
Meeting under the African Forum for Catholic Social Teachings (Afcast), the participants, drawn from Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe shared varied experiences of the church's social teachings in light of the democratisation process in Africa. Afcast has membership drawn from individual Catholics interested in the promotion of social teachings of the Church in Africa.
A member of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, Anthony Njui, said Kenyans are faced with an interesting scenario of transition and succession.
However, Njui said the two should be de-linked as many fear the review process could be used to make the incumbent president eligible for re-election.
"Kanu should not be a judge of its own case as it will not be different from making the hyena pass a ruling over the goat for the goat will certainly be devoured," said Njui.
He said the clear direction on when the elections will be held will only emerge after Kanu has sorted out its succession issue.
He, however, said the election date should not be any individual's secret weapon in order to ensure competitiveness among all political parties.
Njui expressed fear that the forthcoming elections might be marred by excessive violence as it will be expected to address the twin issues of succession and transition. To stem violence, he said, the electoral code of conduct must be enforced.
Archbishop Pius Ncube from Zimbabwe said election violence has been used in many African countries to ensure the ruling parties retain power. He cited the Zimbabwe elections where he claimed President Robert Mugabe sponsored all forms of violence to ensure Zanu-PF retained power.
The Executive Director of the Undugu Society of Kenya, who is also a co-convenor of the meeting, Aloys Opiyo, said the church's social teachings have inspired many countries in East and Southern Africa towards good governance and free and fair elections.
Muslim Scholars Oppose Anti-Polio Drive
("This Day," June 27, 2002)
A bid to drive the scourge of polio out of Nigeria once and for all has come under threat from the pulpit, where Islamic preachers are opposing vaccination.
Health officials said Wednesday that the campaign was still on course, but sceptical Muslim scholars are striving to capitalise on distrust of the West and fear inspired by the failed Pfizer drug test in 1996 in which many people died.
"We will kick against any preventative measure that is clouded by political and economic subjugation, and other intrigues like the 'new world order' and globalisation," said Muhammad Bin Uthman.
The young Islamic scholar has become one of the most outspoken opponents of an internationally funded immunisation drive to eliminate the pockets of polio, a crippling disease.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) aims to eradicate polio in Nigeria by the end of the year and from the other highly popualted regions where it is still endemic by 2005.
Health officials believe the goal is attainable after a coordinated 14-year global campaign brought down cases across the world by 99.8 per cent from 350,000 in 1988 to 600 in 2001.
Last month, a WHO-backed immunisation drive was launched on the Nigeria-Niger frontier North of the city of Kano, where is a Uthman preacher, in a region with a large Muslim majority.
But despite attempts by health officials to talk them round, many of the influential Ulama (Islamic scholars) in the area have attacked the drive in sermons, undermining its support.
by Chris Tomlinson (AP, June 27, 2002)
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Sudanese government planes bombed two church compounds in rebel-held southern Sudan, injuring at least four people, a Roman Catholic group said Thursday.
The Sudan Catholic Bishops Regional Conference said four bombs struck the residence of Bishop Johnson Akio Mutek in Ikotos on Tuesday night.
The bombing injured "many people including four Kenyans" and destroyed the bishop's residence and a youth center, said a statement by the conference released in neighboring Nairobi.
Another 12 bombs were dropped near church schools in Isoke, the group said. A church spokesman said no one was injured and the bombs did no damage.
No rebel units were near either target, church officials said.
Sudanese government officials were not available for comment.
Ikotos and Isoke are in the south in Equatoria province, along the Kenyan border, where the rebel Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army recently captured an important government garrison town. The rebels are fighting for autonomy from the Islamic government in the capital, Khartoum.
In Khartoum, 57 nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference ended a three-day meeting on Thursday by pledging support for Palestinians and their leadership.
The 19-year civil war in Sudan is often portrayed as a battle between the Muslim north and the followers of traditional religions and Christianity in the south, but oil fields in the south have also come to the center of the conflict.
Peace talks mediated by regional leaders are under way in Kenya and are scheduled to last until the end of July. Despite the talks, attacks continue, with government planes bombing several humanitarian targets in southern Sudan in recent weeks.
Copt arrested for allegedly turning his home into a church
(AP, June 23, 2002)
CAIRO, Egypt - Egyptian police on Sunday arrested a Coptic man for allegedly turning his house into a church, police said.
Sulieman Ibrahim, a farmer from a village in the province of Sohag, about 290 miles (455 kilometers) south of Cairo, had turned his house into a church where Copts from the area prayed daily, police said.
Muslims in Ibrahim's village of Nag'a al-Keeman complained to police after hearing people's prayers coming from the house, police said, who added that some of the Muslim villagers were planning to attack the house.
Some 2,000 Muslims and 40 Christians live in Nag'a al-Keeman. The village is near the town of el-Kusheh, which was the center of a spate of sectarian strife in January 2000 in which 23 people, mainly Copts, were killed.
Egypt's Christians, who are mostly Copts, generally live in peace with the Muslim majority. But many Copts, who comprise about 10 percent of the country's 68 million people, have long complained of discrimination, particularly over civil service jobs.
by Julia Liebich and Tom McMann ("Black Voices," June 21, 2002)
For years American missionaries brought Christianity to Africa. Now African Christians say they want to export their own brand of ecstatic worship and moral discipline to the United States, a country they believe has lost its fervor.
"The United States has become very slack, so God is making us bring worship and praise to them," Rev. Samuel Sorinmade said at the North American convention of the Nigeria-based Redeemed Christian Church of God, or RCCG, which runs through Friday at the Rosemont Theatre.
Christianity is growing faster in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world, and the number of African Christians coming to the U.S. is also rising. The largest African Pentecostal church, the RCCG counts 82 parishes in the United States, including two in Chicago: Jesus House on the North Side and All Nations Assembly in Lincolnwood.
The church emphasizes biblical inerrancy, the power of the Holy Spirit, divine healing and prophecy. It warns against disobeying church authority and a worldliness leaders see as rampant in the United States.
Leaders of the RCCG dream of a day when one in four people worldwide are members. Although most of its 5,000 parishes in 80 countries are predominantly Nigerian, in Africa the church has attracted residents of Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana and Zimbabwe, among other countries. In the U.S., African-Americans, Latinos and Caucasians occasionally join in the church's boisterous, music-filled services.
Worshipers expect nothing less than miracles in their evangelism and at the conference, which will culminate in an all-night Holy Ghost service Friday modeled after events in Nigeria that organizers say draw millions of ecstatic followers.
"By the time you are going back, it will be like a dream when you think of all the problems you used to have," Rev. E.A. Adeboye told a crowd of 2,700 men, women and children Wednesday night as they rose to their feet, reached to the sky and shouted words of praise. "After this convention you are going to sing a new song."
Adeboye, a former mathematics professor, spearheaded the church's growth beginning in the 1980s.
His church "is a miracle center," said Tosin Lofinmakin, a public health official who came to the conference from Washington, D.C., and said she has seen the disabled walk after church services.
Founded in 1952, the RCCG is one of several African churches in the U.S., said Jacob Olupona, a religion professor at the University of California at Davis who has studied the topic.
The African Pentecostals, he said, are characterized by their use of music and dance in the liturgy, their belief that prayer will solve problems, and their attempts to adapt Christian values to African beliefs and ways of life.
"The African mind is one that believes in the existence of witchcraft and evil in the world and the effect of magic and medicine," said Olupona. "The Pentecostal church counteracts the forces with the power of prayer and the word of God."
Olupona said African indigenous religion--such as the traditional faith of the Yoruba people--has become stronger among African-Americans than among modern Africans. "It's part of the Black Nationalist phenomenon" in the U.S., he said.
Ethnic ministries are also found within American churches with a large African presence, particularly the Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians. These mainline groups hope to prevent more defections to Pentecostal churches, Olupona said, which are often considered more sensitive to the Africans' needs.
For the last 10 years, members of Jesus House, a RCCG church located in a refurbished store at Montrose and Kedzie Avenues in Chicago, have hoped to meet the needs of anyone drawn to the spirit.
Last Sunday more than 400 people reveled in the church's three-hour service, most of them Nigerian immigrants who danced wildly in the pews and formed conga lines to the raucous music of a seven-piece band. But there were also a smattering of African-Americans, Hispanics and whites.
Amid the Africans dressed in splendid robes and headdresses was Monique Jones, 28, a secretarial worker from the South Side.
"It's my second time here, and I just love it. They really know how to praise the Lord," said Jones, who was brought to the service by a Nigerian co-worker. "The music is what got me. It feels like you're going back to your African roots."
Members of the congregation actively promote the church to friends, neighbors and co-workers. The church posts fliers throughout Chicago and hosts several picnics a year in an aggressive effort to evangelize.
"I extend my gospel to all the people I work with. I ask them to turn back to God," said Jimi Kafisanwo, 50, a hotel bellman who said he has persuaded four of his co-workers to join.
Wale Akinosun, the church's associate pastor, said the church's music is also a big draw. "The sound is a bit African and a bit R&B. But it gets people dancing and celebrating, which the Lord loves to see."
Heather Harris, 21, a bank teller who just moved to the North Side from Indianapolis, was given a flier for the church last week.
"The first song brought tears to my eyes," Harris said after the service Sunday. "I love the way they worship. They actually prayed for God to show up before we started. I haven't really been thinking about God too much lately, but I could feel him in that room."
While the church calls itself a place of all nations, and some Americans have indeed joined the church, it remains primarily a gathering place for African immigrants, where they can mourn their dead, baptize their children and teach the new generation the traditions of old.
"I find so much love, so much comfort in this place. It makes me feel like I'm home in Nigeria," said Foluke Irukera, 32, an accountant from Schaumburg who came to the U.S. in 1995. "Being a Nigerian center isn't the aim of our church, but that's what it has become for many of us. You miss the feeling of your home church."
A group of teenagers at the Rosemont Theatre agreed it was important to hold onto their culture, but like most second-generation immigrants they sometimes chafe at their parents' strictness.
"I like to stick to the ways, but sometimes I stray," said Dare Adewole, 14 of Detroit. "When I go to parties and I dance with a girl--the way they dance is not something the church would want for us."
Temitayo Akindele, 12, also of Detroit, objects to the rules about dating. "They think you shouldn't get a boyfriend till you're looking for someone to marry. I don't like it."
But they would never give up, they said, the classes, the services and the promise of miracles.
"Nigeria is a more holy church-going nation," said Temitayo. America, she believes, has a lot to learn.
"People in America have grown too comfortable," Akinosun said. "The very things your missionaries taught us about God, you have forgotten. Now it's time for us to bring it back. It's our job now to teach the teachers."
Western Youth MP Survives Witchdoctors
by
Davis Weddi ("New Vision,"
June 20, 2002)
The Police in Kampala have arrested three men who allegedly tried to use 'witchcraft to cleanse' the Western Youth Member of Parliament Juliet Sekitoleko.
Kampala's CID Chief Moses Sakira yesterday identified the suspects as Rashid Kalyesubula, Abdu Juuko and Kulaish Bukenya.
The Police confiscated some items normally used in witchcraft.
"They are indescribable articles in a basket," Sakira said.
They were arrested in two intervals starting with Kalyesubula who Sekitoleko delivered to Central Police station before he led detectives to arrest the rest from their base at Masajja, a city suburb in Makindye division.
Sakira said Sekitoleko had for a long time received several telephone calls from the trio who claimed that 'she had been bewitched and that she needed immediate cleansing if she wanted to survive death.'
Sekitoleko reportedly agreed with the suspects on a date on which she would be taken for cleansing.
They organised to meet her at Shell Capital on Kampala road from where they would take her to the place for the cleansing rituals.
(Reuters, June 19, 2002)
LAGOS (Reuters) - At least 18 people have been killed in an attack by students belonging to a secret society at a university in southeast Nigeria on a rival group, the independent newspaper Vanguard reported Wednesday.
The attackers drove onto the University of Nigeria (UNN) campus at Nsukka, near southeast Enugu city, in stolen cars on Saturday and opened fire on students in the engineering faculty, the paper said.
"We know that a number of people were killed in the attack," the Enugu state commissioner of police, Nwachukwu Egbochukwu, told Reuters by phone from the state capital. "But we still cannot say how many people were killed."
The Vanguard said the UNN authorities had closed the university, one of Nigeria's biggest with about 10,000 students, after the attack, part of the rivalry between different cults or gangs at the university.
Most of those killed Saturday were students, but bystanders and lecturers were also among the victims, it said.
Secret societies have become common in most Nigerian universities since the late 1980s, and clashes between rival groups have killed hundreds of students over the years.
Police are allowed onto university campuses only when invited by the university authorities, who generally prefer to use their own security measures to try to keep order.
Nigeria, with more than 250 tribes and about 120 million people, is grappling with its worst cycle of violence since the late 1960s war over breakaway Biafra.
by Hamza Hendawi (AP, June 25, 2002)
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) - The Muslim world risks being "even more marginalized than we are at present" if it fails to close social and economic gaps with developed nations, Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir said Tuesday.
El-Bashir also called for reform of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in remarks to foreign ministers from the 57 Muslim nations meeting in the Sudanese capital.
He said the OIC, the world's only pan-Islamic body, needed to be overhauled so it could "lead joint Islamic endeavors toward the horizons we all aspire for."
He did not say what the organization had to do to become more effective. The OIC, headquartered in the Red Sea port city of Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, has been largely ineffective in finding solutions to problems facing the world's estimated 1.2 billion Muslims and has over the years earned a reputation for being a little more than a debating forum.
El-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 coup, said the Muslim world had no choice but to develop its capabilities "to bridge the historic gap between backwardness and development, weakness and strength ... so we can take our place on the world map as an effective force in every field."
"Unless we do that," he warned, "we shall be reduced to neglected numbers and a quantity that is even more marginalized than we are at present."
Sudan, where an Islamic government has been in power since 1989, says it wants OIC foreign ministers to produce resolutions that reflect the "middle ground" prescribed by Islam.
"We look forward to the adoption of resolutions that may not satisfy everyone but reflect the average of the sentiments and views of Muslims," said Mutref Siddiq, Sudan's Foreign Ministry undersecretary. "Differences exist between Muslim nations and among Muslims too."
The OIC was founded more than 30 years ago in response to a wave of Muslim indignation after a 1969 fire at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam's holiest shrines. A Christian man from Australia was blamed for starting the fire, but Muslims held Israel responsible since it controlled the holy city.
Because it was born out of an event in Jerusalem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been central the organization, and Khartoum gathering was likely to voice solid support for the Palestinians and withering criticism of Israel.
The meeting comes a day after President Bush urged the Palestinians in a long-anticipated speech to replace the Palestinian leadership with those "not compromised by terror" and to adopt democratic reforms that could produce an independent state within three years. He also called on Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank and said the Jewish state will ultimately have to withdraw from lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
Cultists Ambush Mourners, Kill 20
by
Charles Abah ("Daily
Champion," June 11, 2002)
ABOUT 20 people were feared dead at the weekend following an attack on mourners by members of a suspected cult group in Buguma, Asari-Toru council area of Rivers State. Daily Champion gathered that those who lost their lives were mostly young men and women in a procession escorting the body of a slain 26-year-old youth.
Although there are conflicting reports on the cause of the incident,, a source said trouble started when the procession left the compound of the deceased youth's mother and headed for his father's place. The procession was allegedly attacked by the cult group said to be on a reprisal mission for unknown reasons.
Another source stated that the incident was sparked off by a drunken man who had scattered the tables and chairs at an earlier rite of passage party, a development that led to the ensuing confusion and subsequent death of a member of the Kaka group. Confirming the report to Daily Champion, an eyewitness who resides on Nnewi Street in Port Harcourt where the slain youth lived, said most of the victims were friends, streetmates and relations of the deceased who came to witness the burial ceremony.
The source said those killed were initially deposited at the town square, but later taken to a place called sandfill, where the supposed leader of the Kaka Boys, a native doctor, once lived.
Although the state's Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) Mrs. Ireju Barasua said yesterday she was yet to be briefed about the development, another police source who did not want his name in print confirmed the incident but observed that the number of casualties was exaggerated.
It would be recalled that the slain youth was reportedly stabbed by his friend, one Dawari, on May 5 this year over girlfriend matter.
Cultists Raid Iruekpen, Burn Bunglow, Vandalise Others
("Vanguard," June 10, 2002)A gang of suspected cultists from the Edo state government - owned Ambrose Alli University (AAU) Ekpoma have burnt down a 12-room bungalow and vandalised three other buildings at Iruekpen community in Esan West local government area.
Just as the residents of Uwenugo quarters, Iruekpen, who were sacked from their homes for five days by the rampaging cultists were trying to recover from the shock, cultists at the federal government - owned University of Benin (UNIBEN), Benin, have threatened to cause mayhem in the institution.
Vice Chancellor of AAU, Professor Dennis Agbonlahor and his UNIBEN counterpart, Professor Richard Anao were said to be shocked at the turn of events in their respective universities as the authorities had made so much efforts to stamp out cultism in the institutions.
At Iruekpen, cultists, numbering over 20, armed with guns, cutlasses, axes, broken bottles, petrol and other dangerous weapons, descended on the residents of Uwenugo quarters, Iruekpen because a female student of the Ambrose Alli University, residing in the area, jilted a cult leader.
The female student, and four others were seriously wounded by the cultists who stole over N200,000 found in the homes of their victims.
The villagers who were dazed by the attack abandoned their houses for five days and started returning only when the police assured them of their safety.
However, the cultist who led his colleagues on the rampage, a postgraduate student of the institution has been arrested by the police in the state.
When newsmen visited Iruekpen, on Saturday, the 12-room bungalow, situated at N0. 15 Uwenugo quarters, Iruekpen and mainly occupied by students was in complete ruins.
The owner of the house, Mr. Philemon Ikpefua was not immediately available but a lady who witnessed the incident said the cultists struck at about 4.00pm Sunday, last week.
She said that one female student residing at No. 3 Ugo Street, dumped her boyfriend because of his suspicious character and amorous relationship with several other girls on campus.
Her action infuriated the cultist who for the past three weeks, beat up the girl anywhere he found her in town to intimidated her but when that failed to achieve the desired result, he paid a visit to her on Saturday night before unleashing mayhem next day.
"He (the cultist) came to the former girlfriend's house and asked her younger brother to produce the girl who was not at home at that time. They saw a boy, Daniel outside and tried to bundle him away but some of the youths in the area resisted, only for them to go back to the school and mobilise more students to attack the residents," the witness narrated to newsmen.
She said that "the students who came in several buses later, besieged the area and started burning and looting property," adding that building materials, electronic gadgets, hair dressing equipment were all destroyed.
Pius Osaghae and Clement Irekengba, both landlords of No 5 and 13 Ugo Street respectively, told newsmen that their houses were vandalised by the cultists.
Mr. Irekengba said his residence would have been razed if not for the intervention of villagers who put out the fire before it did much damage. Both of them said they had reported the matter to the police.
The UNIBEN authorities in a press statement in Benin stated that the plot to cause mayhem in the university was being spearheaded by a group of cultists who claimed that they wanted to retaliate the death of a member at Osasogie area, last year.
It said that the identities of key leaders of the cult groups, including their "big boss" were known to the authorities and they would be reported to the police in the event of any outbreak of violence in the school.
Edo State Police Commissioner, Mr. Tunji Olapini confirmed the Iruekpen incidents and the arrest of some suspects, including the leader of the gang that sacked the villagers, promising that the police would not spare cultists anywhere they are found in the state.
'Prophet' Bushara Sticks to His Cult
by
Frederick Kiwanuka ("New
Vision," June 06, 2002)
LUWEERO self-styled prophet Wilson Bushara has defied efforts by State House to drop his cult and revert to mainstream Christianity.
Bushara said at the end of a three-day State House organised crusade aimed at spiritually rehabilitating him and his followers that nothing will make him drop his World Message, Last Warning Church.
State House had convened the crusade for followers of Bushara's World Message, Last Warning Church, with the aim of morally, spiritually and physically rehabilitating them.
Rev. Can. Rubunda who coordinated the crusade said he wanted the followers, who are living in destitution in various parts of the country, to drop their cult mentality and start working for a living instead of sitting idle waiting to go to heaven.
"We only listened but we shall not leave our religion as they wanted us to do," said Bushara, who claims he received God's vision in 1996.
He said to him, dropping the cult principles was tantamount to betraying his followers whom he said currently number to over 7,000 people.
New Cult Emerges in Wakiso
by Alex Balimwikungu ("New Vision," June 03, 2002)A new cult has emerged in Wattuba sub-county on Bombo road, in Wakiso district.
The 300-member cult is under the leadership of a 42-year-old self-styled prophet, Basajjakambwe Busajjabukirana.
They believe in cultural norms, though they also claim to deal directly with God and not through intercessors like Jesus Christ.
Basajjakambwe also preaches against the white man's influence and discourages converts from carrying out any practice linked with the whites, stressing the notion, "Africa for Africans".
Speaking to the New Vision on Monday, Basajjakambwe said he received a vision from God which instructed him to carry on his work.
"Recently as I crouched on my bed in the dead of the night, something strange happened. I heard a voice, which communicated to the effect that it had been sent to tell me to preach to people about God, not his creation or his intercessors," he said.
"We have a direct link with God. Those who reach God through intercessors are false believers. We do not believe in Lubaale (spirits) or Jesus Christ. Those are creations," he said.
He said they used a book called Enkuluze (authoritative compilation) which was written by Professor J.C Ssekamwa, a former dean of the School of Education Makerere University, which expertly disseminates information on Baganda cultures, norms and totems.
Church Warns Herald
("The Daily News," May 30, 2002)
THE Johanne Marange Apostolic Church says it will take legal action against the government mouthpiece The Herald for "manufacturing falsehoods," unless the newspaper retracts stories it published on two consecutive days last week.
These claimed that some worshippers died when they drank "poisoned" tea at Rupako Farm in Nyazura.
In a letter to Pikirayi Deketeke, the paper's editor, dated 24 May, written by the sect's lawyers Mushonga and Associates, the Church says if there is no retraction within four days they will either issue a summons for defamation against the newspaper or make an official report to the police.
The letter says the sect, led by Noah Taguta, would consider reporting the paper to the police for allegedly publishing falsehoods in contravention of the draconian Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
It could not be established by yesterday whether The Herald had responded to the ultimatum.
At least 47 people, 27 of them women and seven children, were affected and admitted to hospital on 19 May, according to the stories.