MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Central Nigeria is rich with fertile land. The struggle for access to it has become increasingly violent. In June, more than 160 people were killed in one farming village. The suspects are herders. Farming communities accuse the herders of a campaign to drive them from their farms. NPR's Emmanuel Akinwotu went to the village. It is still reeling from the killings. And a warning before we get started - his story includes descriptions of violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS CLUCKING)
EMMANUEL AKINWOTU, BYLINE: A cluster of chicks dart through rice crops at a farm in Yelwata, a predominantly Christian village in Nigeria's central state of Benue, known as the country's bread basket. Dotted across acres of farmland are brick homes, huts and barns that have been destroyed.
TERHEMBA LORMBA: (Crying).
AKINWOTU: Forty-five-year-old farmer Terhemba Lormba weeps outside what's left of his home. The brick walls have caved in, the metal roof torched, the floor covered in ash. He lost eight members of his family, including three of his children. They were among more than 160 people killed here in mid-June.
LORMBA: They killed seven people here.
AKINWOTU: The attackers set fire to his house while his family hid in a bedroom. Seven of them were burnt alive, he says. His brother was found shot dead. The attackers also torched his storehouse just a few yards away from his home, filled with his sacks of rice, beans and yams. Almost all the crops were destroyed, but Lormba's family are trying to salvage what they can.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
AKINWOTU: They crouch on a mud path outside and wash bowls of rice, charred black, moving the clean grains onto trays laid out on the ground.
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
AKINWOTU: Nearby in the village, other survivors search through the debris. Dried pools of blood soak the ground of a small transport union office in the village. We're led inside by 35-year-old Mathias Dze, to where his brother, Elijah, was hacked with machetes.
Is this where you found his body?
MATHIAS DZE: Yes, this is where I found his body.
AKINWOTU: Like virtually everyone in Yelwata, Dze is a Christian. He was hiding in the nearby St. Joseph's Catholic church with several others. Then he went to find his brother.
DZE: And when I came, I saw him on the floor with wounds and then blood everywhere. He was still breathing.
AKINWOTU: He rushed him to the hospital, but before they arrived, he died. The identities of the attackers are unknown, but they are widely believed by police to be herders or militants from the Fulani ethnic group, who are mostly Muslim. Disputes between herders and farmers are common in Nigeria and the Sahel region in Africa, where pressures on land have become intense, in part due to climate change and population growth. Farmers often accuse herders of grazing cattle on their crops. Herders bemoan that private farms and urban development have expanded, shrinking available land to graze. But what used to be locally resolved disputes has evolved into a wave of mass killings in farming communities like Yelwata.
In a statement, a group representing Nigeria's herders say they seek peaceful coexistence and condemn the recent killings. But the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria also said that Fulani herders are themselves often profiled, robbed and killed and said that more than 500 herders have been killed in the past year and thousands of their cattle stolen. However, here in Benue, farming communities say these attacks are not tit-for-tat violence, but part of a pattern.
JAMES AYATSE: If you want to kill people, then you must be interested in what they have, and we believe that it's the land.
AKINWOTU: Professor James Ayatse is the Tor Tiv, a traditional monarch and the head of the Tiv people, the dominant ethnic group in Benue. He said the massacres are driving farming communities away from their land, and then herders arrive, free to graze their cattle. Close to 500,000 people in Benue have been displaced by the violence, most from rural villages that are now too dangerous to return to.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
AKINWOTU: Groups of young men are still poring through destroyed homes where entire families were killed.
We've stepped into a brick house in Yelwata community that has been burnt down. They were rice farmers, and you can see rice, charred black, scattered all across the floor. And it reeks. There are flies everywhere. You can see human remains.
While villagers clear the damage, the lasting effects of the violence are visible in the nearby hospitals.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Crying).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
AKINWOTU: At a pediatric ward, about a dozen children, some under a year old, are receiving treatment, their small limbs and arms in bandages. Four-year-old Onyuso is among them, with cuts to his arm and ankle.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
AKINWOTU: He's engrossed in a comedy show he's watching on his grandmother's phone. She's 62-year-old Felicia David.
FELICIA DAVID: (Speaking Tiv).
AKINWOTU: Speaking in Tiv, she says her daughter, Martina, and her son-in-law were killed. Onyuso was with his mom when she was hacked to death in front of him, while his dad was shot outside their home. She says he's been crying, asking for his dad to come and see him, and she doesn't know how to tell Onyuso that he's gone.
Emmanuel Akinwotu, NPR News, Benue. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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