President Trump recently designated Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” for the persecution of Christians by groups of violent Islamists. A White House statement announced that the United States will “stand ready, willing and able” to defend them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had urged CPC status for Nigeria, cited specifically the actions of “Fulani ethnic militias” as part of the problem.
Nigeria’s beleaguered Christians received this news with hope, while the American foreign policy denizens of security and trade silos, not to mention those who want to cancel any reference to Christians as victims, launched an immediate backlash of criticism filled with misconceptions and disinformation.
A key to why Trump made this designation is the International Religious Freedom Act (IRF Act) of 1998. This law requires the president to evaluate annually every foreign country’s record on religious freedom and designate as a CPC those with “severe violations of religious freedom,” which its government actively “engages in” or “tolerates.” “Severe” is defined as “egregious, ongoing and systematic.” Note, there is no mention in it of those other terms that are frequently used loosely and interchangeably in social discourse — “genocide,” which American law defines with a high bar, and “persecution,” which has no legal definition.
The drafters of the IRF Act decided not to automatically attach military, economic, or other sanctions to CPC findings after President Bill Clinton threatened to “fudge an evaluation of the facts” of persecution to avoid sanctions, as the New York Times reported on April 27, 1998. Congress aimed to ensure accuracy in the official U.S. reporting on religious persecution and left it to the president to decide the appropriate policy responses or to waive them entirely.
The crisis facing Nigerian Christians has long been a concern of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and the religious-freedom community. It finally got Washington’s attention last March when Nigerian Catholic Bishop Wilfred Anagbe, from the mostly Christian Middle Belt state of Benue, gave startling testimony before the House of Representatives’ Africa Subcommittee. He described frequent raids on the farmlands of his diocese by armed Fulani Muslim herders, who kill, rape, or kidnap residents, all the while shouting the jihadi battle cry, “Allahu Akbar.” He stated:
The Makurdi Diocese in Benue state has been the epicentre of the invasion by these herders, who are more like ‘hired guns’ of cattle oligarchs, who manipulate religion to rally the herders to eliminate the Christian population, and cleanse the land in the name of Islam.
This took courage. A few weeks later, Fulani militants attacked the bishop’s home village of Aondoana and its surrounding area, massacring twelve of his relatives and scores of others. The priest directing his Justice and Peace office, who took the body counts and came to the aid of survivors, has been forced to take a temporary leave after credible threats to his life. Washington politicians who had met with Bishop Anagbe when he was in Washington were “appalled” when they got this news.
Two weeks after that incident, in Yelwata, Benue, over 270 already displaced Christians were murdered in a similar Fulani raid, prompting public prayers from Pope Leo in Rome. This pattern of frequent and violent attacks has occurred in the years before and months since then.
As the Nigeria government watches passively — with no Fulanis arrested and prosecuted, with no Nigerian forces sent to defend the vulnerable — the Christian death toll has mounted into the thousands, and millions of Christian survivors are in displacement camps. The respected research group Open Doors cites Nigeria as now the world’s most dangerous country for Christians because of their religion.
The State Department’s Foreign Service and the United Nations have insisted that the violence by Nigeria’s various Islamist groups is the unavoidable impact of climate change. The State Department religious-freedom reports have annually described the indiscriminate killings by nomadic herders, who are Muslim, of Christian farming families while on their own lands as “clashes” between two socio-economic groups, who fight over scarce resources brought on by climate change.
A UNHCR article entitled, “Climate change fuels deadly conflict in Nigeria’s Middle Belt,” is a pitch-perfect example of this narrative. After an interview with a survivor of one such Fulani atrocity who describes the rape and murder of her eleven-year-old daughter and the murder of her husband, and who now lives in a Benue displacement camp, it concludes by quoting the head of the powerful pro-Fulani Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association: “Climate change is a new challenge that we didn’t experience 20 or 30 years ago; it’s really impacting us.” In other words, the UNHCR casts as victims both the Fulani aggressors and their farming family victims, with religious persecution having no role.
Bill Gates points out that the climate change cause is becoming passé, and that may explain the recent shift of many CPC opponents. They now acknowledge that Christians are being murdered in cold blood but assert that more Muslims are killed in the violence. U.S. Advisor on Africa Massad Boulos, espousing this stance in addressing the anti-Christian attacks, told journalists in Abuja two weeks before Trump’s announcement: “This has never been a serious religious issue and should not be.”
The premise that more Muslims than Christians are killed is questionable, as the scholarly Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa documents. In any case, most Nigerian Muslims live in the north where Boko Haram and a plethora of ISIS- and al-Qaeda-linked Islamist terror groups attack them and non-Muslims alike, for religious reasons, but where, significantly, Abuja’s military is actively fighting them. By contrast, in the Middle Belt, where most of the Christians are being slaughtered, the government isn’t lifting a finger against their militant Fulani oppressors; instead, it is “tolerating” them. I have also heard about sporadic Christian attacks on Muslim villages. To the extent that the government is not investigating and taking action in those cases, that is all the more reason for CPC designation.
The president’s designation has already gotten the attention of Nigerian President Bola Tinubu. Hopefully, it will instill in him a newfound will to protect the Middle Belt Christians. The next step in the CPC process will be the American president’s determination of a specific policy response.
President Trump, often criticized as solely “transactional,” deserves credit for not fudging the facts of persecution in the interest of dealmaking with oil-rich Nigeria. He is upholding religious freedom as a pillar of American foreign policy, drawing attention to an unaddressed security threat and hopefully bringing relief to Nigeria’s Christians.