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Nigeria

Feature-Nigeria swings between bloodshed and harmony

By Tume Ahemba

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria, April 11 (Reuters) - Nnamdi Okpala believes he still has a future in the northern Nigerian city of Maiduguri despite being a victim of repeated bouts of ethnic and religious violence.

Okpala is a Christian from the Ibo ethnic group, a minority in Maiduguri where Muslims from the Kanuri group dominate. He has lived and traded in the largely Islamic north for 21 years.

Last year, his shop was among dozens belonging to Christian Ibos that were looted and torched during riots in which Muslim mobs killed about 30 Christians.

"The crisis was the worst I have seen in all my stay here. We had to run for our dear lives after the rioters overwhelmed the police. By the time we came back, our shops had been looted and burnt," said Okpala, sitting with a group of Ibo traders in front of a row of shops, some still blackened by soot.

News of the killings in Maiduguri sparked reprisal attacks in the Ibo heartland in the southeast. Christian mobs there turned on northern Muslim traders, killing about 100 of them.

The Maiduguri riots and the tit-for-tat violence in the southeast were typical of Nigeria's volatile mix of ethnic diversity, religious rivalry and complex politics.

The ostensible cause of the riots was Muslim anger over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. But many local people said the violence was instigated by politicians because Maiduguri was scheduled to host a public hearing about a plan to extend the president's tenure, which was unpopular there.

Such eruptions of violence are not uncommon in Nigeria, where human rights groups estimate at least 15,000 people have died in religious or ethnic fighting since 1999 when elections returned Nigeria to democracy after three decades of almost continuous army rule.

But that statistic belies a broader picture of usually peaceful cohabitation in Nigeria, whose 140 million people are split into about 250 ethnic groups and divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians.

Okpala said the violence, when it occurs, is orchestrated by politicians and radical Islamic preachers who use ethnicity and religion to manipulate people for their own cynical ends.

MUSLIM PRESIDENT

For now, he places his hope in the expected election on April 21 of a northern Muslim to be the next president after eight years of Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian and an ethnic Yoruba from the southwest.

The two main candidates, Umaru Yar'Adua and Muhammadu Buhari, are both Muslim from Katsina state in the north.

"These senseless killings will reduce when a northerner is president because his Muslim brethren will see him as their own man and won't want to cause trouble for his government," said Okpala.

Obasanjo is due to step down next month after elections marking the first transition from one elected leader to another since independence from Britain in 1960. The major parties have nominated Muslim flagbearers from the northern part of the country in the spirit of an unwritten agreement by the political elite that the presidency alternates between the north and the south.

"There is no cause for alarm because a reasonable Muslim president may even be better than a bad Christian president," said Reverend Nevin Mshelia, secretary general of the Christian Association of Nigeria's branch in Maiduguri.

Obasanjo has implemented economic reforms that have won praise from Western powers and the private sector, but many northerners feel they have exacerbated an economic imbalance between the south and the poorer north.

"Obasanjo's government has empowered the south and neglected the north," said Audu Maishanu, a 59-year-old car and real estate dealer, sheltering under a tree from the scorching sun in Maiduguri, on the fringes of the Sahel.

"You can hardly get petrol at any filling station in the north. It has been so for eight years," he said, pointing at a group of teenagers hawking fuel in jerrycans by the roadside.

Maishanu said: "Almost all the textile industries in the north have shut down. Anyone that Allah chooses as the next president will surely reverse all this."

Borno, where Maiduguri is located, is one of 12 northern states that imposed provisions of Islamic sharia law into the criminal justice system in 2000, a politically motivated move by state governors that alienated Christians and sparked violence.

But in Maiduguri, residents of all ethnic and religious backgrounds gather in the evenings at Wurali, an area the size of a soccer field filled with shanties, to drink beer or local gin despite sharia restrictions.

"Here there is no religion or ethnicity, we are all united by Bacchus," said a senior Muslim police officer, asking not to be named.