++Okoh urges Nigerian Christians to resist temptation to violence

Via Anglican Ink:

The Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Archbishop Nicholas Okoh has urged Nigerian Christians not to seek vengeance for the wave of anti-Christian and ethnic violence sweeping across Northern Nigeria. The archbishop’s peace plea follows a series of bombings carried out by the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group, Boko Haram, which last week killed over 200 people.

The plight of Nigeria’s Christians was also raised in Parliament last week, with MPs pressing the Church of England and the government to use their influence to end the violence.

Reporters from the Leadership newspaper in Kano counted 185 bodies in the mortuaries of the city’s main hospital following four apparently coordinated bomb blasts on the evening of 20 January 2012. The death toll is expected to rise, the newspaper said, as other bodies are brought to the hospital, while several people were severely injured in the blasts and are near death.

Following the attack by the radical Islamist group, police imposed a 24-hour curfew on the city, which was modified to a dusk to dawn curfew on Monday. The Kano bombings were followed by an attack on a Christian community in North-Eastern Nigerian town of Tafawa which left nine people dead and ten wounded.

President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, condemned the Islamist attacks, protesting the fact that “honest Nigerians were brutally killed by terrorists.”

“We will not sit here and watch while enemies of democracy spread terror across our land,” he said.

In a statement released on 23 January following the visit of the Bishop of Durham to Nigeria, Archbishop Okoh warned the violence in the North posed a “very serious challenge” to the government and was giving President Jonathan many “sleepless nights.” However, the outbreak of “religious strife” was unnatural as Christians and Nigerians sought “to continue to live together peacefully as before.”

He stated that Christians were “facing serious temptation” as the “intense attack” by the Islamist radicals was “tempting the Christians whether to continue to maintain peace, always turning the other cheek, or fight back to find their safety.”

The archbishop called upon government and Muslim leaders to “reach out to Boko Haram to dissuade them from dastardly acts.”

He called upon Boko Haram to “leave the Church alone,” and to “dialogue with government if they have any axe to grind with her.”

However Christians would not meet violence with violence. “The attempt to drag Nigerians into militancy is something Nigerians must resist,” Archbishop Okoh said.