The town of Dutse in northern Nigeria was recovering on Tuesday after 1,000 people fled their homes in the latest in a series of inter-communal flare-ups that analysts warn could escalate in the coming months.

The violence that erupted in Dutse, capital of Jigawa state and close to the border with Niger, last week was sparked by rumours that a Christian market trader had blasphemed against the Prophet Mohammed. Analysts say the unrest is part of a trend whereby unemployed youths in the dirt-poor, yet oil-rich, former British colony are using religious pretexts for looting sprees.

Mobs of young men rampaged through the predominantly Muslim town, looting shops and burning churches and other buildings belonging to Christians. Over 1,000 people sought refuge in police stations, according to police officials.

Violent precedent

In similar violence in February, at least 150 people were killed and 50,000 displaced in a week of riots across six of the country’s 36 states after Muslims attacked Christians in the northeastern city of Maiduguri. They were ostensibly angry over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published in Denmark.

Teeming with 130 million Nigerians, Africa’s most populous country has experienced dozens of incidents like this since civilian leadership took over in 1999. More than 14,000 Nigerians have been killed and three million have fled their homes because of violence since 1999, according to the Brussels-based conflict-analysis NGO International Crisis Group.

Most people displaced by violence in Nigeria seek refuge with family, friends or communities where their ethnic group is in the majority. Many appear to return to their homes or resettle nearby after violence has subsided, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) in Geneva, although thousands of Nigerians now live abroad.

Rivalry among the country’s main ethnic groups - the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Igbo in the southeast and the Yoruba in the southwest - and religious tension between Muslims and Christians are frequently blamed for outbreaks of violence.

But Crisis Group says polarisation has been exacerbated by the disintegration of public services, forcing people to rely on “self-help measures through ethnic, religious, community and civic organisations”, and that resulting friction has been fuelled by the “eagerness” of the oil-rich country’s ruling elites to exploit social cleavages and factional mobilisation.

Warning issued

Analysts warn that if the run-up to the presidential election, which is scheduled for April 2007, proves to be violent or divisive, thousands more people could potentially be displaced by unrest.

The IDMC said in a report last week that “splits within the government of Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and increasing jockeying for power have seen a rise in the number of political assassinations and a general sense of insecurity across the country”.

“Failure to strengthen Nigeria’s fragile democracy and to ensure free and fair elections could ultimately result in massive population movements both within and well beyond the country’s borders,” the Norwegian Refugee Council-sponsored group warned.

The IDMC highlighted the Christian-dominated Plateau state in the centre of the country as being especially at risk of inter-communal conflict. Tensions there in 2004 between Muslim cattle herders and Christian farmers left up to 1,000 people dead and 258,000 temporarily displaced.

Other potential flash-point issues in Nigeria that the IDMC warned could trigger more displacement are violence linked with secessionist demands in Nigeria’s southeast, local resistance to the official handover by Nigeria of the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon, and unrest in the oil-rich Niger Delta region. Dozens of people have been kidnapped and killed in the Delta this year alone as demands grow for greater access to the region’s oil wealth.

Despite being the world’s tenth largest oil producer, 37 percent of Nigerians live on less than US $1 per day, according to the World Bank. By comparison, the much-smaller West African state of Senegal, which exports groundnuts and fish and has no major natural resources, enjoys more than twice Nigeria’s per capita income.