You’re listening to part two of an interview with Dr. Robert Royal conducted by Dr. William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights. Dr. Royal is an accomplished author and speaker and has taught at several universities. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, an online publication. To listen to the rest of this interview, click the link in the description or visit humanrights.catholic.edu.
William Saunders: You know, Bob, in your article, you mentioned the Fulani, I believe, and the… if people have heard of this, what you often hear is this conflict is about, bizarrely, having to do with global warming, that somehow this has made the Muslim cow… owners of cattle have to infringe even more in farmland, which Christians have, and that’s created this conflict.
You know, there may be a tiny bit of truth in that, or there may be no truth in it, but the fact is, these herdsmen are also feeling justified in the horrible things they do because of jihad and Muslim extremists towards Christians. I’ll just mention one thing. Like I said, I started in Sudan; I’ve worked about the persecuted church for over 30 years. But I started in Sudan, and it was the same dynamic there, Bob, as here. You had Muslim herders infringing into an area of the Dinka tribe and taking their land. Okay, yes, that had gone on before. What had happened?
Well, in Sudan, the government had armed these herdsmen, and so they’d upped the ante and they used them as, you know, as a force of jihad. And nobody in the US government for the longest time would acknowledge there was a religious element. I mean, like in Sudan, there may have been all kinds of things involved.
There was absolute racism, there were cultural conflicts, but there was a religious element to it as well. And it’s just closing your eyes to that that I think you and I, Bob, are trying to stop, make people acknowledge the truth and the suffering of people who are suffering because of their faith.
Robert Royal: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a tough one because people don’t like to have to face the fact that there are virtually impossible to resolve religious differences. Several popes have kind of shied away from this question of Islam. One of the things that has happened – I mention this, of course, in my book – is that ISIS was largely defeated in the Middle East.
ISIS is the Islamic State. It’s a radicalized group trying to bring back the Muslim caliphate, which is, you know, the multinational kind of Islamic political structure, the way that the old Ottoman Empire and et cetera used to exist. And what happened was after they were defeated in the Middle East largely by a coalition of America and other Western countries, and some Eastern countries, that it migrated.
It migrated to Central Africa. So, in Nigeria, you have a group, if I remember this correctly it’s called the Islamic State Western African Province, ISWAP, which is a formal group that is seeking to establish a caliphate in that region. It’ll be a multinational – if they can achieve it obviously – multinational caliphate.
But it’s clear that this is driven by a kind of religious ideology that is very similar to what happened in the past with Christians in the Middle East. I mean, people talk about how well people got along together. Yeah, of course they did, because, you know, you have to live and let live when you’re living alongside people.
But Christians were there on sufferance in the Ottoman Empire, so they paid an extra tax, which by the way, the Ottomans liked a lot. They didn’t want to drive the Christians out because they needed that money from the Christians. But it, it was never the case that this was simply a kind of a pluralistic society the way we think about it in the West.
It was dominated by Islam. Christians and Jews were second-hand citizens and they had to pay a tax to live there, and they were tolerated and sometimes repressed there too. But that’s moved on and that militant part of Islam has moved into Central Africa, and sadly even out into East Asia.
So, people used to think Eastern Asian Muslims were more moderate and, you know, not as inclined toward jihad, but it’s everywhere. We need to take the measure of that, because it’s the truth. It’s not something that I created or you created or, you know, somebody created ideologically. It’s what the reality is on the ground.
W: Yeah, it’s uncomfortable for some reason for a lot of people in the West and in America to acknowledge that sometimes there is this religious hatred element. And I… there is a lot of religious hatred in the world. It may be true that sometimes Christians are guilty of it, but here, it’s driven by some Muslims’ hatred of Christians.
And of course we want to acknowledge there have been quite a number of innocent Muslims killed in Nigeria, too. Not all Muslims are these Fulani herdsmen or the Boko Haram, which is really kind of like a terrorist gang of robbers, Muslims. But, there are those and they do it in religious terms and they particularly target Christians.
And there’s been, for those who are interested in this subject, there have been a number of hearings on Capitol Hill about this; I have something here from Congressman Chris Smith who held a hearing and who is a great leader on human rights issues. And he quotes a bishop from Nigeria who is saying the militant Fulani herdsmen are terrorists.
They steal and vandalize, they kill and boast about it, they kidnap and rape and they enjoy total immunity from elected officials. And I wanna say, because in my master’s program I’ve had students from Nigeria…. that one of the big problems in Nigeria is the officials or the government not doing what they are required to do as government officials to protect innocent people.
So, there’s no question that’s an important part of it. Now, part of the reason they don’t do it is from bribery to stay away from it. So, there’s a lot of problems in Nigeria, but a part of it, an important part of it, a central part of it, is this hatred of Christians that is being exploited by the haters to take their lands and kill their people.
R: Yeah. No, I think you, you got that exactly right. Nigeria’s a big country. As you said, it’s the largest in population in Africa. It’s very wealthy in terms of mineral riches, you know, all sorts of different things. And that may be one of the reasons why Western countries don’t particularly want to look at Nigeria because, you know, a lot of people in the West benefit from, from those natural resources.
But you can’t entirely excuse the government from what has been going on. Now, since the attention of the world has been turned to Nigeria, the Nigerian president has said that he’s hiring, I forget the exact figure, but it’s, you know, thousands of new police and military and whatnot, but that doesn’t resolve the problem.
And some of the bishops there have said, “Yeah, they’re doing this, but part of the problem is that the corruption inside the military and inside the police forces is such that they can also, not always, but they can also operate like the very jihadists who allegedly they’re supposed to be controlling from attacking the Christians.” So, insofar as there is a sincere desire to protect the Christians, it’s a very complex thing to do even within the social structure that exists there in Nigeria.
So, I think you’re exactly right about that. And listen, you rightly said that there are some Muslims that also suffer under these radicals, and it’s because they regard them as too moderate. And so even within Islam, there is this violent activity going on by people who think that they are the voice of God and they are the true path to religiosity.
So again, we come back to the fact that the religious factor cannot be ignored here. It’s probably the case, I would say, 1,000 so-called moderate Muslims have died this year in Nigeria without questioning the case that maybe 10 or more thousand Christians have died. So, that’s the proportion.
When people try to tell you, “Well, you know, there are also moderate Muslims who are being attacked,” yeah, that’s true, but again, that’s kind of a secondary point. The real repression that’s going on, the major part of it, 90% or more, is Muslim attacks on Christians.
The Catholic University of America’s Center for Human Rights has published a documentary on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The documentary features world-class human rights experts from former state department officials to ambassadors and human rights activists. It can be found on our website at humanrights.catholic.edu.