African democracy can defeat terror

Holy Week this year, like the first Good Friday, was particularly cruel. The agony of families whose sons and daughters were studying at Garissa University, Kenya, has been witnessed across the world: 142 students and six security personnel were slaughtered on Maundy Thursday as Islamist terrorists, mostly from neighbouring Somalia, sought to kill as many Christians as they could find. Yet the atrocity was not the outcome of local sectarianism, and Muslims joined Christians in a march in Garissa against the al-Shabaab killers the next day.

The terrorist campaign in Kenya is mirrored in West Africa by the Nigeria-based Boko Haram group, which has murdered 13,000 Christians and Muslims over the past six years. Yet there is more than a glimmer of hope in the general reaction to recent events in Kenya and Nigeria. The inability of Nigeria’s Christian President, Goodluck Jonathan, to bring security to the Muslim-majority north of the country – and most notoriously his Government’s failure to rescue nearly 300 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram exactly one year ago – in large part cost him the presidential election last month. 

Many Christians have therefore welcomed the election result. Mr Jonathan’s gesture of telephoning his Muslim rival Muhammadu Buhari to concede defeat may have saved hundreds of lives, and helped to stabilise Nigerian democracy. In 2011, 800 died in disturbances following the announcement of Mr Jonathan’s victory. There are indications now that the Nigerian army under a Buhari Government, with a relatively united nation behind it, might start driving back Boko Haram from the territory it has occupied.

Meanwhile, following all-too-credible allegations that Garissa University was not sufficiently protected at the time of the attack, President Uhuru Kenyatta on Monday sent Kenyan warplanes to bomb al-Shabaab bases in Somalia where the Kenyan army is fighting the terrorists. Kenya’s Muslim-majority coastal areas, which have also suffered from terrorism, cannot be dealt with in the same manner, but the way forward, as in Nigeria, must be to show both Muslims and Christians that they can be protected from Islamist terror. As both Governments step up their anti-terrorist campaigns, they have to demonstrate that they will defend all communities, and will resist every attempt to divide one community from another.

These remain dark times for Christians, and many Easter homilies focused on contemporary martyrdom. Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, preaching at the commemoration of the Passion of Our Lord in Rome on Good Friday, pointed out: “True martyrs for Christ do not die with clenched fists but with their hands joined in prayer.” Like the Archbishop of Canterbury in his own Easter Sunday homily, he was reclaiming the notion of martyrdom from those who award it to the suicide murderer – that is, the likes of Islamic State, Boko Haram and al-Shabaab. The reclamation of the word will be a small but important part of the reclamation of civilisation and decency from barbarity and bloody slaughter.