The umbrella body of the Berom tribes of Plateau State known as the Berom Educational and Cultural Organisation (BECO), yesterday warned that no matter the killings of its people, including innocent women and children by the Fulani herdsmen, not a single inch of Berom Land shall be ceded to them.
BECO, which is the highest decision making body of the Berom Nation in a press statement signed by its Vice President, Da Iliya Choji Kim and made available to Sunday Telegraph in Jos, said despite the fact that its people and communities are victims of sustained herdsmen’s attack, they won’t cede their land to them.
The Vice President, who insisted that the attacks are aimed at dispossessing and annihilating them from their ancestral lands and heritage, said the Berom nation takes serious exception to the smear campaign targeted at demonising the Berom, religious hatred and intolerance.
The statement reads in part: “To us, these narratives are largely blatant lies, contradictory, and misleading or merely the figments of the authors’ imagination. It must be said that no matter the terror and killings of our people, not a single inch of Berom land shall be ceded to Fulani occupiers and their cohorts in this 21st century.
“We find it very dubious to isolate the unfortunate disappearance of Major Gen. Idris Alkali and treat it outside the context of security challenges bedeviling Plateau State now for nearly two decades.
“The Berom nation strongly holds that the mere discovery of a car in very unclear circumstances at a particular location does not immediately incriminate an entire community, no matter how much we are hated or demonised.
“The disappearance of General Idris Alkali is without doubt, painful and unfortunate. However, this must be explained in a proper perspective of the prevailing general insecurity, the compromised security agents and the quality of governance among others.”
BECO held that Berom Nation has never and shall not tolerate criminality or cover bad elements in any way, saying justice demands that particular culprits be fished out through established procedures of scientific and criminal investigation practiced all over the world.
The statement continued: “This is what we expect in the circumstance, not for the Nigerian Army to indiscriminately arrest and harass community members and passers-by including heavily pregnant women and the aged with the aim of torturing them and ‘cowing’ them to make statements under duress.
“Today, however, what the Berom Nation is confronted with is the biased speculation and religiously motivated campaign to justify the dispossession and extermination of its people.
“More fundamentally, we consider the labeling of the yet unknown perpetrator(s) of the disappearance of Major General Idris Alkali, as ‘Berom Christian terrorists’ as not only prejudicial but malicious and inciting, meant only to further entrench religious bigotry and hatred.
According to them, the deliberate distortion of facts and reality, appear logical from their narration therefore, to continually brutalise, dispossess, displace and massacre innocent and defenseless peasants, women and children of the Berom Nation.
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