The Catholic bishops of Mali have joined with the country’s evangelical Christian leaders in expressing their condolences after at least 150 Fulani people, including some 50 children, were massacred in an attack on a village on Sunday.
Fr Alexandre Denou, secretary general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Mali, told Agenzia Fides that prayers would be offered this coming Sunday for the victims and their families of the attack on the village of Ogossagou, and for peace in the West African nation.
“The Catholic Church and the evangelical church are working together to promote peace, and together we appeal to the Malian nation so that concord and not division may prevail,” Denou said.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has deployed a team including crime scene investigators and human rights officers to investigate what happened.
The attack has been linked to so-called self-defence groups which have sprung up in the wake of an Islamist-inspired insurgency in the country’s north. The mainly Muslim Fulani people have been accused of having ties to jihadists.
But OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said while “traditional disputes” between different ethnic groups “have always been there…lately it has taken on a particularly deadly turn because entire Fulani communities – and we are talking about millions of people – are being painted as violent extremists simply because they are Muslim.”
The UN said survivors testimonies indicated the raid was carried out by “traditional hunters” using automatic weapons, hunting rifles and other weapons.
They described the attack as the latest in a series of assaults and a cycle of violence that has resulted in some 600 deaths of women, children and men, as well as thousands of displaced persons since March, 2018, in the Mopti region alone.
