Malam Shehu Sani is the President of Civil Rights Congress, a human rights organization. In this interview with Daily Trust, he says the solution to the protracted Plateau crisis lies in prosecuting political and religious leaders. Excerpts:

How would you view the recent violence in Plateau State from the human right perspective?

In this kind of violence, people lose their lives in a number of ways including raid or ambush, field combat between warring groups; police shoot at sight strategy or stray bullets. In all, arson, murder or genocide is the result. If you take a look at the historical of past crisis in other states including that of Jos, you will discover a recurring pattern of docility, recklessness and negligence on the side of the authorities. You also discover failure of intelligence on the side of the Police and other security agencies, belated intervention and scapegoatism.

But it is the failure of effective intelligence in Nigeria that leads to the escalation of crises. Most often, security intervenes after much harm has been done.

The persons arrested are not usually those who perpetrated the dastardly acts. People are only arrested because arrest has to be made and because arrest symbolizes the notion of being seen or seen to be doing something.

If we want to bring a permanent end to the crisis in Jos, we have to stop prosecuting street hoodlums, petty thieves and pick pockets and go up the ladder to prosecute political and religious elites for genocide.

The redeployed Plateau State Commissioner of Police had, during a press briefing, said the latest Jos crisis was caused by some Muslims youths who 'without any provocation' attacked some Christian worshipers. So with this comment and reports that security personnel have taken side in the conflict, can we say that the police in Jos were out to complete a hidden agenda?

When I was writing my book; Killing fields: Religious violence in Northern Nigeria, I visited all the states in the North and beyond gathering data of religious violence right from 1979. It is fascinating but absurd that in almost all the clips I laid my hands on, it is Muslims that are always blamed. To blame the Muslims have become the order, the stigma and the pattern. And because it is a stigma, it has afforded people of other faiths the cover to start up violence, escalate it and assume the role of victims. But this analysis is only relevant if you prefer to tag killers, arsonists, rapist and vandals as either Christians or Muslims.

Muslims are statistically a minority in Plateau, it is logically impossible to think a minority could risk inviting the wrath of a majority.

The crisis is said to have been ignited by an attempt to renovate a house destroyed in the previous crisis...

That is the widely held belief but beyond renovation in my research, I found out that religious violence in Northern Nigeria is caused by a number of factors which include poverty, failure of leadership at all levels; impunity for perpetrators of past violence, disconnect between people and government, pervasive corruption that broadens the gap between the rich and the poor; failure of intelligence, ill equipped police force, lack of legislation on religious violence, proliferation of arms and ammunitions, refusal to implement past panel reports, absence of institutional mechanism to promote peace and integrity, indigene-settler syndromes, diversion of security votes, manipulation of religion, proliferation of religious leaders and preachers, marginalization, social injustice, lack of national consciousness, absence of a genuine national conference to debate this and other issues and then to intelligently, systematically, and institutionally address them once and for all.

All said and done, the redeployed Commissioner of Police is not the problem, but he is a problem. The problem is the political and religious elite in Plateau; they hold the ace for peace or war even if they can't dictate its outcome.

Do you favour declaration of state of emergency in Plateau State as a solution to the recurrent crisis?

Declaration of state of emergency cannot bring about permanent peace in the Plateau. It had been tried before and here we are again. Declaration of emergency is a palliative, it's like anti-retroviral drug. It can contain but can't cure. The peculiarity of the case in Plateau is that of a history of hate and a sustain culture of xenophobia, jingoism and ethnic cleansing in the guise of faith. The violence in Jos has similarity with the one in Kafanchan (1987) and Zangon Kataf (1992) all in Kaduna state. People of Plateau have shed enough blood, check this out. YMAN 1980, Hausa-Benin 1987; Jos North 1994; Mwaghavuls versus Rons (1995), Jos North (2001), Yelwa Shendan conflict in 2002; Sabon gada (2004) and so on, up to this recent one.

Violence begins from the heart and it is in the heart that peace lies. The earlier Christian and Muslim masses realized that the rich and powerful among Muslims and Christians don't kill each other, but only take tea and shake hands, the better for them.

How do you think the federal government can better handle this problem?

For over 30 years, each time we have a violence of this kind, after condemnation, the next thing the government does is to set up a commission of enquiry and we had a number of them like the Suleiman Gurin Committee 1985, John Shagaya's 1986, Federal Government Judicial Panel on Kafanchan, 1987, Justice Babalakin 1991 up to Justice Ajibola that is still sitting.

You need not to go further than that because none of these reports had ever been implemented to the latter.