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Nigeria forces 8,000 people out of Lagos housing complex
Associated Press
Published December 10, 2005
LAGOS, Nigeria - Police forcefully evicted thousands of civil servants and their families from a recently privatized government complex before dawn Friday.
It was just one in a series of mass evictions in Africa's most populous nation that Amnesty International has called a "human rights scandal."
The 1,004 Housing Estate, home to 8,000 people and sold to a company run by a former Nigerian army chief, is one of several government properties being privatized as part of a wider package of free market reforms.
President Olusegun Obasanjo has pushed ahead with the reforms since he was re-elected in 2003, despite strong criticism.
Friday's ousters overrode a court injunction against the eviction and a motion passed Thursday by Nigerian lawmakers that said civil servants were being "physically intimidated, threatened and brutalized by members of the armed forces" in evictions.
The residents were offered alternative lodgings, but Sunny Barber, a tenants representative, said the new flats were too far from work, too expensive and in a crime-ridden neighborhood.
The move on the complex was the third mass eviction of civil servants this week in Lagos, and tenants of other Lagos apartment blocks have been given notice that they would also be evicted.
Amnesty International has estimated that more than a million people have been forcibly evicted from their homes in Nigeria since 2000.
[Last modified December 10, 2005, 00:52:07]
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