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Umunnem, Ka anyi na echeta kwa. Koro unu umu nu. Ihe demede ndia bu ka anyi hapu ichefu. Chukwu gozie anyi nile. peace
BEYOND BIAFRA: BROKEN BONDS.
M. O. Ené
egbedaa@aol.com May 12, 2004
Many people surely still remember the atrocious Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970. This month of May, many Nigerian communities, especially the Igbo people, will commemorate 37 years of a republic that nearly made it out of the clutches of 1884 Berlin Conference. The Biafra dream of May 30, 1967 soon became a thirty-month nightmare.
Let this be known: No Biafran wanted that war. The Biafran government did not start the war. However, one way or another, there was going to be a critical crisis of sorts to resolve some stubborn issues in the marriage of colonial disingenuousness, which midwifed Nigeria as-is on January 1, 1914 -- the so-called “Mistake of 1914.”
The crisis began four decades ago with the flawed elections of 1963, similar to what is going on today in Nigeria, through coups and countercoups to an anti-Igbo Pogrom most insidious.
The Igbo people and, to a large extent, their neighboring nations in southeastern Nigeria, are the true Nigerians. They would have invented a bigger Nigeria if the British had not knocked them into the current country. It is therefore not surprising that they towed the path of peace all the way to Aburi, Ghana, with General Ankrah presiding.
Why then was breakaway Biafra necessary?
Venerated Nwalimu, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, summed it up in 1967: “Biafrans have now suffered the same kind of rejection within their state that the Jews of Germany experienced. Fortunately they already had a homeland. They have retreated to it for their own protection, and for the same reason - after all other efforts had failed - they have declared it to be an independent state.”
On July 6, 1967, Lt. Colonel Yakubu Gowon, who had reneged on the Aburi Accord, declared war on a people so morally wounded and so psychologically scarred they were incapable of hurting a fly.
Brigadier Victor Banjo, a Yoruba officer caught up on the Biafra side, told Wole Soyinka in 1966: “The Igbo were not a danger to anyone. The May and July murders had sapped their capacity to make any serious trouble.”
Yet, Gowon unleashed what he called a “police action”; on the other hand, Biafrans saw it as the “final solution” hatched while the world still watched -- the extermination of a race. So Biafrans tapped into their spirit of survival and fought back. They survived as a people; many died to assure that many Igbo Nigerians are here today with their heads held high. As George Orwell put it, “I believe that it is better even from the point of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.”
War is wrong; no one wants it, but it happens. Thus, when the unholy Anglo-Arab-Soviet alliance came to town, Biafrans fought long and hard. At one point, it was obvious to the Western powers that an indigenous African power would emerge in Biafra and that the regime in Lagos could not stop it. France, which was nominally supportive, suddenly became reluctant and failed to offer full and overt support.
The French deputy foreign minister Ambassador Raymond Offroy had this to say: “Before I came to Biafra, I was told Biafrans fought like heroes. But now I know that heroes fought like Biafrans.”
Major Williams, one of the long-lasting and better Biafran mercenaries, told Frederick Forsyth on August 25, 1968: “I’ve seen a lot of Africans at war. But there is nobody to touch these people. Give me 10,000 Biafrans for six months, and we’ll build an army that would be invincible on this continent.” With what we have witnessed in Iraq and knowing that never in the history of modern warfare has there been such a deep disparity in firepower and manpower as in the Nigeria-Biafra War, that Biafran army would have been world-class. I know; I was there.
Thereafter, the table turned. The blockade of Biafra, in furtherance of the use of food as a weapon of war, demoralized and crippled the new nation. It injected the mortal virus that eventually killed the inventive genius of Biafran scientists and the fighting spirit of Biafran soldiers.
The Catholic relief agency Caritas, World Council of Churches, volunteer American and Swedish pilots, and ordinary people all over the world sat up and watched no more. They did something about it. Swedish nobleman and veteran pilot, Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, saw enough to make him stop pleading with the Lagos regime for reason. Since he could no longer sit and watch the choking of beleaguered Biafra, he took to the air to check the menace of mercenary pilots with the now legendary “Biafran Babies,” daredevil planes that wrecked havoc on the Nigerian army.
Biafra became an issue in the presidential campaign of 1968, with Richard Nixon taking the high road in accusing the State Department of “not doing enough to ease civilian suffering in the besieged” Biafra. However, when Nixon took over, his campaign outrage amounted to nothing.
Why the US State Department conveniently “never succeeded in establishing an independent relief program,” as Henry Kissinger put it, is obvious: British Prime Minister Harold “Wilson influenced Nixon’s policy to a degree and curbed our interventionist impulses.” Thanks to Senator Edward Kennedy and others like him, Biafra remained in the conscience of moral America until the Nigeria-Biafra War ended on January 12, 1970.
Writing on the cost of the war, Edwin O. Reischauer stated: “None of us need to be reminded of the great cost to us of the war -- to say nothing of the suffering it is causing…. We pay first in the lives of our young men and in the sorrow and suffering of their families and friends. We pay in diversion of so much of our national wealth to destructive purposes, wealth we would rather see used for urgent constructive tasks.… We pay dearly for national unity…. We pay a high price for our relations with other parts of the world.”
You would think that he was writing about Biafra. He might as well have been. In this case, the former American Ambassador to Japan from April 1961 until August 1966 was writing about the “The lessons of Vietnam” in 1997.
In Biafra, the situation was worse. The use of hunger as a weapon of war, sanctioned by Gowon and propagated by Anthony Enahoro, was the worst war act committed by a constituted authority since Nazi Germany gassed Jews in ovens. As in the savagery of Sudan, or as in the ravages of Rwanda, the world watched it happen and allowed General Gowon to go on with the one-Nigeria mantra, to which he was a convert.
But Biafra was not all about the broken bonds of brotherhood, kwashiorkor, and death; there are lasting lessons of Biafra. We shall revisit some of these lessons next time.
culled from Amandla Newspapers, where Dr. Ené maintains a column called HOME ABROAD.
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