the Biafra Story (1969) (29 page)

From that point Nigeria went steadily backwards on the question of the permissibility of relief aid reaching Biafra, and subsequent minor concessions had to be wrung out, not by British Government pressure or advocacy, but by a growing wave of hostile world opinion stemming from the people in the streets. Nevertheless, an agenda for Addis Ababa was agreed, the order this time being reversed to suit the Nigerians: political settlement first, ceasefire second.

The Addis Ababa conference convened on Monday 29 July. Colonel Ojukwu had left Biafra the previous night and flown straight to the Ethiopian capital, this time with a bigger delegation and in a bigger jet, also provided by the President of the Ivory Coast. Predictably General Gowon refused to attend, or was prevented by advisers aware the contrast could hardly be flattering.

The first meeting, to hear the opening addresses by the two delegate leaders, was an open one, with representatives of every African head of state, and some of the heads themselves, the whole diplomatic corps of Addis Ababa, scores of observers and a host of pressmen present. Chief Enahoro, sought to have the press excluded, particularly the television cameras. The move failed, and he contented himself with a twelve-minute speech.

Colonel Ojukwu rose. He began by whal sounded like a plea for the Biafran people on humanitarian grounds. After four paragraphs he revealed that he was quoting direct from the speech Haile Selassie had made to the League of Nations in 1936 over the rape of Abyssinia by the Fascists. The point was not lost. He continued to speak for one hour and ten minutes,, describing the history of the Biafran people from its earliest days, the persecution, rejection, separation and subsequent suffering. When he sat down, he became one of the few men in the world to receive from a predominantly diplomatic gathering a standing ovation. In seventy minutes Biafra had ceased to belong to Nigeria, or Africa, or the British or the Commonwealth. It had become a world issue. Colonel Ojukwu at thirty-four had become a world figure, an accolade translated into press terms twenty-four days later when his face featured on the cover of Time magazine.

But the Addis Ababa conference got bogged down after the glitter of publicity had died away. Like its predecessors it became lost in a quagmire of delays, stalling, intransigence and ill-will. In all it sat for over five weeks, but world attention, the only thing that might have given it stimulus, swung away to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Nigerian delegation again had an aim in stalling. Cease- fire was no longer a live issue as on 47 August the Nigerian Third Division crossed the Imo River and threatened Aba, the largest city remaining to the Biafrans. By this time the attitude of the American gun-runner Wharton appeared to have changed. South of Aba Biafran soldiers defended on two bullets per man per day, attacked on five. The ammunition planes broke down, turned back, jettisoned their cargoes over the sea. Despite terrible Nigerian casualties Aba fell on 4 September 1968.

Soon all eyes were on the Heads of State conference of the Organization of African Unity scheduled for 14 September in Algiers. From Lagos frantic messages went out to the commander of the Third Division that Owerri must fall by then, or Uli airport. African states friendly to Biafra let her know that in preparation for Algiers British and American diplomacy was working overtime behind the scenes to persuade Africa that Biafra was finished. Considerable pressure, not excluding financial inducements, was repeatedly brought to bear. It worked.

The agenda committee of the Summit Conference, meeting in Algiers as from 8 September left Nigeria-Biafra off the agenda. The conference met on 14 September. After an abortive effort to take Uli airport, the Third Division launched an attack towards Owerri on 12 September. Still short of arms and ammunition (the American gun-runner had been fired, but an alternative route had not been completely set up) the Biafrans fought with their usual handful of bullets against a spearhead of British Saladin armoured cars.

Owerri fell on 16 September. On the following day the Algiers meeting passed by thirty-two votes to four a hastily-appended resolution calling on the Biafrans to cooperate with the Nigerians in restoring the territorial integrity of the Federation: in other words to surrender.

In doing so the organization that prides itself on being the repository of the conscience of Africa washed its hands of the biggest conscientious issue in the continent. It was the nadir of Biafra's fortunes, military and diplomatic. At that time and for the succeeding weeks it was hard to find a single voice prepared to say Biafra was not completely finished. It took a hundred days before the world realized Biafra was stiff alive, still fighting.

By that time the situation had changed in most of its aspects. In Biafra there had been a re-surge of morale, of confidence, an increase in the amount of aid coming in or expected. Biafran troops were counter-attacking heavily for the first time in the war. Several nations, by-passing Britain, had declared that they intended actively to seek a means of bringing peace. In Nigeria an agreement with Russia had been signed that opened the door wide to Soviet infiltration of all walks of Nigerian life. In the North there were growing rumbles of discontent from the Emirs, dissatisfied with the government by minority-tribe civil servants who could not fulfil their promises. In the West there had been riots, shootings, mass arrests. In America Mr. Nixon had been elected.

The failure of the diplomacy was the failure not so much of the Nigerian front-men whose concern with preserving their own careers was predictable, but the failure of those able to bring pressure to bear to do so. Never once did the Nigerian delegations give an indication that their basic conviction, that a solution through war was feasible and attainable, had been shaken, nor did their supporters once seek to persuade them away from that conviction. The chance was there and it was thrown away.

Chapter 13. The Question of Genocide.

GENOCIDE is an ugly word. It is the name given to the biggest crime man is capable of. What constitutes genocide in the modern world? What degree of violence offered towards a people justifies the use of the word? What degree of intent is necessary to justify the description? After years of study, some of the world's best legal brains assisted in drawing up the definition written into the United Nations Convention on Genocide adopted on 9 December 1948. Article Two specifiesIn the present Convention genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing of members of the group; b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c, Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article One states that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or war is a crime under international law, and Article Four makes plain that constitutional rulers, public officials or private individuals may be held responsible.

Obviously, in time of war men get killed, and as they belong to a national ethnical, racial or religious group this paragraph is perhaps too wide to be practicable. It is the use of the phrase 'with intent' that separates the usual casualties inflicted during war from the crime of genocide. The killing party must be shown to have had, or to have developed, intent to destroy, and the victims must be a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

There are two other points about genocide that have become habitually accepted in law: one is that intent 6a behalf of the Head of State of the inflicting party need'not be proved. An individual general can direct his troops to commit genocide, and the Supreme Commander is held responsible if he cannot control his armed forces. Secondly, the deliberate decimation of the leadership cadres of a racial group, calculated to leave that group without the cream of its educated manpower, can constitute genocide even if the majority of the population is left alive as a helpless mass of semi-literate peasantry. The society may then be presumed to have been emasculated as a group.

The Biafran charges against the Nigerian Government and armed forces rests on their behaviour in five fields: the pogroms of the North, the West and Lagos in 1966; the behaviour of the Nigerian Army towards the civilian population they encountered during the course of the war; the behaviour of the Nigerian Air Force in selection of its targets; the selective killings in various captured areas of chiefs, leaders, adminis. trators, teachers, technicians; and the allegedly deliberate imposition of famine, which was predicted in advance by foreign experts and which during 1968 carried away an estimated 500,000 children between the ages of one and ten years.

About the massacres of 1966 enough has been said. It is generally admitted that the size and scope of the killings gave them 'genocidal proportions' and there exists ample evidence to show that they were planned, directed and organized by men who knew what they were about; that no inquiry was ever instituted by the central government, nor any punishments, compensations or restitutions exacted, which may in law be taken to presume condonement.

The widespread killing of Biafran civilians, and of Ibo inhabitants of the Midwest State is equally incontrovertible. After the withdrawal of the Biafran forces from the Midwest in late September 1967 after a six-week occupation, a series of massacres started against Ibo residents. The explanation that it was difficult to differentiate between soldiers and civilians cannot hold water, for as has been explained the armed forces were withdrawn in almost every case before the Second Division of the Federal Army came within firing range. These massacres were witnessed by numerous foreign residents of the various Midwestern towns concerned, and widely reported in the international press. Some examples will suffice:

New York Review, 21 December 1967: 'In some areas outside the East which were temporarily held by Biafran forces, as at Benin and the Midwestern Region, Ibos were killed by local people with at least the acquiescence of the Federal forces. About 1,000 Ibo civilians perished at Benin in this way.'

Washington Morning Post, 27 September 1967: 'Butr after the Federal takeover of Benin Northern troops killed about 500 Ibo civilians in Benin after a house-to-house search!

London Observer, 21 January 1968 'The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where 700 Ibo males were lined up and shot.'

New York Times 10 January 1968. 'The code [Gowon's Code of Conduct] has all but vanished except from Federal propaganda. In clearing the Midwest State of Biafra forces Federal troops were reported to have killed, or stood by w le mobs killed, more than 5,000 Ibos in Benin, Warri, Sap le, Agbor and Asaba.'

Asaba, referred to above in the Observer's report, lies on the western bank of the River Niger, and was a wholly Ibo township. Here the massacre occurred after the Biafran troops had crossed the bridge back into Biafra. Later Monsignor Creorges Rocheau, sent down on a fact-finding mission by His Holiness the Pope, visited both Biafra and Nigeria. At Asaba, by then in Nigerian hands, he talked with priests who had been there at the time. On 5 April 1968 he was interviewed by the French evening newspaper Le Monde, to whom he said: 'There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres. . . . Two areas have suffered badly [from the fighting]. Firstly the region between the towns of Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain, Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men.'

According to eyewitnesses of that massacre the Nigerian commander ordered the execution of every Ibo male over the age of ten years.

The Midwest killings had nothing to do with the prosecution of the Nigerian war effort, and for the Biafrans they represented what was widely interpreted as a taste of things to come.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of the Ibo popuW. tion of the Midwest stayed behind after the withdrawal of the Biafran troops under, Banjo's orders indicated that they were confident neither they nor their fellow-lbos from across the Niger had done anything to warrant reprisals. If they had taken advantage of the armed Biafran presence to inflict suffering on their non-lbo fellow Regionals, they would have fled helter-skelter with the retreating Biafrans.

Later, at Calabar in Biafra, more massacres took place. Mr. Alfred Friendly reported in the New York Times of 18 January: 'Recently in Calabar, a port in the secessionist region captured by Federal forces, soldiers were said to have shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos, most of them civilians. . . . Some killings have included the members of the Efik tribe, one of the minority groups whose allegiance, Lagos maintains, is to federalism, not secession.'

These reports merely skim the surface of what happened. I have deliberately confined them to foreign correspondents, but the testimony of the refugem now runs to thousands of transcript pages. Since the autumn of 1967 the Ibo population of the Midwest has been drastically reduced. Calabar marked the last t@wn in which the Ibos stayed behind, believing they would come to no harm. Since then all have fled, almost without exception, some few returning timorously months later. But all the towns of Biafra now in Nigerian hands, even the very first to be captured, have remained ghost towns in comparison to their former selves.

One could go on to quote many newspaper reporters' accounts of what they saw or were told, but it would serve no purpose. In forays behind the Nigerian lines with the Biafran Commandos I have seen the hinterland of desolated villages, wrecked farms, sacked and looted buildings, burned habitations and by the wayside the executed bodies of peasants foolish enough or slow enough to be caught in the open by the Federal Army. The killings of civilians have not been confined to Ibo land; the Efiks, Calabars, Ibibios and Ogonis have suffered heavily as the reports of their emissaries to Colonel Ojukwu describe. Nor was the killing process a flash in the pan, the first reaction' of an army in the grip of the heady elation of victory or the vengeful gloom of defeat. The practice has been too standardized, too methodical for that.