the Biafra Story (1969) (30 page)

It continued after the troops of the Third Nigerian Division of Colonel 'Shoot anything that moves' Adekunle crossed the Imo and started to move through the river basin. At Akwa, accompanying Biafran reconnoitre scouts, I saw the corpses of the occupants of the refugee camp at that place, about 500 wasted forms who in life had already fled once from further south. They had been caught by surprise and exterminated. South of Aba, in the villages of Ubute and Ozata, moving with a small group of shock troops, we came across two more examples of communities caught before they had time to flee. The menfolk had had their hands tied before shooting; to judge from appearances the women had been subjected to appalling mutilations either before or after death. The bulletbroken bodies of the children lay scattered like dolls in the long grass.

At Onitsha in March 1968, 1 was present with the Biafran 29th Battalion -when it pursued the Second Division spearhead down the main road into the city. There 300 members of the Apostolic Church who had stayed behind while others fled to pray for deliverance, had been dragged from the church and executed. One woman survived by feigning death; she was later treated by another Englishman, Dr. Ian Hyde.

In war there are bound to be innocent victims, occasional excesses, here and there a wanton brutality conducted by soldiers of a low level. But seldom has such a remarkable pattern of bestiality been established over such a wide territory by such diverse army units.

The evidence of the Biafran survivors continues to mount. and to be discounted outside Biafra as forming part of the allpurpose evil, the Ojukwu propaganda machine. A group of foreign observers, put together at the suggestion of the British Government, has accompanied Federal soldiers in various sectors and produced a report saying that they had found no evidence of genocide. The initiative was a white-washing operation and it worked, for their findings were widely published and have since become the basis for several complacent statements in the British House of Commons.

But the mission was also irrelevant. Failure to find evidence of a crime, when one is being conducted to the site by the alleged perpetrators, is a practice hardly likely to convince even a police cadet. In terms of evidence in court, when a man is accused of murder it is no use for the defence to produce witnesses who said they did not see anything, particularly when they were guided by the accused. The evidence-of those who did see something is still being largely disregarded by a world that would prefer not to know.

The testimony of the Ibos, Efiks, Calabars who saw and survived cannot be so easily discounted. The evidence that hanged the Nazi war criminals did not come from a few observers accompanying the Wehrmacht; ninety per cent of it came from the survivors among the victims, Jews, Russians, Poles and so forth. Their evidence was not discounted at, Nuremberg as Jewish propaganda. Of the remainder about nine per cent came from Nazi documentation, and barely one per cent ffrom confession from the German side. I In a country like the Midwest and Biafra, quite thickly populated with Europeans engaged on various projects, it would be unlikely for much to occur without their being aware of it. It may then be wondered why, apart from some doctors and priests, few have spoken out. The answer would appear to be the same as in all cases where witnesses are hard to come by, a situation often experienced by police officers in all countries.- There is a strong tendency not to want to get involved, least of all when such involvement might bring sanctions. Broadly speaking the European population of both areas falls into three categories.

Businessmen are often prepared to say over a private drink what they saw in their own area, but then hastily add 'Not for publication, old boy. My firm would be right in the mire if that ever got out.' Most businessmen in both areas are employed by firms with other interests elsewhere in Nigeria, and fear reprisals if their employees start leaping into print with tales injurious to the Federal Army or Government.

Civil servants are usually very much in touch with events in their area of service, and little escapes them. They too tend to shyness, for being men of few means they count on their pension in retirement and would hardly welcome expulsion in mid-career and termination of contract for a few denunciatory paragraphs in a newspaper.

The third group is the priesthood. These men probably know their parishes as well as anyone, and even after they have fled their parishioners still seek them out to report what has been going on in the newly overrun area. Inside Biafra they are outspoken in private, but seldom prepared to go into print. A priest's instinct is to protect, but then he has to think: what would happen to the flock if he were expelled? What is his real duty, to his parishioners or to the dead? By speaking out he may endanger his own Order by provoking their expulsion, and he possibly comes to the view that he serves the parishioners best by staying on, even though he knows this means he must keep silent. ,Even those in Biafra have in their possession letters from other priests continuing a precarious missionary existence under Nigerian Army control, asking them not to be too outspoken. The priesthood, and notably the Catholics, forms a nation-wide network of men who know what goes on. The attitude of the Vatican has surprised and pained the Nigerian Government, which has apparently failed to realize that the Vatican now possesses the best-documented history of what has gone on in the captured areas of Biafra.

It may be as well at this point to touch on the counterallegations. As various areas of the minority people fell to the Nigerian Army individuals were found to come forward and claim the Ibos had conducted atrocious pogroms against the minorities. These accounts caused some flutter in the Western world, and caused delight to the extren-fist supporters of the Federal Government. There were tales of several hundreds being lined up and forced to dig their own graves before being shot down, rather the pattern established,by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe. The Roman Catholic (European) parish priests of some of the parishes where these massacres were alleged to have taken place are now in unoccupied Biafra. One of them told me: 'I was there at the time. It would have been absolutely impossible for such a thing to have happened without the whole parish being aware. I would certainly have known about it. To my certain knowledge nothing of the kind occurred.'

A senior priest in the same Order added: 'In this country nothing can happen without the parish priests being aware very quickly. We go out to hear confessions in the remotest areas daily, and hear all the local gossip as well. Not only the parish priest but the whole Order would soon know every detail. If anything like that happened I would be up to see Colonel Ojukwu like a shot.'

It is difficult to see why two middle-aged Irishmen should bother to cover up such a thing, had it occurred, unless they feared reprisals; and those who know Colonel Ojukwu and Biafra are aware that the Biafran leader is not a tyrant who takes reprisals on priests, and that any attempt to penalize the Roman Catholic Church in Biafra would be the end c4 the despot.

Of the selective killing of community leaders, the evidence to date stems exclusively from Biafran witnesses. These report executions of teachers, chiefs and elders in a wide variety of locations, but predominantly in the minority areas, partly because these form the bulk of the overrun territories, partly because the Ibos no longer stay behind expecting mercy. Reports of this emasculation of the civilian communities have come from Ikot Ekpene, Uyo and Annang (Ibibio areas); Degema, Brass and Bonny (Rivers areas; the Kings of Bonny, Opobo and Kalabari are now refugees with Colonel Ojukwu); Calabar (Efik and Calabar areas); Ugep, Itigide and Ndiba (Ekoi, Igbo and South Ogoja areas); and Ogoni and Ikweffa, in the areas inhabited by people of the same name. In many cases these executions were alleged to have been public, the villagers being herded into the main square to watch. Significantly most of the refugees from the minority areas slipped through the lines into unoccupied Biafra after several days or weeks of occupation.

The air war is bound to remain controversial. Civilians have always been casualties of bombers and fighters used against ground targets. From Guernica onwards the world has come ,to accept punitive raids by bombers on civilian targets. In the Second World War bombers of the two opposing sides pulverized each others' cities by day and night, though these cities were usually industrial centres as well. Bombing cannot be accurate to the nearest street, even when Pathfinders are used. But the behaviour of the Nigerian Air Force, equipped by Russia and often manned by Egyptians, has managed to throw overboard any few rules remaining. Very rarely have aircraft been used in conjunction with ground forces, or against Biafran ground forces. When they have, the bombers have preferred to fly very high out of small-arms range and drop their bombs at random, which means that they usually fall in the bush. Similarly, defended targets in Biafra of a strategic nature - bridges, rail yards, barracks - have seldom been hit, or seriously aimed at, for they usually have a Bofor -or a heavy machine gun in the vicinity.

Most of the air war has been conducted against the civilian population. Far too many times have the bombers and fighters roared in low to plump their cargoes right in among packed groups of people for any excuse of accident or mistake to be viable. Highly prized targets appear to be hospitals (or anything marked with a Red Cross like the Relief Airport at Obilagu), close-packed townships, churches on Sunday and market places at midday. The latter are known in Africa to be largely the preserve of women, with their babies strapped to their back. At Awgu market on 17 February 1968 a bomber managed to kill 103 people in less than a minute, and at Aguleri market in October 510 people lost their lives. The actual number of different raids are now -countless, but the death ton has topped 5,000 with several thousand more - maimed for life.

Repeated pledges by General Gowon that only military targets were being selected has shown that he has no more control over his air force than over his army. Despite periodic pauses in intensity, the raids have continued throughout the war. As this book was being written in Umuahia, MiG 17s and Ilyushin 28s paid six visits in Christmas week in breach of a truce offered by General Gowon, killing over 100 people and wounding another 300 with bombs, rockets and cannon fire.

But whether the use of aircraft and high explosives against helpless civilians, to extract casualties, cram the hospitals and inspire stark terror, can be counted as forming a part of genocide is something that legal brains are still arguing. 'Some may say it (mass starvation) is a legitimate aspect of war', stated the Nigerian Commissioner for Information, Chief Anthony Enahoro, usually regarded as the top-ranking politician in Lagos, at a press conference in New York in July 1968. At the peace talks at Niamey, Republic of Niger, two weeks later the head of the Nigerian delegation refused to consider further the feasibility criteria for a food corridor with the words, 'Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war, and we have every intention of using it against the rebels.'

These two assertions, coming from some of the highest men in the land, may be taken as representing Nigerian Government policy. The latter one forms a statement of philosophy and of intent. What happened afterwards cannot be explained away as a regretted but inevitable by-product of war. What happened was that despite the presence close to Biafra of adequate food supplies, the availability of means of transport to bring them to the needy people, five hundred thousand children, pregnant women and nursing mothers died of malnutrition, starvation and their attendant diseases. These have been described in another chapter.

But there was no doubt of the technical ease of bringing food to those areas well behind the Federal advance points. The international agencies made available ships, planes, helicopters, trucks, vans and technical personnel. Within a short while the latter were complaining bitterly of the inability to work in face of the Nigerian Army attitude, A ship was commandeered, a plane requisitioned, relief foods off-loaded to make way for arms, men and ammunition. Sacks of relief foods ended up in Federal Army trenches or sold on the black market. Some of the relief personnel resigned in protest.

Ironically, in the last week of October 1968, when the airlift by night to the Biafran-held areas, still technically illegal, had at last brought the malnutrition problem under control and had saved, for a while at least, the remaining child population, Mr. Harold Wilson admitted that the difficulty of getting relief supplies by road even to the Nigerian-held areas was due to Federal obstructionism.

As regards the rest of the phrases in the United Nations Convention on Genocide, one refers to a 'national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. There can be little doubt that the Biafrans, either regarded as a nation, or as separate racial groups, come under this heading. With regard to the 'intent' mentioned in Article Two the position is more complex. Intent is not easy toprove, since it concerns what happens inside the human mind, unless it is written down on paper.

Nevertheless, intent may be shown by default of any other plausible explanation. A judge may tell a prisoner about to be sentenced: 'I cannot believe that you were unaware ... there is ample evidence to suggest that you knew what the consequence of your actions would be ... despite repeated warnings you did nothing to prevent or arrest ... etc.' Such phrases are often used in courts, and intent in law may be proved in such a way. It is no defence for an arsonist, having wilfully set fire to a structure and having killed those inside, to claim he did not mean the occupants any harm. This is somewhat the case of General Gowon, who claims he has nothing against the Ibos, either the leadership or the rank and file, yet who has apparently been able to -take no meaningful steps to prevent a course of conduct by his armed forces that has shocked much of the world.