There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

for in the very germ

of that kindred love is

lodged the perpetuity

of evil.1

The Fight to the Finish

By the rainy season of 1968, Gowon’s three-pronged attack had surrounded millions of civilians who were harbored in a narrow corridor around Umuahia. He was counting on a strategy of decisive force to which the Biafrans responded with a classic guerrilla war strategy out of Che Guevara’s playbook.

r /> The Biafrans surprised the Nigerians with their perseverance. Overwhelmingly outgunned, Philip Effiong’s army was able to withstand the attack by breaking conflict zones into classic smaller wars, where the few arms he had would prove more effective. This strategy required “no front lines, a reliance on small unit operations and great individual discipline.”1

The Economic Blockade and Starvation

The Biafrans paid a great humanitarian price by ceding a great deal of territory to the Nigerians and employing this war strategy. The famine worsened as the war raged, as the traditional Igbo society of farmers could not plant their crops. Gowon had succeeded in cutting Biafra off from the sea, robbing its inhabitants of shipping ports to receive military and humanitarian supplies. The afflictions marasmus and kwashiorkor began to spread farther, with the absence of protein in the diet, and they were compouded by outbreaks of other disease epidemics and diarrhea. The landscape was filled by an increasing number of those avian prognosticators of death as the famine worsened and the death toll mounted: udene, the vultures. By the beginning of the dry season of 1968, Biafran civilians and soldiers alike were starving. Bodies lay rotting under the hot sun by the roadside, and the flapping wings of scavengers could be seen circling, waiting, watching patiently nearby. Some estimates are that over a thousand Biafrans a day were perishing by this time, and at the height of Gowon’s economic blockade and “starve them into submission?? policy, upward of fifty thousand Biafran civilians, most of them babies, children, and women, were dying every single month.

Ojukwu seized upon this humanitarian emergency and channeled the Biafran propaganda machinery to broadcast and showcase the suffering to the world. In one speech he accused Gowon of a “calculated war of destruction and genocide.”1 Known in some circles as the “Biafran babies” speech, it was hugely effective and touched the hearts of many around the world. This move was brilliant in a couple of respects. First, it deflected from himself or his war cabinet any sentiments of culpability and outrage that might have been welling up in the hearts and minds of Biafrans, and second, it was yet another opportunity to cast his arch nemesis, Gowon, in a negative light.2

Ojukwu dispatched several of his ambassadors to world capitals, hoping to build on the momentum from his broadcast. His envoys received little new support or pledges. Frustrated by the obstacles he found in coaxing a more pro-Biafra policy from the United States, Sir Louis Mbanefo famously rebuked the Americans, saying:

We are especially resentful of the ambivalent pretenses the United States makes, that it is trying to help us. . . . If we are condemned to die, all right, we will die. But at least let the world, and the United States, be honest about it.3

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Nigerian and Biafran envoys were meeting with His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia to sort out the modality of air and land transport for relief supplies to Biafra.4 The diplomatic battles had reached a fever pitch by the middle of 1968. Gowon, under immense international pressure and bristling from the whirlwind of publicity about Biafra, decided to open up land routes for a “supervised transport” of relief. To the consternation of Gowon, Ojukwu opted out of land routes in favor of increased airlifts of food from São Tomé by international relief agencies. Ojukwu, like many Biafrans, was concerned about the prospect that the Nigerians would poison the food supplies.5

The Silence of the United Nations

Biafrans had their own reasons to lament the death of the widely respected secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, who was killed in an air crash in September 1961. The Burmese diplomat U Thant, selected to replace him, would lead the UN from 1961 to 1971. Unlike Dag Hammarskjöld, who was an expert at conflict resolution, and a humanist, U Thant was a decidedly different kind of man.1

A noninterventionist who deferred to local bodies such as the Organization of African Unity for policy advice and guidance, U Thant provided the OAU a great deal of latitude in decision making and implementation. An argument could be made for this stance, at least at the beginning of the conflict, but as the humanitarian catastrophe worsened, leading ultimately to the starvation and death of millions, even the most committed anarchist would have expected greater United Nations involvement. That did not happen, and I and several others believe that had the United Nations been more involved, there would not have been as many atrocities, as much starvation, as much death.

In October 1969, when Ojukwu reached out desperately to the United Nations to “mediate a cease-fire as a prelude to peace negotiations,”2 his pleas were met with a deafening silence. U Thant turned to the Nigerians for direction. Gowon insisted on Biafra’s surrender, and he observed that “rebel leaders had made it clear that this is a fight to the finish and that no concession will ever satisfy them.”3

This was a calculated strategy from the Nigerians, who now had the international cloak of the United Nations under which to commit a series of human rights violations. Failing to end the protracted Biafran guerrilla offensive, the Nigerian army openly attacked civilians in an ill-advised, cruel, and desperate attempt to incite internal opposition to the war and build momentum toward a quick surrender.4

The vacuum in moral and humanitarian leadership from the United Nations meant that the Nigerian federal government could operate with reckless abandon, without appropriate monitoring from international agencies. There would be precious little proof of the wartime atrocities had it not been for private nongovernmental agencies and individuals. In February 1969 alone nearly eight hundred civilians were massacred by targeted Nigerian air force strikes on open markets near Owerri—Umuohiagu and Ozu-abam. The Nigerian air force pilots were particularly noteworthy for not respecting Geneva Convention resolutions describing civilian safe havens, such as hospitals, refugee and food distribution camps, and centers of religious worship.

In an article called “Who Cares About Biafra Anyway?” that was published in the Harvard Crimson, Jeffrey D. Blum described the horrors witnessed by Harvard University School of Public Health professor Jean Mayer:

Distribution centers and refugee camps are bombed and strafed if any large numbers of people are visible in the daylight. Red Cross insignias are singled out for special attention by Nigerian bombers. Mayer saw one European engaged in working on the Biafran side of the war front carrying 117 dying children in his truck to a hospital in a single night.5

These air strikes backfired for Nigeria, further eroding international support for their war effort. Ojukwu seized on this opportunity, releasing a statement to the international press following an address to the consultative assembly in Umuahia. He lambasted the federal troops for having “begun a last desperate effort in the form of a land army pogrom.” Ojukwu categorically denied any attempts by the Biafrans to surrender and reported that there would be an increased emphasis on the cultivation of staple crops to meet the mounting food needs of the starving Biafrans.

Many of us wondered where and how exactly this “cultivation” would take place, given the fact that the land mass controlled by Biafra was at this point of the conflict a fraction of its original size. Ojukwu clearly intended to try to feed the starving masses. It was important to him for Biafrans to see him making an effort even if he failed at achieving his lofty goals. Many listening on the Biafran side were willing to receive this food for thought even if there was no food for their stomachs. Ojukwu also warned the government of Harold Wilson of Great Britain that the British will “forfeit all holdings in Eastern Nigeria” if it continued to provide military and logistical aid to the Nigerians.6

Wilson’s government was feeling the heat of the glaring lights of international media scrutiny. On one of my trips to London, on August, 12, 1968, I was an eyewitness to one of the debates on the Biafran issue in the House of Commons, and I came away with this impression: If government was largely unmoved by the tragedy, ordinary people were outraged. I witnessed fro

m the visitors’ gallery what was described as “unprecedented rowdiness” during a private members’ motion on Biafra. Harold Wilson, villain of the peace, sat cool as a cucumber, leaving his foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, to sweat it out. It was hardly surprising that many remarkable people would want to visit the scene of such human tragedy.7

Harold Wilson was concerned that the growing opposition to his Nigeria policy might cause him to lose the next general election. He tried to assuage domestic and international opinion by planning an elaborate trip to Nigeria. Baroness Castle famously and aptly described Lord Wilson as “indulging in his near fatal weakness for gestures as a substitute for action.”8 By the time Harold Wilson arrived at the theater that he had set on fire on March, 29, 1969, he chose to do so in an “11,000 tonne amphibious assault ship called Fearless with an extra platoon of marines aboard.”9

Claiming to have arrived to negotiate a peace between the warring parties, Lord Wilson met only with Gowon, extending a Trojan invitation to Ojukwu—to meet outside Nigeria, on Nigerian ground, or on the British ship Fearless anchored in the Lagos Lagoon. As a meeting in Biafra was not one of the choices, all the options were unsatisfactory to the Biafrans, who turned down the purely political invitation.10

Like the cruel deception of locusts that appear from a distance as a welcome visit of dark clouds gorged with rain, Lord Wilson failed to deliver on any resolution to help end the Nigeria-Biafra conflict and left the land stripped bare of what many felt was the last substantive hope of peace.

Azikiwe Withdraws Support for Biafra

Beyond the military histrionics, there were a number of important attempts at peace made by several local and international statesmen, including Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nigeria’s first president, who called on the United Nations to help end the conflict in Nigeria. In a speech at Oxford University on February 16, 1969, the former president and a one-time emissary of Biafra outlined a fourteen-point peace plan to be implemented by a proposed “UN peace keeping force made up of international and local peace keeping forces” that would stay on the ground for at least a year during the implementation of both a cease-fire and peaceful resolution of ethnic, economic, and political tensions. Azikiwe’s proposals also called on Nigeria and Biafra to sign a modus vivendi “to be enforced by the Security Council of the United Nations.”1