the Biafra Story (1969) (10 page)

Recent events have shown that for Nigerian leaders to try and build a future for the country on rigid political ideology will be unrealistic and disastrous. We have pretended for too long that there are no differences between the peoples of this country. The hard fact which we must honestly accept as of paramount importance in the Nigerian experiment especially for the future is that we are different peoples brought together by recent accidents of history. T6 pretend otherwise would be folly.

The similarity of conclusion in that passage and the one quoted earlier from the Eastern publication are obvious. For the first time ever it appeared that East and North were agreed on the self-evidence of their own incompatibility. . The North went even further, asking that in any new Nigerian Constitution a secession clause should be written, adding: 'Any member state of the Union should reserve the right to secede completely and unilaterally from the Union, and to make arrangements for cooperation with the other members of the Union in such a manner as they may severally or individually deem fit.'

Unlike the Eastern attitude, the North's viewpoint was completely in accord with decades- of tradition. That was when the second volte-face occurred. There seemed after a few days in Lagos to be a crisis inside the Northern delegation. Colonel Katsina arrived from Kaduna; the delegates hurriedly left for the North; the conference was adjourned. When the Northerners arrived back after consultations, they presented an entirely different set of proposals. This time they wanted a strong and effective central government, thus diminishing the autonomy of the Regions; they agreed to the creation of more states in Nigeria (the idea had Iways been abhorrent to them before); and they agreed to cut but any mention of secession.

There have been various explanations offered for this extraordinary break with all traditional Northern attitudes. One is that the Middle Belt elements, whose infantrymen composed the bulk of the army, made plain that they did not want a impose on return to regional autonomy, since that would re them the hegemony of the Emirs which they found so irksome; and that they pressured both the North and the central government with their preponderance in the army, on which both sets of rulers now depended, to get their 'way. If this is true, then it brought a new force into Nigerian politics, the minority tribes, and caused what Mr. Walter Schwarz refers to as 'the third coup'.

Another explanation is that it occurred to the Emirs, or was explained to them, that virtually autonomous regions would depend largely on their own revenue, and that the North would then be left to repay the massive loans owing for the Kainji Dam project and the Bornu Railway Extension, while the East would collar most of the oil revenue.

A third explanation is that once again the British diplomats got to work and used their undoubted influence in the North to urge that it was certainly not Whitehall's wish that Nigeria should become a Confederation of States.

Fourthly, it is possible that the Northern rulers realized that they could afford to let minority tribe figures take the front of the stage in a unified Nigeria, and could even afford the creation of new states, provided they remained the true power base in the background by making sure that the central government remained dependent of its power on the army, and the army remained the tool of the North. Some evidence to support this view came later when, after the North had ostensibly been divided into six states, Colonel Katsina was asked by a B. B. C. correspondent whether this change in any way affected the traditional power structure in the North. He replied, 'Not in the slightest'. When, half way through the present war, Gowon looked as if he might assert himself, Katsina moved a brigade of Hausas to the northern approaches of Lagos and calmly appointed himself Army Chief of Staff in succession to another northerner, Colonel Bissalla.

Whatever the reason for the change, it was so sudden and so out of character that it smacked of a 'deal' somewhere behind the scenes, and the satisfaction of Whitehall at the change was so evident in Lagos that one is at pains to believe the British High Commission was content to remain an idle bystander throughout.

As it turned out the Constitutional Conference came to nought; for it was interrupted and stultified by another outbreak of killings of Easterners in the North, the worst ever, and of such an intensity that it destroyed once and for all any illusion that the hatred of the North towards the East could be dismissed as a passing phase in a new nation, and laid the grounds for the Eastern feeling that their only hope of ultimate survival as a people was to get out of Nigeria.

In later explanatory literature published by the Nigerian Military Government (not surprisingly Federal literature is strongly pro-Northern), several reasons are given for these massacres, and the size and character of them is strongly played down. An examination of these excuses reveals them to have been adduced or invented after the massacres, and a comparison of the pertinent dates and an examination of contemporary evidence from European eye-witnesses proves their falsehood. The main excuse was that there were killings of some Northerners in the East, and that this triggered the massacre of the Easterners in the North. In fact although there was some violence showR against Northerners living in the East, it was first manifested a full seven days after the killings of Easterners in the North.

As in May the massacres were plotted and organized by much the same elements that had been discredited in January; ex-politicians, civil servants, local government officials and party hacks and thugs. Again they were seen driving in hired buses from town to town in the North, exhorting the populace to violence and leading them in their attacks on the Sabon Garis where the Easterners lived. There was one significant difference; in the late summer the police and the army not only joined in but in many cases actively led the killing gangs, spearheading the looting of the victims' properties and the raping of their womenfolk.

These outbreaks started between 18 and 24 September, that is, within a few days of the opening of the Constitutional Conference in Lagos, in the Northern cities of Makurdi, Minna, Gboko, Gombe, Jos, Sokoto and Kaduna. The Fourth Battalion at Kaduna left its barracks and went on the rampage with the civilians. Colone Katsina issued a warning to the soldiers to desist, with not the slightest effect.

On 29 September 1966 Colonel Gowon made a radio broadcast apparently intended to bring the violence to an end,. J, it he said: 'It appears that it is going beyond reason, and is now at a point of recklessness and irresponsibility', giving the impression to his listeners that up to a certain point the killing of Easterners might be regarded as a reasonable practice. In any event his intervention was fruitless.' Far from abating, the pogrom on that day exploded from' a blaze into a holocaust.

Lest descriptions of what happened should be regarded by the reader as a figment of imagination, a theory that has subsequently come close to being postulated in some British and Nigerian Government circles, three European eye-witnesses had better tell the tale of what they saw.

The correspondent of Time magazine, 7 October:

The massacre began at the airport near the Fifth Battalion's home city ot Kano. A Lagos-bound jet had just arrived from London, and as the Kano passengers were escorted into the customs shed a wild-eyed soldier stormed in, brandishing a rifle and demanding 'Ina Nyamiri' - the Hausa for 'Where are the damned Ibos?'. There were Ibos among the customs officers, andthey dropped their chalk and fled, only to be shot down in the main terminal by other soldiers. Screaming the blood curses of a Moslem Holy War, the Hausa troops turned the airport into a shambles, bayonetting Ibo workers in the bar, gunning them down in the corridors, and hauling Ibo passengers off the plane to be lined up and shot.

From the airport the troops fanned out through downtown kano, hunting down Ibos in bars, hotels, and on the streets. One contingent drove their Landrovers to the rail-road station where more than 100 Ibos were waiting for a train, and cut them down with automatic weapon fire.

The soldiers did not have to do all the killing. They were soon joined by thousands of Hausa civilians, who rampaged through the city armed with stones, cutlasses, matchets,, and home-made weapons of metal and broken glass. Crying 'Heathen' and 'Allah' the mobs and troops invaded the Sabon Gari (strangers' quarter) ransacking, looting and burning Ibo homes and stores and murdering their owners.

All night long and into the morning the massacre went on. Then, tired but fulfilled, the Hausas drifted back to their homes and barracks to get some breakfast and sleep. Municipal garbage trucks were sent out to collect the dead and dump them into mass graves outside the city. The death toll will never be known, but it was at least a thousand.

Somehow several thousand Ibos survived the orgy, and all had the same thought: to get out of the North.

Mr. Walter Partingtonof the Daily Express, London, 6 October:

But from what I have been told on my journey by chartered plane to towns to which the North civil airline would fly, and hitching a lift through this desolat"and, the horror of the massacre at times seems to equal that of the Congo. I do not know if there are any Ibos left in the Northern Region ... for if they are not dead they must be hiding in the bush of this land which is as big as Britain and France.

I saw vultures and dogs tearing at Ibo corpses, and women and children wielding matchets and clubs and guns.

I talked in Kaduna with the Airline Charter Pilot who flew hundreds of Ibos to safety last week. He said, 'The death toll must be far in excess of 3,000 ..... One young English woman said, 'The Hausas were carting wounded Ibos off to hospital to kill them there!

I talked to three families who fled from the bush town of Nguru, 176 miles north of here [the dispatch was datelined Lagos]. They escaped in three Landrovers from the town where about fifty Ibos were murdered by mobs drunk on beer in some European shops. Another Englishman who fled the town told of two Catholic priests running for it, the mob after them. 'I don't know if they escaped; I didn't wait to see.' . . . A lot of the massacred Ibos are buried in mass graves outside the Moslem walls.

In Jos charter pilots who have been airlifting Ibos to Eastern safety talked of at least 800 dead.

In Zaria, forty-five miles from Kaduna, I talked with a saffronrobed Hausa who told me: 'We killed about 250 here. Perhaps Allah willed it.'

One European saw a woman and her daughter slaughtered in his front garden after he had been forced to turn them away.

Mr. Colin Legum of the Observer, London, 16 October 1966:

While the Hausas in each town and village in the North know what happened in their own localities, only the Ibos know the whole terrible story from the 600,000 or so refugees who have fled to the safety of the Eastern Region - hacked, slashed, mangled, stripped naked and robbed of all their possessions; the orphans, the widows, the traumatized. A woman, mute and dazed, arrived back in her village after travelling for five days with only a bowl in her lap. She held her child's head, which was severed before her eyes.

Men, women and children arrived with arms and legs broken, hands hacked off, mouths split open. Pregnant women were cut open and the unborn children killed. The total casualties are unknown., The number ofinjured who have arrived in the East runs into thousands. After a fortnight the scene in the Eastern Region continues to be reminiscent of the ingathering of exiles into Israel after the end of the last war. The parallel is not fanciful.

To continue with descriptions of the type and scale of the atrocities perpetrated during those weeks of late summer 1966 would be to invite criticism that one was glorying in the bestiality of the affair. The eye-witness descriptions later put together from the victims' accounts runs to several thousand pages, and in parts the nature of the atrocities perpetrated baffles human understanding. The same applies to the descriptions offered by the European doctors who were among those tending the wounded at Enugu airport and railway station as the refugees arrived back in the East.

But no less awe-inspiring has been the subsequent attempt by the Nigerian and British Governments to brush all this under the carpet, as if by lack of mention the memory of it would the more easily pass away. For the Nigerian Government the subject is taboo; in Whitehall circles it is the best conversation-stopper since Burgess and Maclean.

Many sophisticated newspaper correspondents also appear tacitly to have agreed not to mention the killings of 1966 in regard to the breakaway of Eastern Nigeria from the Federation, and to the present war. This is unrealistic. One can no more explain the present-day attitude of Biafrans to Nigerians without reference to these events than one can account for contemporary Jewish attitudes towards the Germans without reference to the Jews' experience in the Nazis' hands between 1933 and 1945.

Chapter 7.

Aburi - Nigeria's Last Chance

THERE is no doubt that the aim of the pogrom of 1966 was to drive the Easterners out of the North and perhaps even out of Nigeria. In both it was remarkably successful. In the wake of the killing the Easterners came home in droves, convinced once and for all that Nigeria neither could nor would offer them the simple guarantees of security of life and property that are habitually the inalienable rights of citizens in their own country.

They have since been accused of playing up the scope and effect of the massacres. Ironically no playing up was necessary. The facts spoke for themselves and were witnessed by too many independent minds to be discountable. Mr. Schwarz, who can hardly be accused of sensationalism, refers to them as da p pgrom of genocidal proportions'. Nor were they directed solely against the Ibos. The word'Ibo' is a single generic term in the North - actually the Hausa word is 'Nyamiri', which is derogatory as well as descriptive - for all Easterners regardless of racial group. Thus not only the Ibos suffered, though they were undoubtedly in the majority. Efiks, Ibibios, Ogojas and Ijaws were also singled out for butchery.