the Biafra Story (1969) (24 page)

Except possibly for oil: this product needs comparatively little supervision to export in its crude form, and some production had already started by the end of 1968 from wells firmly in Nigerian hands. But whether the oil companies believe it or not, the chances of uninterrupted flow in the face of a bitter guerrilla war are as slim as those of a flourishing trade in other commodities.

But oil is different from other commodities. It has strategic value. With the Middle East apparently destined to a period of instability to which no end can be seen, alternative oil sources excite interest. Biafra provides a big alternative source. For France, Portugal and South Africa (to name but three) oil is a major strategic factor. Apart from the fact that not all the oil concessions in Biafra are bespoke, the Biafrans have repeatedly warned that the price of the British Government's policies towards them over the duration of the war could lead to a re-negotiation of the existing oil concessions to other takers.

There is reason to believe that, like the British Government, British business, having backed one horse on the assurance that it would win with ease, has now gone so far that it must continue backing that horse to win no matter what the price; that it is committed to a policy which it might privately Eke to reverse, but cannot see how to do so. If that is so, the oil companies and other business firms have the added irritation of knowing that it was not their policy in the first place.

THE BRITISH PUBLIC

It took the British public a full, year from the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra war to acquire even a hazy and largely uninformed outline of what was going on. But seeing through press and television that people were suffering appallingly, the British public reacted. In the next six months it did everything it could within constitutional limits to change the Government's policy over arms to Nigeria and to donate assistance to Biafra.

There were meetings, committees, protests, demonstrations, riots, lobbies, sit-ins, fasts, vigils, collections, banners, public meetings, marches, letters sent to everybody in public fife, capable of influencing other opinion, sermons, lectures, films and donations. Young people volunteered to go out and try to help, doctors and nurses did go out to offer their services in an attempt to relieve the suffering. Others offered to take Biafran babies into their homes for the duration of the war; some volunteered to fly or fight for Biafra. The donors are known to have ranged from old age pensioners to the boys at Eton College. Some of the offers were impractical, others hare-brained, but all were well-intentioned.

While considerably less mobilization of parliamentary, press and public opinion in Belgium and Holland managed to bring the governments of those countries to modify their policy of shipping arms to Lagos, the efforts of British popular opinion have failed to budge the Government by one iota. This is not an indictment of the British public but of the Wilson Government.

Normally such an enormous and broadly based expression of the popular will has an effect on Government, for although Britain has no written constitution it is generally accepted that when a British Government's policy, other than a cornerstone of defence or foreign commitment, has been condemned and opposed by the Parliamentary Party and the Opposition, the Party Executive, the Churches and the Trade Unions, the Press and the public at large, then a Prime Minister will normally heed the wishes of the great majority of his electorate and reconsider the policy.

It takes a government of unprecedented and unique arrogance first to deceive the people's representatives for a year, then to snub the expressed will of Parliament and people, and their institutions. But a government of unprecedented and unique arrogance, coupled with a flabby and gutless Opposition, is precisely what Britain has had since October 1964.

THE RUSSIAN INVOLVEMENT.

From December 1968 the steadily increasing Soviet build-up inside Nigeria became of increasing concern to observers outside the conflict. Although the first shipment of Russian MiG fighters and Ilyushin bombers arrived in Northern Nigeria in late August 1967, and further shipments, accompanied by two or three hundred Soviet technicians, continued to arrive over the next fifteen months to replace losses, it was not until the signing of the Soviet-Nigerian pact of November 1968 that the door opened wide to Russian infiltration.

The pact had already incurred the disquiet of Western diplomats while it was still in the discussion stage between the two sides, and the British made three attempts to dissuade the Nigerians from signing it. Each effort managed to bring about a delay, but the pact was finally signed on 21 November in the presence of an unusually strong delegation from Moscow.

In the following weeks the Russian presence became increasingly noticeable to the disquiet not only of the British and Americans but also of many Nigerian moderates.

The pact specified certain fields of assistance for Nigeria from Russia, such as the construction of an iron and steel industry. But it seems that the signing was linked to other activities. Shortly after the signing, reports began to come through from Northern Nigeria of a nightly airlift of Soviet infantry weapons in large quantities being ferried through airfields in the Southern Sahara to Kaduna, and thence to the Nigerian First Division at Enugu. Previous presence of Russian military equipment had been in fighters, bombers, bombs, rockets, naval patrol boats and, for the infantry, bazookas and hand-grenades. In the latter half of 1968 lorries, jeeps, trenching tools and Soviet N. C. O. S operating the support weapons began to make their appearance. Of the equipment, identification was easy from captured examples, and the presence of Soviet advisers was given away by prisoners, notably a Yoruba company commander who claimed the Russians made no secret of their nationality and ordered junior officers to attend lectures extolling the virtues of the Soviet way of life.

But towards the end of the war, after the signing of the pact, the First Division was re-equipped for the January 1969 push against the Biafrans largely with Soviet ground weaponry, including thousands of RK 49 sub-machine guns, the standard Warsaw Pact infantry gun, and Kalashnikov machine guns.

Elsewhere in Nigeria, correspondents began to notice teams of Russian advisers in various fields. Some were introduced as mineralogists, geologists, agricultural experts and the like. Fears were expressed that the Nigerian extreme Left, already strongly impregnating the Trade Union movement, would become stronger than ever, and anti-Western demonstrations were seen at the end of the year. In Ibadan the American and British flags were tom down, burnt and trampled on by a chanting mob of students and labour organizers.

By the end of the year 1968 the long-term Soviet aim in Nigeria was,still a subject for speculation. Some saw the Soviet aim not as being towards a quick end to the war, but towards an extension of it until such time as Nigeria should be so hopelessly in debt as to become sufficiently pliable to accede to Russian wishes for concessions far removed from mutual assistance. Others saw the aim as being to acquire a long-term monopoly of Nigeria's cash-crop produce, like ground-nuts, cotton, cocoa and palm oil, taken in lieu of cash payments for weapons and other aid, which would have the same effect on Nigerian independence from Soviet pressure in the 1970s. Yet others saw the final aim as being strategic - the obtaining of air bases in Northern Nigeria and perhaps a sea base along the south coast. These observers recalled Britain's chain of air bases from England through Gibraltar, Malta, Libya, Cyprus, Aden, the Maldives and Singapore which gave Britain in the 1960s the option of fast intervention East of Suez. The reasoning was that Russia, with access from the Crimea to Damascus, Port Said, Upper Egypt and the Sudan, needed only Kaduna and Calabar to have a chain of air bases straight into Southern Africa. In fact by the end of 1968 Russian technicians had set up a base at Kaduna, and had improved both Kaduna and Calabar from small municipal airstrips to full-length runways capable of taking Ilyushin bombers and Antonov freighters with all facilities for bad-weather and night landings.

Chapter 11. Refugees, Hunger and Help.

IT was the starvation in Biafra that really woke up the consciousness of the world to what was going on. The general public, not only of Britain, but of all western Europe and America, though usually unable to fathom the political complexities behind the war news, could nevertheless realize the wrong in the picture of a starving child. It was on this image that a press campaign was launched which swept the western world, caused governments to change their policy, and gave Biafra the chance to survive, or at least not to die unchronicled.

But even this issue was fogged by propaganda suggesting the Biafrans themselves were 'playing up the issue' and using the hunger of their own people to solicit world sympathy for their political aspirations. There is not one priest, doctor, relief worker or administrator from the dozen European countries who worked in Biafra throughout the last half of 1968 and watched several hundred thousand children die miserably, who could be found to suggest the issue needed any playing up'. The facts were there, the pressmen's cameras popped, and the starvation of the children of Biafra became a world scandal.

The graver charge is that the Biafrans, and notably Colonel Ojukwu, used the situation and even prevented its amelioration in order to curry support and sympathy. It is so serious, and so much of the mud has stuck, that it would not be possible to write the Biafra story without explaining what really happened.

It has been explained elsewhere in this book that the starvation of the Biafrans was not an accident, or a mischance, or even a necessary but regrettable by-product of the war. It was a deliberately executed and integral part of the Nigerian war policy. The Nigerian leaders, with commendably greater frankness than the British ever got from their leaders, made few bones about it.

In view of this the conclusion becomes inevitable that there was no concession Colonel Ojukwu could have made which would have enabled the relief food to come into Biafra faster and in greater quantities than it did, other than those concessions which Nigeria and Britain wanted him to make, which would have ,entailed the complete demise of his country.

All the 'offers' put forward by the Nigerian Government, often after joint consultation with the British High Commission, and usually accepted and welcomed in good faith by the revealed ingenuous British Parliament, press and public, were on examination to contain the largest tactical and strategic perspectives in favour of the Nigerian Army.

All proposals put forward by Colonel Ojukwu and other concerned parties like the International Red Cross, the Roman Catholic Church, and some newspapers, which contained no built-in military advantage to either side, were flatly turned down by the Nigerians with the full blessing of Whitehall.

This then is the story. Biafra is roughly square in shape. Running down the Eastern edge about a third of the way in is the Cross River, with its fertile valleys and meadows. Along the southern edge just above the creeks and marshes runs another strip of land watered by numerous small rivers which rise in the highlands and flow to the sea. The rest of the country, representing the top left-hand corner of the square, is a plateau, which is also the home of the Ibo.

In pre-war days this/ plateau had the bulk of the population of the Eastern Region, but it was the minority areas to the east and south that grew most of the food. The area as a whole was more or less self-supporting in food, being able to provide all of its carbohydrates and fruit, but importing quantities of meat from the cattle-breeding north of Nigeria, and bringing in by sea dried stockfish from Scandinavia, and salt. The meat and fish represented the protein part of the diet, and although there were goats and chickens inside the country, there were not enough to supply the protein necessary to keep over thirteen million people in good health.

With the blockade and the war the supply of imported protein was cut off. While adults can stay in good health for a long time without adequate protein, children require a constant supply of it.

The Biafrans set up intensive chicken and egg-rearing farms to boost production of the available protein-rich foods. They might have beaten the problem, at least for two years, had it not been compounded by the shrinking of their territorial area, the loss of the food-rich peripheral provinces, and the influx of up to five million refugees from those provinces.

By mid-April they had lost the Cross River valley along most of its length and part of the south, the Ibibio homeland in the provinces of Uyo, Annang and Eket, and land containing the richest earth in the country. At about this time reports from the International Red Cross representative in Biafra, Swiss businessman Mr. Heinrich Jaggi, from the Catholic Caritas leaders, from the World Council of Churches, the Biafran Red Cross, and the doctors of several nationalities who had stayed on, showed that the problem was getting serious. The experts were noticing an increasing incidence of kwashi 'okor, a disease which stems from protein deficiency and which mainly affects children. The symptoms are a reddening of the hair, paling of the skin, swelling of the joints and bloating of the flesh as it distends with water. Besides kwashiokor there was anaernia, pellagra, and just plain starvation, the symptoms of the last named being a wasting away to skin and bone. The effects of kwashiokor, which was the biggest scourge, are damage to the brain tissues, lethargy, coma and finally death.

At the end of January Mr. Jaggi had appealed to the Red Cross in Geneva to seek permission from both sides for a limited international appeal for medicine, food and clothing. The agreement came from Colonel Ojukwu as soon as he was asked, on 10 February, from Lagos at the end of April. In the meantime the refugee problem had been increasing, though it should be said that a refugee problem is the almost inevitable outcome of any hostilities and no blame can necessarily be attached to governments involved, provided they take reasonable measures to alleviate the sufferings of the displaced until the latter feel safe enough to return home.