the Biafra Story (1969) (26 page)

In Britain the Enugu-Awgu. plan was strongly supported by the Government with everything it could muster. Alternative proposals were impatiently brushed away. The Government, increasingly aware of public outcry, offered E250,000 to Nigeria to help with the problem. Although the issues at stake, the options open, and the technical eyewitness evidence were either known or available, the Government decided to send Lord Hunt out to tour Nigeria and Biafra to decide how best the British donation could be administered.

Colonel Ojukwu replied by saying his people did not wish to accept money or aid from Mr. Wilson's Government, alleging that the sum involved was less than one per cent of the sales of the arms which had caused the disaster in the first place, and that so long as arms shipments went on they found donations of milk from the British Government unpalatable. At the same time he made clear that assistance from the British people would be received with genuine gratitude. However as Lord Hunt's mission was concerned with the modalities of administering the Government gift, there was no point in his coming to Biafra.

Some observers in Biafra felt this decision was hasty, since Lord Hunt and his companions could have seen, had they visited Biafra, the practicability of an airlift into Annabelle. But Colonel Ojukwu knew that his people were massively against the Hunt visit. He came within an ace of changing his mind, but an injudicious statement by Mr. Thomson to the effect that world opinion would condemn him utterly unless he accepted the Awgu corr idor made it impossible for Ojukwu to do other than stick by his original decision.

So for two weeks Lord Hunt visited various war-fronts on the Nigerian side of the fighting line, but had no opportunity to hear arguments other than those advocating the Awgu corridor, which the British Government had said during Hunt's absence it intended to support. The usefulness of Lord-Hunt's subsequent report has yet to be proved. In later weeks and months it became somewhat doubtful if ;E250,000 worth of food would ever get delivered to the suffering beWnd the Nigerian lines, let alone through them.

Some in Britain did see the Biafrans' anxieties. On 22 July in the House of Commons, protesting against the continuing supply of arms, Mr. Hugh Fraser said: 'In the name of humanity it would be foolish to ship instruments of war which would convert corridors of mercy into avenues of massacre. To make the case for the Awgu corridor more plausible it was necessary to deal with the question of an airlift, notably by denigrating the suitability of Annabelle airport, by now being referred to by its real name of Uli. This was duly done. Mr. George Thomson referred to Uli as 'a rough grass strip" and said it could not take an airlift. There were, apart from Mr. Kirkley, at least a score of journalists within a mile of Whitehall who could have testified that it was not a rough grass strip and could take heavy aircraft. Their experience was not sought, and when the precise specifications of Uli were provided to the Commonwealth Office, they were smoothly and hurriedly brushed aside.

The runway of Uli is 6,000 feet long, that is, twice as long as Enugu runway and half as long again as Port Harcourt. it is 75 feet wide, slightly less than a pilot would like, but wide enough for most undercarriages with room to spare, and it has an all-up load capacity of 75 tons. It was built by the same Biafran who before independence was the' project engineer for the construction of the main runways at Lagos and Kano international airports in Nigeria. Nevertheless, the British Government's campaign stuck, and millions in Britain were duped into thinking that Colonel Ojukwu was refusing a land corridor under any circumstances, and that in this way he was responsible for any deaths that might occur among the Biafran people.

In point of fact, he never received from the Nigerians, directly or indirectly, a formal proposal for the Awgu corridor. After Mr. Arikpo's press conference, the red herring by then swimming nicely, the matter was dropped. It was briefly raised again by the Biafrans when they met the Nigerians at Niamey, but when the respective arguments were examined for the various alternative proposals, the Nigerians realized that on feasibility alone the Biafran proposals were better, and they then backtracked on everything and told the Biafrans they intended to starve them out. This is described more fully in a later chapter.

However, when he left Niamey to return to Lagos the chief negotiator for the Nigerian side, Mr. Allison Ayida, was interviewed by the Observer which published on 28 July 1968 the following:

According to Mr. Ayida the Biafrans were prepared to accept a land corridor even without winning their own demand for a day-time air corridor into Biafra, provided the land corridor, was patrolled by an armed international police force.

After the Nigerian spokesman at Niamey, Mr. Allison Ayida, had made the Nigerian intention plain once and for all, any real hope of getting an agreement to fly, drive or ship food into Biafra went out of the window. It is difficult to see why in this case such a fuss was made about negotiating a corridor at all. The only way to get food in was to fly at night and thus technically at any rate break the blockade. Only the churches realized this, and without clamour or publicity quietly flew in as much food as they could. By this time each of the two church bodies had bought planes of their own, but Wharton still controlled, them, and the churches wanted to set up their own operations.

The difficulty was the opposition of Wharton himself to the idea of losing his monopoly of flights into and out of the country. The churches could not hire their own pilots and servicing crews and fly in independently because Wharton's pilots alone knew the vital landing codes by which a friendly aircraft identified itself to the control tower at Uli.

Apart from the churches, even the Biafrans hesitated to affront Wharton by breaking his monopoly; for one thing they depended on him for their arms flights. But at last they decided to give the codes to the Red Cross and the Churches. This was not so easy. One Biafran emissary flying to S.%o Tome was refused access to the aircraft at Uli by a Wharton pilot because the pilot suspected (quite rightly) that he had the codes in his pocket. It was eventually through a delegate of the Biafrans going via Gabon to Addis Ababa for the Peace Conference that the codes were smuggled out, and in the Ethiopian capital that they were handed over to a representative of the Red Cross, who later passed them on to the churches.

Whether this breaking of his monopoly had anything to do with Wharton's later activities over the non-arrival of Biafran desperately needed ammunition supplies towards the end of August when the Nigerian 'final offensive' was on, is something that only Wharton can answer.

On 15 July Nigerian anti-aircraft fire started from flak-ships in the creeks to the south of Biafra, and Wharton's pilots decided the pace Was getting too hot. They quit and for ten days no planes came into Uli. They eventually started again on 25 July after certain reassurances not entirely uninvolved with hard cash.

On 31 July the Red Cross at last started its own operation from Fernando Po, an island then a Spanish Colony and much nearer to Biafra than Sao Tome, being only forty miles off the coast as opposed to the 180 miles to the Portuguese island. But Fernando Po was due for independence on 12 October, and the mood of the future government of Africans was not known. In the event the party that won the elections was not the expected one,, and subsequently, proved, thoroughly unhelpful, a state of affairs for which the constant pressure brought by the Nigerian Consul on the island was largely responsible.

I Many criticisms have been levelled at the international Red Cross from both sides, and from journalists. They are accused of not doing enough, of spending more money on administrative gallivanting than on getting the job done, of being, too concerned with not treading on political toes and not concerned enough in passing out relief.

But their position has not been easy. By the nature of their charter they have to remain totally neutral. Their neutrality must not only be kept, it must be seen to be kept. They had to operate on both sides of the fighting line. Certainly they could have been more efficient and made fewer mistakes. But it was the first time any operation of this size and scope had ever been undertaken anywhere. There were teams from various nations attached to the International Red Cross, and other teams from the same nations working under the flag of their own national Red Cross. Thus in Biafra there were two French teams, one attached to the IRC, the other sent by French Red Cross. The effolrt was often disparate and uncoordinated. It was to bring some order into the state of affairs that Mr. August Lindt, Swiss ambassador to Moscow and a former United Nations senior servant in refugee and famine matters, was asked by the IRC to-come and head the whole operation.

Of the accusations usually made that the IRC was not tough enough in brushing aside the obstacles, one weary spokesman said: 'Look, here in Biafra we get all the cooperation we need. But on the other side they've made it quite plain they don't want us. They don't like what we are doing, which is saving lives a lot of them would privately like to see waste away, and they don't like our presence because it prevents them doing certain things we think they would like to do to the civilian population. 'If we get too stroppy with them they can just as easily order us to leave. O. K., fine, so we get a day in the headlines. But what about the million people our supplies are maintaining in life behind the Nigerian lines? What happens to them?'

But one criticism that can reasonably be made is that the International Red Cross in Geneva took a disastrously long time to wake up and get moving.

Although they were kept informed from, the very earliest days by Mr. Jaggi of the urgency of the situation, and although the money that came in from all sources during July ran into millions of dollars, it was not until the last day of the month that the first all-Red Cross plane flew into Uli. Even throughout the month of August, with their own air operation, the Red Cross only brought in 219 tons of food while the churches with less money and still relying on Wharton for transport shifted over 1,000 tons. But as the generally accepted required tonnage of 300 tons a 'night would have meant that this combined quantity should have come in every four days, Mr. Kirkley's gloomy prediction came true.

It is not the intent of this chapter to paint gaudy pictures of human suffering; it is rather a chronicle of events to explain to the puzzled reader what really happened. Besides, the pictures have been seen, in newspapers and on television, and highly emotional word-portraits have been painted by scores of journalists and writers about what they saw. A brief r6sum6 will suffice.

By July, 650 refugee camps, had been set up and they contained about 700,000 haggard bundles of human flotsam waiting hopelessly for a meal. Outside the camps, squatting in the bush, was the remainder of an estimated four and a half to five million displaced persons. As the price of the available foodstuffs went up, not only the refugees but also those indigenous to the unoccupied zone suffered.

Wildly varying figures have been hazarded to describe the death toll. The author has tried to achieve a consensus of estimates from the best-informed sources within the International Red Cross, the World Council of Churches, the Caritas International and the orders of nuns and priests who did much of the field work of food distribution in the bush villages.

Throughout July and August, the politicians postured and the diplomats prevaricated. A land corridor, even if it had been set up at that period, could not conceivably have been in operation in time. The donations from British and West European private citizens were pouring in; several Governments, notably in Scandinavia, indicated privately that they would not be unsympathetic to a request from the Red Cross for the loan of a freighter and aircrew, if asked. The Red Cross in Geneva preferred to negotiate with a private firm whose pilots said they would only fly into Biafra. If Nigeria accorded them a safe-conduct guarantee; and to ask Lagos for that guarantee. As ever it was refused.

The death-toll spiralled as predicted. Starting at an estimated 400 a day, by its peak it had reached what the four main foreign-staffed bodies of relief workers in Biafra reckoned to be 10,000 a day. The food imports throughout July and August were pitifully small. While some of the deaths occurred in the camps, and could be noted, far more occurred in the villages where no relief percolated at all. As so often, the most heartbreaking tasks and the dirtiest work were undertaken by the Roman Catholics.

There are no words to express nor phrases in this language to convey the heroism of the priests of the Order of the Holy Ghost and the nuns of the Order of the Holy Rosary, both from Ireland. To have to see twenty tiny children brought in in a state of advanced kwashiokor, to know that you have enough relief food to give ten a chance of living while the others are completely beyond hope; to have to face this sort of thing day in and day out; to age ten years in as many months under the . Strain; to be bombed and strafed, dirty, tired and hungry and to keep on working, requires the kind of courage that is not given to most men who wear a chestful of war ribbons.

By the end of 1968 the consensus estimate of deaths within unoccupied Biafra was three quarters of a million, and the most conservative estimate to be found was half a million. The Red Cross, whose colleagues were working on the other side of the fighting line, reported an estimated half a million dead in the Nigerian-occupied areas.

it must be stated that much of the food bought with the money donated by the people of Britain, Western Europe and North America that did not go to Biafra direct did not reach the hungry at all. While reporters like Mr. Stanford and Mr. Noyes Thomas of the News of the World were reporting in June and July the scenes of human degradation they witnessed at Ikot Ekpene, an Ibibio town which Lagos had quite correctly been claiming for twelve weeks to be firmly in their hands, other journalists in Lagos were uncomfortably reporting that piles of donated food were rotting on the docks. Red Cross workers there were complaining of being deliberately frustrated at all official levels.