There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (21 page)

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.

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 from 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

Azikiwe’s lecture could not have come at a more critical time. I remember many of
us in Biafra were hoping that his intervention would bring about a breakthrough in
the stalemate. That hope was crushed when, following his triumphant lecture at Oxford,
his strategy, which was submitted to both United Nations officials and the federal
government of Nigeria, was soundly rejected as “unworkable.”

It is instructive to note that many of Azikiwe’s strategies and suggestions—international
conflict resolution with United Nations peacekeeping forces, the use of international
observer teams and military personnel to complement existing resources on the ground,
etc.—have become standard United Nations practices today. Nevertheless, exactly six
months later Nnamdi Azikiwe decided to discontinue any public support for the secessionist
aspirations of Biafra and turned in his diplomatic credentials.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to why Azikiwe withdrew his support
for Biafra. He was in a tough position and made a very difficult decision after his
counsel went mostly ignored by Ojukwu. The late Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani provides for
posterity a rare insight into Azikiwe’s thinking, apprehension, and intellectual struggle:

His [Azikiwe’s] feeling was that when a leader of a nation wants to go to war, he
should consult people. Primarily Ojukwu should have consulted Zik. Secondly, he should
have consulted [Michael] Okpara [premier of eastern Nigeria]. Thirdly, he should have
consulted other leaders. The only people that Ojukwu consulted were [Louis] Mbanefo
and [Francis] Ibiam. I have Ibiam’s letter here. It was a great mistake. I told Ojukwu
[to] invite these people [and inform them]. He told me they would compromise. That’s
what he said. He didn’t invite them, never asked them questions. That’s not how to
lead. That’s what led us into trouble. There are many areas we would have compromised.
Ojukwu did not compromise. That’s one of the mistakes we made in the war. . . . It
wasn’t that Zik opposed the war. Anybody with an intellect, with a sense would consider
carefully the implications of a war. War is destructive. There’s no country that went
to war that didn’t suffer, not one. When we went to war, we destroyed everything we
had. That’s true.
²

One must also remember that Azikiwe had spent his entire life first fighting for Nigerian
independence under the One Nigeria mantra. In a curious twist of irony he found the
same position manipulated by the British he had helped oust from his homeland. To
add insult to injury, Azikiwe watched helplessly as the words he helped invent were
then used by the Nigerian army—made up of some of the very same people who from the
get-go had rejected the concept of a unified Northern and Southern Nigeria. Azikiwe
supporters allege that the refusal by Ojukwu to consider many peaceful strategies
to end the conflict, coupled with the prospects of annihilation of his people, was,
I was told, just too much for the “great Zik of Africa” to bear.