Raw Genocide

 

LIKE IN RAMA

 

In faraway Rama,

A lone voice was heard.

Mother Rachel, heart-broken,

Bitterly bewailing her children

Who were no more.

 

Here at home

In Asaba,

In Owerri;

In Ameke-Item.

Here in the Land of the

Rising Sun,

The sun suddenly set at noon,

Eclipsed by a screen of blood;

Mournful voices of many mothers

Bitterly bemoan and grieve

Their children and men

Slain by the savage swords

Of the uncircumcised.

 

After the 1966 series of ruthless massacre of Easterners, mainly the Igbo, in the North, we were left in no doubt about the limitless depth of bestiality which our traducer compatriots were operating from. Everywhere the Nigerian troops and mobs invaded, they left streams of blood on their trail. Their aim was to decimate the Igbo population.

        In their trademark bloodthirsty savagery, as reported by the Washington Morning Post of September 27, 1967, they embarked on a house-to-house search during which they murdered over 500 Igbo civilians. The New York Review of December 21, 1967 also wrote:

‘In some areas outside the East…Ibos were killed by local people with at least the acquiescence of the federal forces…1000 Igbo civilians perished in Benin in this way.’

Giwa Amu, a former Solicitor General of the defunct Mid-West region, was quoted in the Sunday Observer of March 16, 1983 as having lamented thus:

‘Benin was the capital of the Mid-Western region with a high concentration of Asaba born technocrats, bureaucrats, and professionals who met their untimely end at the hands of federal troops and other accomplices…For record purposes, however, let me state fearlessly that I saw hundreds of unarmed civilians being shot at sight when Federal troops arrived to liberate the city…There appeared a fleeting period of lunacy in which Mid-westerners gladly identified Asaba people to be shot down by federal troops on the so called liberation day in Benin…It was the first Black on Black genocide in post-independence Africa.’ 

From Warri, Sapele and Agbor, gory tales of brazen acts of mass murder emerged, of how federal troops killed or stood by while mobs killed more than 5000 Ibos… (New York Times, January 10, 1968).

When Nigerian soldiers swept their way into Asaba and firmly seized the city, at the command of Murtala Mohamed who was later replaced by Ibrahim Haruna, the troops herded in all the men and boys they could find—all of them unarmed and defenceless. And in a most atrocious manner, brutally slaughtered about seven hundred in one fell swoop.

The London Observer of January 21, 1968, reported this heinous mass murder thus:

‘The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where seven hundred Ibo male were lined up and shot dead.’

Monsignor Georges, a special emissary of His Holiness, Pope Paul VI, to Asaba, on an on-the-spot assessment of the reality on ground, cried in alarm as he spoke to the French Newspaper, Le monde, on the 5^th of April, 1968:

‘There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres…Two areas have suffered badly…First, the regions between the town of Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain, Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men. According to eyewitnesses of that massacre, the Nigerian commander ordered the execution of every Igbo male over the age of ten years.’

Just as in Asaba, Ibrahim Haruna, with even more vehemence, went on to lead the Nigerian mission of ethnic cleansing to Owerri and Ameke-Item.  His lust for blood was insatiable.

Other Nigerian commanders followed suit, after they observed the tolerance of the Nigeria Military high command for such heinous acts. Their appetite for blood was thoroughly stirred. Each one of them tried to outdo the other in acts of atrocious brutality. Chief among them was Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, who was commanding the Division 3 of the Nigerian Army that invaded the city of Port Harcourt, raping, looting and indulging in all forms of war crimes against the civilian population.

Having succeeded in overrunning Port Harcourt on the 12^th of May, 1968, after weeks of air, land and sea bombardment, Adekunle and his troops pressed on past the Imo River towards the commercial city of Aba. Biafran forces put up a highly spirited defence. However, the superior fire power of the Nigerian side decisively swayed the battle in Nigeria’s favour.

The horrendous massacre of more than two thousand Biafran civilians by Nigerian troops as they entered Aba, so alarmed the French Press Agency reporter, Susan Masid, who stated in her accounts of the Aba massacres as follows:

‘Young Ibos, with terrifying eyes and trembling lips told journalists in Aba that in the villages, Nigerian troops came from behind, shooting and firing everywhere, shooting everybody who was running, firing into the homes.’

Adekunle later gave verbal vent to his brutish, sadist personality, when he made that abhorrent, extremely wicked statement in which he referred to food aid for the starving children of Biafra as a ‘misguided humanitarian rubbish…’

Still wallowing in his infamy, Benjamin Adekunle also uttered a horrifying proclamation to the international media, and was quoted accordingly by the West German magazine, ‘Stern’:

‘I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas; no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary and no UN delegation. I want to prevent even one Igbo from having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the centre of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that do not move…’

This barbaric pronouncement seriously rankled the international community. The West German government therefore decried Adekunle’s savagery and sent a vehement protest to the Nigerian government on August 19, 1968.

At Owaza and Ozuaka, 2,000 and 300 persons were respectively massacred by Nigerian soldiers who crossed the Imo River. On the same day, 17^th August 1968, Nigerian troops also indiscriminately shot at inmates of some refugee camps at Awka, killing 375 of them.

The New York Times of January 18, 1968 reported that when Nigerian troops captured the ancient city of Calabar, they deliberately and meticulously sought out the Igbo dwelling therein, massacring about two thousand, in a hideous bid to annihilate the Igbo in Calabar.

When Nigerian troops entered Ikot-Ekpene, an eight-year-old orphan, Emmanuel Effiong narrated how his parents were forcefully carried away to an undisclosed location. He was lucky to escape into the bush with some other orphans, where they hid themselves until their rescue by Biafran troops after the town was rid of Nigerian soldiers.

Nigerian troops, on entry into Ikot-Ekpene sought out and massacred everything that had breath. None was spared—neither man, woman, nor children. This was the testimony of a seventy year old lady witness, Madam Okure, who saw the Nigerian troops tie up and shoot to death one of her children. Her other children were also murdered by the same troops. This report was corroborated by Professor Heely, an Irish priest and an eye-witness, in his narrative to the French News Agency.

The murder of many Biafran civilians at Ogwe near Aba, on the 27^th August, 1968, by one Lieutenant Macaulay Lamurde, a Nigerian army officer, was witnessed by British Television crew members. Although Lieutenant Macaulay was later executed by Brigadier Adekunle, it was really not for the murder of Biafran civilians, but for the personal grouse Adekunle had against him.

Forty seven men from Afia-mmanya in Udi, for their blunt resistance to be coerced into putting together and spearheading a sham demonstration endorsing ‘One Nigeria’, were arraigned and brutally executed at the Afo-agu market, by Nigerian troops, on September 10, 1968.

The towns of Oji River, Okigwe and Uyo were not spared the horrifying violent expressions of Nigerian soldiers’ base passion for blood revelry. In these places, Nigerian troops went on rampage, killing many civilians including nurses and the sick in health facilities.

Earlier, on 14^th August, 1968, a series of indiscriminate heavy bombardment of the civilian population of some villages in Ukwa, with heavy death tolls, as well as Nigeria’s incessant attacks on Red Cross planes on mercy missions, elicited a pronouncement by a spokesperson of the West German Parliamentary Committee on Overseas Aid and Development, that further cordial relations with Nigeria by West Germany would no longer be condoned, for Nigeria’s brazen disregard of the most basic laws of propriety and morality.

Despite this face-off with the West German parliament, arising from Nigeria’s unrelenting attacks on Red Cross planes, Obasanjo who took over from Adekunle, on assuming command of the 3^rd Marine Commando Division, ordered the Nigerian Airforce to shoot down any Red Cross planes ferrying food and medicine into Biafra. This directive was immediately carried out, and Obasanjo gleefully made revelry of it.  As the international furore raised by this dastardly act raged, Obasanjo casually requested the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to handle it.

Nigeria, strongly backed by the British government of Harold Wilson, besieged Biafra on land, air and sea. Her foot soldiers visited Biafra with the most hideous atrocious acts of bestiality. They gave us no respite from the air, as their Russian fighter/bomber planes manned by Egyptian pilots daily rained bombs on us; strafed our homes, places of worship, markets, medical facilities, refugee camps and relief centres.

In a February 1968 BBC interview broadcast, Bruce Loudon narrated the experience of Dr. Philip, a medical doctor at the Itu Joint Hospital, established several decades earlier by the Presbyterian Church—how despite the bold Red Cross insignia painted conspicuously on the roof top, Nigerian fighter-bombers severely bombed and strafed the hospital; reducing it to rubble, leaving many patients dead, and many more grievously wounded.  

With the mounting enormous civilian casualties and indisputable evidences of the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian population of Biafra, Joseph Palmer, the Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs in the Nixon administration, demanded from Nigeria’s Information Minister, Anthony Enahoro, why markets in Biafra were constantly being targeted and bombed by Nigerian war planes. Anthony Enahoro’s response reflected his inner personality—a man with a callous indifference to the sufferings of others—an emotionally hardened person with a calcified conscience. Hear him:

“If food was so scarce in Biafra…why were Biafra’s market places so crowded?”

Anthony Enahoro was also quoted in the Daily Mirror, London of June 13, 1968:

“There are various ways of fighting a war. You might starve your enemy into submission or you might kill him in the battle field.”

Yakubu Gowon, in his interview with Tom Burns in the Tablet, London, on December 7, 1968, stated:

“Food is the means to resistance. It is ammunition in this sense and the mercy flights into rebel territory are looked upon as tantamount to gun running.”

Hassan Katsina would not be outdone in Nigeria’s leaders’ avowed campaign of extermination by starvation against Biafra. He belched:

“Personally, I would not feed somebody I am fighting.” Times, London. June 28, 1969.

Sadly, the deepest cut on Biafra was delivered by Pa Awolowo when he made that unforgettable utterance reported in the Financial Times, London, June 26, 1969, and Daily Telegraph, London. June 27, 1969:

“All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I do not see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight us harder.”  

 

The litany of proven and corroborated evidences of genocidal acts by Nigeria’s leadership, soldiers and their civilian counterparts is inexhaustible. All of Nigeria’s leaders were unanimous in their resolve to annihilate Biafrans through any possible means, no matter how vile.

 The British government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson was intent on utterly destroying the fledgling Republic of Biafra, even if it meant the total extermination of her peoples, not only for the purposes of protecting their criminally and fraudulently acquired vast British commercial interests in the Niger area, but also to ensure that no nation of the British Commonwealth Africa will ever emerge to become less dependent on them, especially in the areas of science, technology and economy, such that they could threaten her economic interests in Nigeria. David Hunt, the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, from 1969 to 1971, in his confidential report on Nigeria, warned:

‘I have already said, and the Ibos in particular are too intelligent…’

It is sad that the British do not understand that the Igbo would rather form a strategic symbiotic alliance with them, providing them with unlimited worthwhile services beyond the provision of mere material resources which could be easily rendered redundant and irrelevant by fast, constantly evolving science and technology. The Igbo would never be a parasitic leech nor a liability to them.

The British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, brutish,   without an atom of compassion, remorselessly ejaculated his genocidal intention towards Biafra and her people, particularly the Igbo, when he told the United States of America’s State Department coordinator for relief to Biafra, Clyde Ferguson:

“…If a million Ibos had to die to preserve the unity of Nigeria, well, that was not a price too high to pay.” (Dan Jacobs: Brutality of Nations)

How sardonic Mr Harold Wilson’s smile of malicious pleasure must have been, as he gloated the ignoble feat of Gowon, his ‘protégé’, who had more than surpassed his expectations. Gowon and Nigeria had succeeded in exterminating not just one million, but well over 3million Biafran children and nursing mothers!

As the Nigeria - Biafra war raged, Harold Wilson kept supplying Nigeria with the most sophisticated, lethal arms and ammunition, while occasionally, he would let in Bibles and second hand clothing materials to Biafra. What a tragic irony! 

Prime Minister Harold Wilson of Britain, had earlier found a partner in the person of President Lyndon Johnson, the US President, who showed no iota of empathy for the starving, severely malnourished, wasting children of Biafra. When in 1968, a telecast of the sorry state of those unfortunate children of Biafra abandoned by humanity was brought to the awareness of President Lyndon Johnson, he blurted out that sad racist retort:

I don’t care what you do. Just get those nigger babies off my TV screen.   

It must be stated however, that, although the Lyndon Johnson government of the United States of America had no empathy for Biafra, the subsequent US president immediately after Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, was visibly worried at the enormity of atrocious criminality unleashed on Biafra and her citizens by Nigeria. Despite the hindrances put in his way by some elements in his government who, for the sake of America’s alliance with Britain, thwarted his plans to assist Biafra, Nixon still vehemently voiced out his personal concerns on Biafra thus:

‘Until now, efforts to relieve the Biafran people have been thwarted by the desire of the central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional victory and by the fear of the Igbo people that surrender means wholesale atrocities and genocide. But genocide is what is taking place now – and starvation is the grim reaper. This is not the time to stand on ceremony, or to ‘go through channels’ or to observe the diplomatic niceties. The destruction of an entire people is an immoral objective even in the most moral of wars. It can never be justified; it can never be condoned.’

The renowned American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, a social critic, and one with a specialist knowledge of international politics averred that:

‘The terrible tragedy of the people of Biafra has now assumed catastrophic dimensions. Starvation is daily claiming the lives of an estimated 6000 Igbo tribesmen, most of them children. If adequate food is not delivered to the people in the immediate future, hundreds of thousands of human beings will die of hunger.’

In January 1969, at Umuahia, Frederick Forsyth captured a lurid detail which the starvation havoc Nigeria inflicted on Biafra, wreaked on the vulnerable civilian population of Biafra, thus:

“…about 700,000 haggard bundles of human flotsam waiting hopelessly for a meal outside the camps…was the reminder of an estimated four and a half to five million displaced persons…the kwashiorkor scourge…a million and half children…suffer(d) from it during January; that put the forecast death toll at another 300,000 children…More than the pogroms of 1966, more than the war casualties, more than the terror bombings, it was the experience of watching helplessly their children waste away and die that gave birth to… a deep and unrelenting loathing…It is a feeling that will one day reap a bitter harvest unless…”  

Americans for Biafran Relief (ABR), in the New York Times of 10^th July, 1969, brought to the notice of the world, the hitherto unthinkable dimensions perpetrators of genocide against Biafra had descended to. They lamented that:

“The war in Biafra has brought out a ‘sophisticated’ aspect of human nature that must make God sick…This ‘noble’ war has killed more children than soldiers.”

The emphatic statement made by Baroness Asquith, the Lady Helen Violet Bonham Carter in the British House of Lords, remains a veritable testimony to the horrendous criminality perpetrated against Biafra by Nigeria:

“Thanks to the miracle of television. We see history happening before our eyes. We see no Igbo propaganda; we see the facts.”

After a detailed journalistic investigation on the dreadful criminal acts being perpetrated against Biafra by Nigeria, the July 2, 1969 Washington Post editorial lamented:

“One word now describes the policy of the Nigerian military government towards secessionist Biafra: genocide. It is ugly and extreme but it is the only word which fits Nigeria’s decision to stop the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other relief agencies, from flying food to Biafra…”

Conservatively, over 2million people were starved to death in Biafra as the war raged. Children below the age of five constituted 70% of the dead. [Dan Jacobs: 1987]. This much and more, Dan Jacobs’ properly researched findings did indicate.

Wole Soyinka, commenting on the plight of the Igbo in Nigeria, emphatically stated:

“…When a people have been subjected to a degree of inhuman violation for which there is no other word but genocide, they have the right to seek an identity apart from their aggressors.” Soyinka 2006: 101)

Nigeria’s quest to wipe out the people of Biafra, especially the Igbo, assumed demonic dimensions. In the sordid, dark, bottomless pit of their hearts, they harboured only every type of horrible death for Biafrans. As confirmed by a team of specialists led by Senator Charles Goodell of the U.S and Jean Mayer, a nutritionist, foods coming into Biafra through Nigeria were laced with poisons—cyanide, arsenic and other poisons. [Dan Jacobs: 1987]

Since World War II, humanity has never been subjected to such heinous criminal acts aimed at the annihilation of an entire race, as that unleashed on the Igbo by Nigeria.

In siding with Nigeria to exterminate the Igbo because of the oil wealth lying in the bowels of the land of Biafra, the British government sold her conscience and sacrificed morality on the altar of filthy lucre.

 Sadly, but true to type, several years after the Nigeria-Biafra war, General Ibrahim Haruna, the self-confessed slaughterer of many a thousand Igbo at Asaba, Owerri and Ameke-Item, was still mired in the sordid depths of crude passion—the base   emotions of brutal aggression devoid of any grain of benevolence. With an ugly grin of sadistic pleasure pasted fittingly on his objectively unattractive face; without any grain of compunction, he went to the Oputa Panel for Truth and Reconciliation, and with much vaunting, vomited his wicked, notorious pronouncement:

‘As the commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred 500 men in Asaba, I have no apology for those massacred in Asaba, Owerri and Ameke-Item. I acted as a soldier maintaining the peace and unity of Nigeria…If General Gowon apologised, he did it in his own capacity. As for me I have no apology.’

Haruna’s statement above, indeed sums up the mentality and mind-set of so many Nigerians who have convinced themselves that it is justifiable to eliminate the Igbo in order to prove their Nigerian-ness, and to maintain the fraudulent decrepit geographical contraption tagged Nigeria.

  There is a preponderance of evidence attesting to the fact that Nigeria, aided by the British government, committed genocide against the Igbo. Many of these incontrovertible evidences are there as confidential/secret reports in British archives, and so many other places within and without Nigeria’s confines. Nigeria and her agents who dispensed such savagery on Biafra and her people may live eternally in denial of their atrocities, but certainly, so would the guilt and consequences of their horrendous acts forever haunt them. Despite the resolute efforts made by Nigeria and her backers to conceal the truth about the genocide they perpetrated against Biafra, the truth shall sure prevail.

No matter how much the spiritually ignorant and morally bankrupt would struggle to suppress and submerge the truth, the consequences of their dastardly acts would ceaselessly haunt and hunt them down.

After the holocaust in which over 6million Jews were exterminated in gas chambers throughout Germany, the Jews were relentless in their bitter complaints. In September 1951, the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer delivered a speech to the West German parliament, as regards the responsibility of Germany in the holocaust. He said:

‘…Unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the German people, calling for material and moral indemnity…The Federal Government is prepared…to bring a solution to the material indemnity problem, thus easing the way to spiritual settlement of infinite suffering.’

The government of Germany wisely did not follow the path of denial and self-justification as Nigeria is doing today. Their leaders knew that blood-guilt is a grievous sin against the Spirit of Life.  From the depths of their hearts, they made material and spiritual recompenses which spiritually settled the infinite suffering which would have consequently befallen them as a nation. Today, Germany is making real progress. But the same cannot be said of Nigeria.  Nigeria has indeed been programmed into an irreversible regressive mode by its British colonial creators, and subsequent leaders.

Nigeria must, its crimes confess; conciliate the direly offended, or be utterly consumed by the same dreadful acts it dispenses.

     Copy Right: Chike Nwaka