This 7/24 free-fire zone

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Every people should be originators of their own destiny”

(Martin Delany, 19th century African American freedom nationalist and writer)

Where is the life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

(TS Eliot, “Choruses from the Rock”, 1934)

The Muhammadu Buhari islamist regime in Nigeria has effectively turned Biafra into a free-fire zone where its genocidist occupying troops can pick and choose where and when to murder the next Igbo child, woman or man. Since October 2015, particularly, genocidist commanders have roamed brazenly, ceaselessly and sadistically across Biafra with troopers pinpointing population layouts for the next targeted firing range: Onicha … Igwe Ocha … Asaba … Oka … Enuugwu … Aba … Igwe Ocha … Asaba … Enuugwu … Igwe Ocha … Onicha …

To ensure that all conceivable spheres of this savage ritual are exhausted, the genocidists have also employed their Boko Haram and Fulani militants’ adjunct terrorists in this slaughtering spree. Buhari authorised the Boko Haram massacre of Uzo-Uwani, north Biafra, on Monday 25 April 2016 in which 200 Biafrans asleep in their beds were murdered (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/uzo-uwani-herbertekwe-ekwe-in.html). Earlier on in January (5th,  2016), Fulani militants abducted and murdered Akaeze Ofulue III, the obi or king of Ubulu-Ukwu, southwest Biafra, west of the Oshimili River.

On Friday 5 May 2016, the troopers wrestled the relay baton of death from their Boko Haram surrogate in Uzo-Uwani and returned to Aba, 100 miles to the south, for yet another free firing stop-over at the commercial city, murdering 3-8 Biafrans this time… The last time they free-fired Aba was 9 February 2016. On that occasion, a genocidist brigade murdered 22 Biafrans.

Silence

Both the British and US governments which imposed Buhari in power in March 2015 have remained deafeningly silent over this slaughtering in Biafra (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html), a policy dictated principally to shield themselves from obvious censure from both domestic and international opinion for their appalling complicity. The British state broadcaster, the BBC, which broadcasts to southwestcentral Africa intensely, and has supported the Igbo genocide campaign throughout the past 50 years (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/bbc-nationalists-or-secessionists.html), is also studiously quiet over the catastrophe. Nowhere else on earth, in 2016, are any peoples murdered so monstrously with scant responses of revulsion from the rest of the world especially from the chanceries of those chiefly responsible for propping up this most ruthless genocidist regime in Africa.

Acknowledgement

As they keep mute on this raging savagery, it appears that both Cameron and Obama administrations and the BBC are reconciled to the awareness that the Biafrans do not consider themselves some doomed sitting ducks awaiting their dreadful enemies to ultimately decide their fate. After all, self-defence, as most people know, is at once a natural right and a right guaranteed in the universal declaration of human rights to which Britain, the US, and indeed genocidist Nigeria are all signatories.

(John Coltrane Sextet, “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”, part-I of the five-part suite Meditations [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, percussion, Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone, tambourine, bells; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 23 November 1965])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe