Indigenous People of Biafra

THE Indigenous People of Biafra, led by Nnamdi Kanu, is constituted integrally in the Biafra freedom movement which campaigns peacefully for the restoration-of-independence of the 50 million indigenous people of Biafra. This is the most peaceful freedom movement in Africa and one of the very few of its kind across the entire South World – Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America. It will stop 51 years of the Igbo genocide by genocidist Nigeria/co-genocidist state Britain (29 May 1966-present day) and will free Biafra from 47 years of occupation (since 13 January 1970) by these dual states. Finally, it will work assiduously to prosecute all individuals and institutions involved in the Igbo genocide since its 29 May 1966 launch, including those involved in the ongoing unimaginable stretch of programmed savagery perpetrated in Biafra by the Nigeria genocidist military-led Hausa-Fulani/islamists.  

(Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe)

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Acknowledgement” {part-I of A Love Supreme suite} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones,  drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 9 December 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

54th birthday of Emma Okocha

(Born 22 June 1963, Asaba, Biafra: onye amuma ndiigbo)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

FOOTBALLER, sports administrator, journalist, freedom exponent, onye amuma ndiigbo, the courageous 4-year-old who, at the third month of phase-III of the Igbo genocide, survives the Saturday 7 October 1967 mass execution of  700 Igbo boys and men by a genocidist Nigeria military brigade commanded by Murtala Mohammed and Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo in Asaba, twin Oshimili River port, during which most of his family and other relatives are murdered; author of Blood on the Niger (TriAtlantic Books, 2006), compulsory reference in the study of the Igbo genocide, carried out by the Hausa-Fulani/islamist-led Nigeria and its suzerain state Britain, which meticulously catalogues the savagery and aftermath of the Asaba execution.

Hundreds of other Igbo boys and men are also slaughtered by the Mohammed-Haruna-Taiwo brigade in several other towns and villages in this Anioma region of Biafra, west of the Oshimili, as  Okafor Udoka has shown (Okafor Udoka, “Lest we forget the genocide of Asaba”, Skytrend News, 6 October 2014). Ifeanyi Uriah, now 63, another survivor of the Asaba execution, recalls, in an interview with Udoka, the haunting memory of 7 October 1967:

I cannot tell this story without tears in my eyes … They [genocidist brigade] ordered everyone to come out to the [Asaba] town square … They were honest with us. They told us they were going to kill us. They took us to the mounted machine guns. Then it dawned on us that it was true. I was standing with my older brother at the edge of the crowd. He was holding my hand. He had always taken care of me. We shared the same bed. He was the first to be dragged away by the soldiers. He let go of my hand and pushed me into the crowd. He was shot in the back. I could see the blood gushing from his back. He was the first victim of the massacre. Then all hell let loose. I lost count of time. To this day, I live with the smell of the blood of my brethren that night. Even the heavens wept for the victims of this holocaust. Finally the bullets stopped (Udoka: 2014).

*****NIGERIA and BRITAIN murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of Igbo population during the three phases of the genocide – 29 May 1966-12 January 1970. This genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the most gruesome and expansive genocide of contemporary history, inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence, and its phase-IV, launched on 13 January 1970 in which tens of thousands of additional Igbo have been murdered, continues till this day.  

The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. The world can stop this ongoing genocide. To understand the politics of the Igbo genocide and the politics of the “post”-Igbo genocide is to have an invaluable insight into the salient features and constitutive indices of politics across Africa in the past 50 years.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Alabama” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner, piano; Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Jazz Casual [Ralph Gleason], National Educational Television, KQED Studios, San Francisco, US, 1 November 1963])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

A comment on Claudia Moscovici, “The siege of Leningrad: Genocide by starvation”, HYPOCRISA, 16 February 2015

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

TWENTY-SIX years later, beginning on 31 March 1967, genocidist Nigeria, very similar to Claudia Moscovici’s reviewed Germany’s strategy in Leningrad, the Soviet Union (http://176.223.121.197/content/siege-leningrad-genocide-starvation, accessed 17 February 2015), embarks on the comprehensive land, naval and aerial blockade of Biafra in phase-II of the Igbo genocide which it enforces through phase III (beginning 6 July 1967) till 12 January 1970 with devastating consequences in Africa’s most densely populated region outside the Nile Delta. 

Nigeria employs starvation as one of its critical weapons to prosecute the genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa formally launched earlier on 29 May 1966 (phase-I). Obafemi Awolowo (lawyer and senior advocate of the Nigerian bar), Nigeria’s chief genocidist “theorist”, deputy head of the prosecuting regime in Lagos and head of the powerful finance ministry publicly states, right from the outset, that starvation of the Igbo is a “legitimate instrument” of the campaign, a policy voiced openly and variously throughout the period by several other senior regime officials including, especially, Anthony Enaharo (head of information ministry), Allison Ayida (regime special advisor), and field commanders Benjamin Adekunle and Olusegun Obasanjo.

Adekunle-Obusonjoist amalgam

Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious of the genocidist commanders in south Biafra, reminds the world of his regime’s starvation strategy in an August 1968 press conference which includes foreign correspondents: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that don’t move” (The Economist, London, 24 August 1968).

 

(Adekunle: “I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat ... We shoot at everything that moves in ... I[g]bo territory ... even at things that don’t move”)

IT IS ALSO in pursuit of this starvation strategy that Olusegun Obasanjo, who takes over this sector’s command from Adekunle later in 1968, orders his air force, in May 1969, to shoot down any Red Cross planes flying in urgently-needed relief supplies to the millions of surviving but encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo. Within a week of his infamous order, 5 June 1969, Obasanjo recalls, nostalgically, in his memoirs, unambiguously titled My Command (London: Heinemann, 1981), genocidist air force pilot Gbadomosi King “redeem[s] his promise”, as Obasanjo clinically asserts (Obasanjo, 1981: 79) – the “promise”: Gbadomosi King shoots down a clearly marked, incoming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 aircraft near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.  Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this crime is fiendish, grotesquely revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [name of the death squad Obasanjo, who subsequently becomes head of Nigeria regime for 11 years, commands] was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel, especially of the Air Force detachment concerned and the troops they supported in [my] 3 Marine Commando Division” (79).

(Obusonjo: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force [shooting down of  Red Cross relief aircraft] especially on 3 Marine Commando Division was profound. It raised morale of all service personnel...”)

Harold Wilson’s “... a half million dead Biafrans ...” 

The British government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson is Nigeria’s strategic ally in this campaign – militarily, politically, diplomatically. Britain had since been riled by the Igbo vanguard role, begun in the 1930s, to terminate its conquest and occupation of Nigeria (one of the very prized lands of the British conquest of Africa). By supporting the genocide, Britain seeks to “punish” the Igbo for the latter’s historic role in the liberation of Nigeria. During the course of the 1968/69 gruesomely catastrophic apogee of the campaign when thousands of Igbo are dying daily from starvation, disease and enhanced land and aerial bombardment of survivors in ever-shrinking territory encapsulated by the siege, Harold Wilson is totally unfazed when he informs C. Clyde Ferguson, the US state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra, that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy [London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977]: 122). 

For the record, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans” represents 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at this time; by the time that this third phase of the genocide comes to an end, 6-9 months after Wilson’s wish-declaration, 25 per cent of this nation’s population or 3.1 million Igbo people are murdered by the genocidists. Undoubtedly, the Nigerian toady “boys”  have handsomely obliged their “massa” Harold Wilson’s wish...

 (Wilson: “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)

IT MUST be stressed that Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half a million dead Biafrans”-wish is not a declaration made by some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party or anything of that ilk; on the contrary, this is a declaration made by an elected politician, a politician in an advanced western representative democracy, the leader of the British Labour party, one of Europe’s leading social democratic parties. “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration is made by the prime minister of Britain; not the prime minister of some “peripheral”, seemingly inconsequential country but the prime minister of a “centre” state and power that was part of the victorious alliance that defeated a fascist global amalgam in a global war that ended barely 23 years earlier. This is a prime minister of a “centre” state and power (sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the war) that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide” – in the wake of the 1930s-1940s deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide and other genocides in Europe. 6 million Jews were murdered then by Germany. It is to ensure that no human beings are ever subjected to what the Jews and others went through in central Europe and elsewhere that this genocide convention is rated as one of the key international documents of the new age. Britain is a signatory to the convention. Surely, Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration cannot fit into the hallowed pages of the UN “Convention on the prevention of the Crime of Genocide”.

“[L]etting the little buggers starve out”, Defoliant

FINALLY, a senior British foreign office official, who echoes Harold Wilson’s disposition to the Igbo slaughter, is no less chilling in their own characterisation of Britain’s strategic goal. Describing the British response to the concerted international humanitarian effort to dispatch urgently needed relief material to the blockaded and bombarded Igbo, this official notes that the British government position is designed to “show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting the little buggers starve out” (Morris: 122). In a courageous and admirable public admission he makes in 1970, Colonel Robert Scott breaks ranks with his employer, the British diplomatic mission in Lagos where he works as military advisor, to acknowledge, gravely, that as the Nigerian genocidists unleash their Adekunleist campaigns across Igbo cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970).

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Wise One” [Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 27 April 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Licence to murder? What’s the difference between the Nigeria military and al-Mourabitoun/al-Shabaab/Ansar dine/al-Qaeda/al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula/al-Qaeda in the islamic Maghreb/Boko Haram/Islamic state/Taleban?

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Select terrorist outrages across the world, November 2015-January 2016

(1) 10 November 2015

Nigeria occupation military brigade (comprising army, police, secret police, other undisclosed units) positioned at Igwe Ocha, south Biafra, attacks peaceful Biafra freedom marchers campaigning for the restoration of Biafra sovereignty and release of Nnamdi Kanu (Radio Biafra freedom broadcaster and leader of Indigenous People of Biafra illegally detained by the Nigeria regime since 14 October 2015), murdering 3 and wounding several others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: stunning silence from the world – including, especially, leading powers US and Britain who played a crucial role in installing genocidist commander Muhammadu Buhari, who oversees these Igbo massacres, as current Nigeria’s head of regime in March 2015; scant mention of massacre by leading global news outlets

(2) 12 November

Islamic state suicide bombers murder 43 people and 240 others wounded in an attack in Beirut, Lebanon

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(3) 13 November

Islamic state fighters attack central Paris, France, murdering 38 people and wounding 368 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(4) 20 November

Al-Mourabitoun and al-Qaeda in the islamic Maghreb fighters attack hotel in Bamako, Mali, murdering 27 people and wounding 2

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(5) 24 November

Islamic state suicide bombers attack bus in Tunis, Tunisia, murdering 12 people and wounding 17 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(6) 2 December

[a] Sayed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a husband-wife-terrorist duo, attack a holiday facility at San Bernardino, California, United States, murdering 14 people and wounding 23 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

[b] Nigeria occupation military brigade (comprising navy, army, police, secret police, other undisclosed units) positioned at head bridge, Onicha, southwestcentral Biafra, attacks peaceful Biafra freedom marchers campaigning for restoration of Biafran sovereignty and release of Nnamdi Kanu (Radio Biafra freedom broadcaster and leader of Indigenous People of Biafra illegally detained by the Nigeria regime since 14 October 2015), murdering 11 people and wounding scores of others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: stunning silence from the world – including, especially, leading powers US and Britain who played a crucial role in installing genocidist commander Muhammadu Buhari, who oversees these Igbo massacres, as Nigeria’s current head of regime in March 2015; scant mention of massacre by leading global news outlets

(7) 12 December

Nigeria military brigade (comprising army, police, secret police, other undisclosed units) positioned at Zaria, northcentral Nigeria, attacks Shiite muslims led by Ibrahim Zakzaky, murdering 300 people and wounding scores of others including Zakzaky who the Nigeria regime detains subsequently

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE … condemnation by a number of countries including the US which states categorically after this attack: “The United States calls on the government of Nigeria to quickly, credibly, and transparently investigate these events in Zaria and hold to account any individuals found to have committed crimes”; Shiite Iran condemns the attack and its parliament calls on Nigeria to “launch an investigation into these deaths”; massacre widely publicised by leading global news outlets                                                         

(8)  17 December

Nigeria occupation military brigade (comprising navy, army, police, secret police, other undisclosed units) positioned at head bridge, Onicha, southwestcentral Biafra, attacks peaceful Biafra freedom marchers campaigning for restoration of Biafran sovereignty and celebrating an Abuja (Nigeria) court’s ruling releasing Nnamdi Kanu (Radio Biafra freedom broadcaster and leader of Indigenous People of Biafra illegally detained by the Nigeria regime since 14 October 2015), murdering 8 and wounding scores of others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: stunning silence from the world – including, especially, leading powers US and Britain who played a crucial role in installing genocidist commander Muhammadu Buhari, who oversees these Igbo massacres, as current Nigeria’s head of regime in March 2015; scant mention of massacre by leading global news outlets

(9) 12 January 2016

Islamic state suicide bomber attacks shopping facility in Istanbul, Turkey, murdering 11 people and wounding 14 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(10)  14 January 2016

Islamic state suicide bombers/other designated fighters attack central Jakarta, Indonesia, murdering 4 people and wounding 24 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations, widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(11) 15-16 January 2016

Al-Qaeda in the islamic Maghreb attack hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, murdering 29 people and wounding 56 others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: world-wide condemnation by leading powers including the US and Britain, as well as the United Nations; widely publicised by leading global news outlets

(12) 19 January

Nigeria occupation military brigade (comprising army, police, secret police, other undisclosed units) positioned at Aba, southeast Biafra, attacks peaceful Biafra freedom marchers campaigning for restoration of Biafran sovereignty and calling for release of Nnamdi Kanu (Radio Biafra freedom broadcaster and leader of Indigenous People of Biafra illegally detained by the Nigeria regime since 14 October 2015), murdering 8 and wounding scores of others

INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE: stunning silence from the world – including, especially, leading powers US and Britain who played a crucial role in installing genocidist commander Muhammadu Buhari, who oversees these Igbo massacres, as current Nigeria’s head of regime in March 2015; scant mention of massacre by leading global news outlets

Notes

As the empirical evidence above shows (1, 6b, 12 ), genocidist Nigeria can, in the contemporary era, 2015-2016, openly and defiantly murder the world’s people who are Igbo and Biafran and African and Christian without any protest or sanction from the rest of the world, not least from the leading powers of the age including the United Nations, the organisation that proclaims that it exists to serve human solidarity and progress.

Thanks to the British government led by Harold Wilson, Nigeria indeed acquired this licence to murder the Igbo as it sought fit during phases I-III of the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 – hence the world’s deafening silence that accompanies each of the three Nigerian atrocities recorded above. This is one of the haunting catastrophes of this epoch. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968-1969, Harold Wilson insisted, on record, that he, Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, London and New York: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 122). The Nigerian subalterns on the ground in this southwestcentral Africa region, the “boys” – indolent, toady, virulently and vindictively anti-African operatives, handsomely obliged their “massa”, slaughtering far beyond the grim Wilson-target of 500,000 Igbo or 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population (then) by 12 January 1970. The Nigerians had instead murdered 3.1 million Igbo, 25 per cent of this nation’s population.  

Essentially, Harold Wilson, an elected politician, a politician in Britain, an advanced West democracy, indeed the leader of the British Labour party, had authorised and managed his country’s support for the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 21 years after the end of the deplorable Jewish genocide by Germany in Europe in which 6 million Jews were murdered. Furthermore, Harold Wilson’s “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took”-declaration became the defining template of the diminution of African life which formed the context of Nigeria’s continuation of the Igbo genocide beyond 12 January 1970, further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur/Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan (all in Sudan since 2003) and in other wars on the continent. A total of 15 million Africans have been murdered across the continent in these genocides and other wars since Nigeria launched the Igbo genocide in May 1966. In this all-Africa cataclysmic outcome, Harold Wilson and his Nigerian génocidaires have operationalised that gripping insight of historian Chancellor Williams’s of the critical role that the African, themself, plays in their own subjugation by the pan-European World:

Now the shadows lengthened. The Europeans had also been busily building up and training strong African armies. Africans trained to hate, kill and conquer Africans. Blood of Africans was to sprinkle and further darken the pages of their history … Indeed, Africa was conquered for the Europeans by the Africans [themselves], and thereafter kept under [conquest] control by African police and African soldiers... (Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, Chicago: Third World, new edition, 1995, p. 218)

“Massa”, “boys”, genocide

Pointedly, one of those principal commanding operatives who beckoned to the Wilson-“a half million dead Biafrans”-target 50 years ago is none other than Muhammadu Buhari who presently directs this phase (IV) of Nigeria’s licence to murder Igbo people. During the Wilson phase, Buhari was commander of a genocidist corps operating in north and northcentral Biafra, slaughtering to the hilt. Another monstrous commander of that phase, Olusegun Obasanjo, whose genocidist brigade operated in south Biafra slaughtering and laying waste to towns and villages and towns and villages on its trail and who, in June 1969, ordered his air force to shoot down an international Red Cross aircraft flying in urgently needed relief supplies to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo, has vociferously supported Buhari’s current death mission on Igbo people. Just as Obasanjo had gloated over his Igbo genocidist campaigns of the 1960s and the destruction of that relief plane in his memoirs (My Command, Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980), emphasising the firm support the genocidists enjoyed from Britain (My Command, p. 165, passim), Obasanjo has recently used newspaper and television interviews in Nigeria to propagate this phase-IV of Nigeria’s “Murder-Igbo” licence.

(O Obusonjo: one of the most notorious operatives of the Igbo genocide)

Yet if this Buhari-Obasanjo swaggering duo Nigerian genocidists and others in their haematophagous lair of Nigeria were European, having participated in the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990s, for instance, murdering a European people, they would have since been tried and sentenced to a long, life imprisonment term by a The Hague court. No one murders Europeans and struts around on the world stage as the Obasanjos and Buharis of Africa... But it must be stressed here that “massa” is not really in this business of ensuring global silence on Nigeria’s atrocities in Biafra in order to protect its genocidist “boys” in Nigeria from censure; no, to the contrary, “massa” doesn’t really relish in such transcontinental solidarity but will speedily dispose of the “boys” as the momentum of the march of the Biafran restoration-of-independence movement gathers pace. 

What has instead been the preoccupation of “massa”, all the while, is to shield itself, Britain, from international censure as the principal driving force in the execution of the Igbo genocide in these past 50 years. As I have shown in several studies (see, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011, and Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Longest genocide – since 29 May 1966, forthcoming), Britain has played this instrumental role in the Igbo genocide militarily, politically, diplomatically. As these lines are written, Saturday 30 January 2015, the world must be reminded that it is with British weapons largely that Nigerian genocidists employ to murder Igbo people at will in occupied Biafra. As always, the Nigerian “boys” on the ground are confident that they have their “massa”’s back, 2961 miles away in Europe, in “upholding” this crime against humanity.

Postscript

Recently, Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party and first minister of Scotland, announced that if Britain were to vote to leave the European Union in a forthcoming referendum, this outcome “could trigger” another referendum in Scotland itself (BBC, London, 26 January 2016) demanding the restoration of Scottish independence. As in the 2014 Scottish voting process (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/rights-for-scots-rights-for-igbo.html), no Scottish voter, for or against restoration-of-independence at the Forth Bridge, outside Edinburgh, or in Glasgow, Inverness, Aye, Aberdeen, Stranraer, Edinburgh, Arbroath, Wick, anywhere in this country, would ever be shot at or harmed in any way by the British police/military/MI5/whatever in exercising this inalienable right, guaranteed by the United Nations, to decide on this crucial testament of freedom.

Britain (as well as Nigeria) is a signatory to the UN declaration on the rights of peoples to self-determination. Britain will surely explain to the wider world much sooner than later why it accepts the rights of 5 million Scots to exercise this freedom which could cause the collapse of a union of 310 years but is unrelentingly instrumental in waging a 50-year-old genocide campaign against 50 million Igbo people, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, who equally want their own freedom.

For all those concerned in the Igbo genocide, there is no statute of limitations in international law in the apprehension, prosecution and punishment of persons or institutions involved in the crime of genocide, a crucial feature of justice underscored just recently with the news that a 95-year-old suspect operative in the Nazi Germany genocide machine against the Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, in 1944, will go on trial next month, February 2016 (CNN, Atlanta, 19 January 2016), for this crime committed 72 years ago.

Igbo seek and will achieve justice for the perpetration of this crime against its people. Igbo seek and will achieve the restoration of Biafra.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Lonnie’s lament” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 27 April/1 June 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe