Delusionary genocidist Nigeria...

(Olusegun Obasanjo: ... delusion ... fantasy ... hallucination)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Nigeria will be one of the ten leading nations in the world by the end of the century” – Olusegun Obasanjo, head of the genocidist Nigeria military junta, 1979 (Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria [Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1983, p. 9]).

FORTY YEARS after this Nigerïaña fantasy, proclaimed by a génocidaire in the Igbo genocide who the London Financial Times, it should be recalled, labelled admirably as the “godfather of modern Nigeria” (London, 14 April 2012), this “country” is nothing else but arguably the globe’s most notorious genocidist state whose current regime, headed by jihadist Muhammadu Buhari, retains the Boko Haram and Fulani militia, two of the five deadliest terrorist groups on earth presently (Institute of Economics & Policy, “Global Terrorism Index 2015”, Sydney: IEP, November 2015), as adjunct brigades it deploys in its genocide against the Igbo people of Biafra and its expanded campaigns within Nigeria itself to destroy a constellation of constituent African nations, predominantly Christians, domiciled in the south Kaduna provinces of the northcentral region and  in the eastcentral Benue valley.

(George Russell Sextet here plays “Nardis”, a composition by Miles Davis [personnel: Russell, piano; Don Ellis, trumpet; Dave Baker, trombone; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Steve Swallow, bass; Joe Hunt, drums; recorded: Riverside Records, New York, US, 8 May 1961])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is author of the recently published The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019)  (https://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2019/01/published-longest-genocide-since-29-may.html)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

That Olusegun Obasanjo Liberia “appointment”: Most irresponsible of the United Nations

(Olusegun Obasanjo)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

IT IS INDEED a sickening and cruel joke by UN Secretary General António Guteress to have “appointed” genocidist Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo as UN envoy to Liberia to “support the transfer of power peacefully to a democratically-elected government”. Unbelievably dreadful! Does Guteress really believe that Olusegun Obasanjo would recognise peace if he sees it?

What “peace envoy”?

Guteress may have just taken the cue from his predecessor in making this irresponsible appointment of Obasanjo as “peace envoy” to Liberia. In 2008, Ban Ki-moon, then UN secretary-general, did not find it outrageous to appoint Obasanjo UN “peace envoy” to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was despite Obasanjo’s rigging of three previous head-of-regime elections in Nigeria (including, particularly, the April 2007 “poll” which Obasanjo codenamed “Operation Do-or-Die”  [Vanguard, Lagos, 11 February 2007] and had, on its eve, imported the following range of weaponry fit to equip a small army to effectuate his vicious “electoral” coup d’état: 40,000 AK-47 rifles with 20 million rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition, 30,000 K2 rifles with 10 million rounds of 5.5 x 45 ammunition, 10,000 Beretta pistols with four million rounds of .9mm ammunition [nigeriavillagesquare.com, 7 March 2007, accessed 29 December 2017]), despite Obasanjo’s egregious moral turpitude, despite Obasanjo’s desperately-engineered attempt to extend his own second-term tenure as Nigeria’s head of regime before the April 2007 “election”, despite Obasanjo’s appalling human rights record and corruption during 11 years as Nigeria’s head of regime, and, most gravely of all, despite Obasanjo’s role as one of the most notorious genocidist officers in the Nigeria military whilst the latter waged the genocide (phases I-III) against Igbo people of Biafra in the 1960s. Obasanjo commanded a monstrous brigade in south Biafra that murdered tens of thousands of Igbo people during the period. Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of the Igbo population in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. The Igbo genocide is the continent’s most gruesome genocide since Belgian King Leopold II/Belgian state-perpetrated genocide against African peoples in the Congo Basin, central Africa, 1878-1908.

OLUSEGUN OBASANJO shows no remorse, whatsoever, in his principal role in the perpetration of this heinous crime against humanity, so categorised, definitively, by the United Nations itself in 1948 (see UN, Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, 9 December 1948, 
https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf, accessed 29 December 2017). On the contrary, Obasanjo boasts of his involvement in the Igbo genocide as he reminds the world in My Command (London and Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981: 79), his memoirs of the time, of ordering the shooting down of a clearly-marked, relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 aircraft bound for the Igbo whose country was then being blockaded and bombarded by the genocidists. The 3-person crew in this plane perished as a result of this crime.

(DC-7 aircraft:... similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria military on the orders of commander Olusegun Obasanjo)

WHAT in fact is at stake here is that the UN has been quite prepared to “receive” and “fraternise” with personages such as Olusegun Obasanjo, in spite of their past, in ways and means that would have been unthinkable if they were a European or Asian or Arab people, for instance, or if the target of their despicable mission on Igbo people and Biafra in 1966-1970, and subsequently, was directed at some European or Asian or Arab people, for example. Would Guteress, conceivably, appoint a Serb genocidist commander as his peace envoy to say, Chechnya?, or a Cambodian genocidist commander to say, the Philippines or Myanmar? (It is significant to cite Myanmar here given that this is the country that U Thant, the UN secretary general that had laid the foundation of UN complicity in the Igbo genocide, right from the outset, came from. It is fascinating to speculate what U Thant’s position would be today on the raging crisis of the Rohingya people in Myanmar...)

UN: facilitating agency

How does anyone realistically expect an Olusegun Obasanjo to recognise what peace is if he sees one?! In the same breadth, in 2007, Andrew Young, an African American who once served his country as ambassador to the UN and later made a huge, personal fortune in his business interests in Nigeria, thanks to Obasanjo’s patronage during the latter’s first tenure as head of regime, campaigned for Obasanjo to be “awarded” the Nobel Peace Prize. One can’t but recall that as Young marched across the United States with the venerable Martin Luther King and others, defending and demanding universal societal recognition of African American freedom quest, the genocidist brigades of his latter-day unlikely pal and business partner were engrossed in the orgy of firebombing Igbo towns and villages east of the Atlantic. 

THIS GROTESQUE Wilsonic-dimunition of African life and wellbeing (from British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s infamous, “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide – proclaimed at the 1968/69 apogee of the Igbo genocide [see Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122]) which has undoubtedly given the impetus to the UN “receptibility” and “fraternisation” that the Olusegun Obasanjos of Africa have “enjoyed”, so uncritically, is a major contributing factor to the glaring tragedy of contemporary Africa. That the very leadership of the United Nations, since the launch of the Igbo genocide in May 1966, is a facilitating agency to this tragedy is indeed a troubling fact that African peoples and the rest of the world can no longer ignore.

(Mal Waldron Quartet, “Hymn from the inferno” [personnel: Waldron, piano; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Vanguard Studios, New York, US, 15 August 1981])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

5 June 1969

The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.

In all my years, one thing does not change,

However you disguise it, this thing does not change:

The perpetual struggle between Good and Evil.

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

There was hardly any day during the entire 44-month duration of the Igbo genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) that the Nigerian assault did not register some dreadful mark of infamy, such was the sheer savagery of this murder mission. 5 June 1969, exactly 46 years ago today, was not different. Genocidist commander Olusegun Obasanjo had, on this day, monstrously ordered his air force to shoot down an international Red Cross aircraft carrying relief supplies to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo.

(DC-7 aircraft similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria military on the orders of commander Olusegun Obasanjo)

Olusegun Obasanjo clearly, unambiguously, records this horrendous crime in his memoirs, appropriately entitled My Command, published in 1981 by the reputable Heinemann publishers. Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge, 5 June 1969, Olusegun Obasanjo recalls, most nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, in coming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew. 

(Olusegun Obasanjo)

Olusegun Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this horrendous crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who later becomes Nigeria’s head of regime for 11 years, commanded] 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” (Obasanjo, My Command: 79).

Caliban and his Prospero

Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, Obansanjo, indeed unashamedly acknowledges in his My Command) to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...

Olusegun Obasanjo must now make the most honourable move over this crime and surrender himself, voluntarily, with his memoirs, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and explain to the world what happened over the skies of south Biafra on that Thursday 5 June 1969. Failing to do this, it is incumbent on the ICC to declare this man “wanted” – to urgently tell the world why he had ordered the destruction of the ICRC DC-7 aircraft with the death of its 3-person crew and who else in his genocidist high command is culpable of this crime.

(Mal Waldron Quartet, “Hymn from the inferno” [personnel: Waldron, piano; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone; Cecil McBee, bass; Dannie Richmond, drums; recorded: Vanguard Studios, New York, US, 15 August 1981]) 

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Remembering 5 June 1969

There was hardly any day during the entire 44-month duration of the Igbo genocide that the Nigerian assault did not register some dreadful mark of infamy, such was the sheer savagery of this murder mission. 5 June 1969, exactly 44 years ago today, was not different. Genocidist commander Olusegun Obasanjo had, on this day, clearly, unambiguously, ordered his air force to shoot down an international Red Cross aircraft, carrying relief supplies to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo. 

Olusegun Obasanjo clearly, unambiguously, records this horrendous crime in his memoirs, appropriately entitled My Command, published in 1981 by the reputable Heinemann publishers. Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge, 5 June 1969, Olusegun Obasanjo recalls, most nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, in coming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew. 

Olusegun Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this horrendous crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who later becomes Nigeria’s head of regime for 11 years, commanded] 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” (Obasanjo, My Command: 79). 

Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, Obansanjo, indeed unashamedly acknowledges in his My Command) to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...

Olusegun Obasanjo must now make the most honourable move over this crime and surrender himself, voluntarily, with his memoirs, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and explain to the world what happened over the skies of south Biafra on that Thursday 5 June 1969. Failing to do this, it is incumbent on the ICC to declare this man “wanted” – to urgently tell the world why he had ordered the destruction of the ICRC DC-7 aircraft with the death of its 3-person crew.



Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Would Obasanjo understand peace if he saw it? – Dakar update, Monday 26 March 2012

Opposition candidate Macky Sall defeats Abdoulaye Wade, Sénégal’s president, in the country’s second round presidential election run-off. Once again, the Sénégalese electorate, arguably Africa’s most sophisticated and resilient, has shown that it can be done! A salute to this beacon! This electorate has not only stopped Wade from his attempt to unconstitutionally extend his maximum 2-term duration in office, implicitly supported by Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo (the AU and ECOWAS so-called mediating envoy to Sénégal), it has, also, resoundingly voted against the president despite that much bandied, seeming armour of certitude so beloved by Africa’s dictators – “incumbency”.

Would Obasanjo recognise peace if he saw it?

It is indeed a sickening and cruel joke by both the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States to have recently sent Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo to Sénégal to “mediate” in the deteriorating political impasse between President Wade, who has insisted on seeking reelection for a third-term in office contrary to the maximum 2-term provision in the constitution, and the constellation of political parties opposed to the extension project. Obasanjo’s so-called “just two years further stay in office for Wade, then Wade steps down” as “compromise” to resolve the crisis was robustly rejected by the opposition and the wider Sénégalese electorate, one of Africa’s most sophisticated, which, in 2000, ironically worked flat out to ensure Wade’s victory at the polls against the then incumbent candidacy of the French government-preferred Abdou Diouf. This victory was scored most spectacularly under that much loved, exhilarating, and progressive slogan and banner of the day, “Amoul Problème”!

In the Dakar public forum a fortnight ago as Obasanjo sought to announce his warped offer, the Sénégalese electorate once again stamped their presence indelibly on another critical course on the history of their land: “Go home, Obasanjo!”, they screamed, with the distinctly staggered discomfiture of the fanged impostor, “Leave our country Mr Obasanjo. We will never accept this!” And they definitely didn’t accept “this” as they forced the interloper out of town and forced Wade into an 18 March (2012) presidential run-off with geologist Macky Sall – a contest that Wade will obviously have an uphill task to win.

WHAT “PEACE ENVOY”?

The AU and ECOWAS may have taken the cue from the UN in making their bizarre appointment of Obasanjo as “peace envoy” to Sénégal. In 2008, Ban Ki-Moon, the current UN secretary-general, did not find it outrageous to appoint the same Obasanjo his “peace envoy” to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was despite Obasanjo’s rigging of three previous head-of-regime elections in Nigeria (including particularly the April 2007 “poll” which Obasanjo codenamed “Operation Do-or-Die” and had, on its eve, imported the following range of weaponry fit to equip a small army to effectuate his vicious “electoral” coup d’état: 40,000 AK-47 rifles with 20 million rounds of 7.62 x 39 mm ammunition, 30,000 K2 rifles with 10 million rounds of 5.5 x 45 ammunition, 10,000 Beretta pistols with four million rounds of .9mm ammunition), despite Obasanjo’s desperately-engineered attempt to extend his own second-term tenure as Nigeria’s head of regime before the April 2007 “election” (a precedent Wade could not have failed to note!), despite Obasanjo’s appalling human rights record and corruption during 11 years as Nigeria’s head of regime, and, most gravely, despite Obasanjo’s role as one of the most notorious genocidist officers in the Nigeria military whilst the latter waged a war of genocide against the Igbo people in the 1960s. Between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people in this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa and the continent’s most gruesome genocide of the 20th century. Obasanjo commanded a nefarious brigade in south Igboland that murdered tens of thousands of Igbo people during the period. Obasanjo shows no remorse, whatsoever, in his principal role in the perpetration of this heinous crime against humanity. On the contrary, he boasts about his involvement as he reminds the world in his My Command (London and Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), his memoirs of the time, of ordering the shooting down of a clearly-marked, relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 aircraft bound for the Igbo whose country was then being blockaded and bombarded by the genocidists. The 3-person crew in this plane perished as a result of this crime.

What in fact is at stake here is that the UN and the world have been quite prepared to “receive” and “fraternise” with personages such as Olusegun Obasanjo, in spite of their past, in ways and means that would have been unthinkable if they were a European or Asian or Arab people, for instance, or if the target of their despicable mission on the Igbo and Igboland in 1966-1970, and subsequently, was directed at some European or Asian or Arab peoples, for example. Would Ban Ki-Moon, conceivably, appoint a Serb genocidist commander as his peace envoy to say, Chechnya?, or a Cambodian genocidist commander to say, the Philippines or Myanmar? How does anyone realistically expect an Olusegun Obasanjo to recognise what peace is if he sees one?! In the same breadth, in 2007, Andrew Young, an African American who once served his country as ambassador to the UN and later made a huge, personal fortune in his business interests in Nigeria, thanks to Obasanjo’s patronage during the latter’s first tenure as head of regime, campaigned for Obasanjo to be “awarded” the Nobel Peace Prize. One can’t but recall that as Young marched across the United States with the venerable Martin Luther King and others, defending and demanding universal societal recognition of African American human rights, the genocidist brigades of his latter-day unlikely pal and business partner were engrossed in the orgy of firebombing Igbo towns and villages east of the Atlantic.

This grotesque Wilsonic-dimunition of African life and well-being (from British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s infamous: “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide – proclaimed at the height of the Igbo genocide…) which has undoubtedly given the impetus to the international “receptibility” and “fraternisation” that the Olusegun Obasanjos of Africa have “enjoyed” so uncritically, in the post-Igbo genocide epoch in Africa, has now been challenged dramatically by the great Sénégalese electorate from this great land of Bâ, Diakhate, Diagne, Alioune Diop, Birago Diop, Cheikh Anta Diop, David Diop, Kane, NDiaye, Sembène, Senghor, Socé … For Africa, it could never be business as usual subsequently…

In kicking Obasanjo out of Sénégal, the Sénégalese public has surely served notice to the rest of Africa: Africans must no longer “reward” those Africans who have murdered Africans, robbed Africans, and destroyed African fortunes but benefit immensely from the “protective cover” provided by the rabid external (and pliant local) hegemonic forces who haven’t relented from their primary goal to control Africans and African lands in perpetuity. For these forces, the Olusegun Obasanjos of Africa pursue anti-African interests that suit and reinforce their goal.

5 June 1969

Thankfully, for the interest of posterity, the Igbo genocide, perpetrated by the Nigeria state, is one of the most documented crimes against humanity. Leading university and public libraries across Europe (particularly in Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Denmark and Sweden) and North America have invaluable repositories of books, state papers (including, crucially, hitherto classified material now declassified as part of mandatory timeframe provisions and freedom-to-information legislations), church papers, human rights/anti-genocide/anti-war groups’ campaign papers, reports, photographs and interviews, Red Cross/other third sector papers, reports and photographs, newspaper/newsmagazine/radio/ television/video archives and sole individual depositories, some of which are classified as “anonymous contributors”.

These data variously include extensive coverage of news and analyses of varying features of the genocide between May 1966 and January 1970 as well as still photographs and reels and reels of film footage of the devastating impact of the genocidist’s “starvation weapon” attack on Igbo children and older people, the genocidist air force’s carpet bombings of Igbo population centres (especially refugee establishments, churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, markets, homes, farmlands and playgrounds) and the haunting photographs and associated material that capture the sheer savagery of the slaughter of 100,000 Igbo in north Nigeria towns and villages and elsewhere in parts of west Nigeria (especially Lagos and suburbs, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Oyo, Benin) during the first phase of the genocide in May to October 1966. A stream of these archival references has flowed steadily onto the youtube website as well as other internet outlets and much more material on the genocide will be available online in the months and years ahead. On the whole, these documentations are a treasure trove for the conscientious scholar and researcher on the genocide. For the would-be prosecutor of the perpetrators of this crime, they couldn’t have wished anything more for that crucial resource base to embark on their historic enterprise. A total of 3.1 million Igbo, or a quarter of the nation’s population at the time, were murdered in the genocide, the worst in Africa since the 19th century. On the morrow of 44 months of unrelenting slaughtering, Nigeria, the perpetrator, emerges as the undisputed obligatory haematophagous monster in this southwestcentral region of Africa. Its death-march on the Igbo and Igboland was soon relayed, tragically, across the continent – Uganda, the Congos, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Darfur … resulting in the murder of additional 12 million Africans in the subsequent 40 years.

Quite auspiciously, the record of those who ordered/executed the Igbo genocide makes no pretences, offers no excuses, whatsoever, about the goal of their dreadful mission – such was the maniacal insouciance and rabid Igbophobia that propelled the project. The principal language used in the prosecution of the genocide was Hausa. Appropriately, the words of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, published and broadcast on Kaduna radio and television throughout the duration of the crime, are in Hausa: Mu je mu kashe nyamiri/Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su/Mu chi mata su da yan mata su/Mu kwashe kaya su (English translation: “Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property”).

The Hausa word for war is yaki. Whilst Hausa speakers would employ this word to refer to the involvement/combat services of their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, sons, brothers, other relatives and friends in “Boma” (reference to World War II Burma [contemporary Myanmar] military campaigns/others in southeast Asia, fighting for the British against the Japanese) or even in the post-1960s Africa-based “peace-keeping” military engagements in the Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, east Africa, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Sudan, they rarely use yaki to describe the 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 mass murders of Igbo people. In Hausaspeak, the latter is either referred to as lokochi mu kashe nyamiri (English past tense: “when we murdered the damned Igbo”) or lokochi muna kashe nyamiri (English past continuous tense: “when we were murdering the damned Igbo”). Pointedly, this “lokochi” (when, time) conflates the timeframes that encapsulate the two phases of the genocide (29 May 1966-29 October 1967 and 6 July 1967-12 January 1970), a reminder, if one is required, for those who bizarrely, if not mischievously, wish to break this organic link.

Elsewhere, genocidist documentation on this crime is equally malevolent and brazenly vulgar. A study of the genocide-time/“post”-genocide era interviews, comments, broadcasts and writings on the campaign by key genocidist commanders, commandants and “theorists” and propagandists such as Benjamin Adekunle, Yakubu Danjuma, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Hassan Katsina, Ibrahim Haruna, Oluwole Rotimi, Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Enaharo and Allison Ayida underscores the trend. A brief review of Obasanjo’s contribution (published in his memoirs, My Command) that focuses on his May 1969 direct orders to his air force to destroy an international Red Cross aircraft, carrying relief supplies to the encircled and blockaded Igbo, is crucially appropriate.

Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King (genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge, 5 June 1969, Obasanjo recalls nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, in coming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.

Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this horrendous crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who later becomes Nigeria’s head of regime for 11 years, commanded] 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”.

Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, Obansanjo, indeed unashamedly acknowledges in his My Command) to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...

June 1969: Documenting a crime against humanity

Thankfully, for the interest of posterity, the Igbo genocide, perpetrated by the Nigeria state, is one of the most documented crimes against humanity. Leading university and public libraries across Europe (particularly in Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden and Denmark) and North America have invaluable repositories of books, state papers (including, crucially, hitherto classified material now declassified as part of mandatory timeframe provisions and freedom-to-information legislations), church papers, human rights/anti-genocide/anti-war groups’ campaign papers, reports, photographs and interviews, Red Cross/other third sector papers, reports and photographs, newspaper/newsmagazine/radio/television/video archives and sole individual depositories, some of which are classified as “anonymous contributors”.

These data variously include extensive coverage of news and analyses of varying features of the genocide between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970 as well as still photographs and reels and reels of film footage of the devastating impact of the genocidist’s “starvation”-weapon attack on Igbo children and older people, the genocidist air force’s carpet bombings of Igbo population centres (especially refugee establishments, churches, shrines, schools, hospitals, markets, homes, farmlands and playgrounds) and the haunting photographs and associated material that capture the sheer savagery of the slaughter of 100,000 Igbo in north Nigeria towns and villages and in the country’s Lagos/west/midwest region during phases I-II of the genocide, 29 May 1966-5 July 1967.

(New York Art Quartet plays Charlie Parker’s composition, “Mohawk” – personnel:  John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums [recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, 16 July 1965])

Maniacal insouciance, Prospero, Caliban

A stream of these archival references has flowed steadily unto the youtube website as well as other internet outlets and much more material on the genocide will be available online in the months and years ahead. On the whole, these documentations are a treasure-trove for the conscientious scholar and researcher on the genocide.

For the would-be- prosecutor of the perpetrators of this crime, they couldn’t have wished anything more for that crucial resource base to embark on their historic enterprise. A total of 3.1 million Igbo, or a quarter of the nation’s population at the time, were murdered in the genocide, the worst in Africa since the 19th century.

Quite auspiciously, the genocidists’ own record on the genocide makes no pretences whatsoever about the goal of their dreadful mission – such was the maniacal insouciance and rabid Igbophobia that propelled the project. The principal language used in the prosecution of the genocide was Hausa. Appropriately, the words of the ghoulish anthem of the genocide, published and broadcast on Kaduna radio and television throughout the duration of the crime, are in Hausa: Mu je mu kashe nyamiri/Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su/Mu chi mata su da yan mata su/Mu kwashe kaya su (translation: Let’s go kill the damned Igbo/Kill off their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property).

The Hausa word for war is yaki. Whilst Hausa speakers would employ this word to refer to the involvement/combat services of their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, sons, brothers, other relatives and friends in Boma (reference to World War II Burma [contemporary Myanmar] military campaigns/others in southeast Asia, fighting for the British against the Japanese) or even in the post-1960s Africa-based “peace-keeping” military engagements in Cameroon, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Sudan, they rarely use yaki to describe the May 1966-January 1970 mass murders of the Igbo people. In Hausaspeak, the latter is either referred to as lokochi mu kashe nyamiri (past tense: “when we murdered the damned Igbo”) or lokochi muna kashe nyamiri (past continuous tense: “when we were murdering the damned Igbo”). Pointedly, this lokochi (when, time) conflates the timeframes that encapsulate the three phases of the genocide (29 May 1966-3 January 967, 4 January 1967-5 July 1967, and 6 July 1967-12 January 1970 – for detailed analysis, see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Biafra Revisited, 2006), a reminder, if one is required, for those who bizarrely, if not mischievously, wish to break this organic link.

Elsewhere, genocidist documentation on this crime is equally malevolent and brazenly vulgar. A study of the genocide-time/“post”-genocide era interviews, comments, broadcasts and writings on the campaign by key genocidist commanders, commandants and “theorists” and propagandists such as Adekunle, Danjuma, Gowon, Obasanjo, Katsina, Haruna, Rotimi, Awolowo, Enaharo and Ayida underscores the trend. A brief review of Obasanjo’s contribution (published in his My Command, 1980) that focuses on his May 1969 direct orders to his air force to destroy an international Red Cross aircraft carrying relief supplies to the encircled and blockaded Igbo is hugely illustrative.

Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Gbadomosi King (Nigeria genocidist air force pilot), who he had known since 1966, to “produce results” in stopping further international relief flight deliveries to the blockaded Igbo. Within a week of his infamous challenge (5 June 1969), Obasanjo recalls nostalgically, Gbadomosi King “redeemed his promise”. Gbadomosi King had shot down a clearly marked, incoming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7 plane near Eket, south Biafra, with the loss of its 3-person crew.

Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the aftermath of this crime is fiendish, chillingly revolting. He writes: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [the notorious unit Obasanjo, who subsequently becomes head of regime for 11 years, commanded] 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”.

Yet despite the huffing and puffing, the raving commanding brute is essentially a coward who lacks the courage to face up to a world totally outraged by his gruesome crime. Instead, Obasanjo, the quintessential Caliban, cringes into a stupor and beacons to his Prospero, British Premier Harold Wilson, to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane...

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Andrew Young, Obasanjo and the Nobel

(originally published in nigeriaworld.com, 5 March 2007)

(Andrew Young ... that Young-Obasanjo pact would have been denounced outright by Martin Luther King)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Primer genocide state

THE RECENT declaration by Andrew Young, the US-based pro-Obasanjo lobbyist, confidant and business associate, that he and other members of his obusonjoist lobbying/contracting outfit are campaigning for Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s head of regime, to be awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace is arguably the most outrageous intervention in African affairs of the past 12 months.

For the Nobel award committee to even begin to consider giving its distinguished peace prize to any leader of Africa’s genocide-states is utterly inconceivable. This is more seriously the case if the leader being so considered is from Nigeria, the continent’s primer genocide-state and inaugurator of the grave emergency that threatens African existence currently. The Nigeria state carried out the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970 in which 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered. Since then, 12 million other Africans have been slaughtered in genocidal rampages and other murders sponsored/perpetrated by African regimes and their allies from Sierra Leone and Liberia in the west, through to the Sudan, Rwanda and the Congos in the centre and Uganda in the east.

One would be forgiven if one thought that this “Obasanjo-for-Nobel” initiative was the brainchild of the founder of a neo-Broederbond executive who gloated over the dreadful existence that African peoples have been reduced to by the ruthless African-led regimes in their midst, and not by a close ally of Martin Luther King, one of the most outstanding African leaders of all time.

IT SHOULD be recalled, to underscore the irony that interpellates the very nexus of the Andrew Young-Olusegun Obasanjo relationship of 30 years, that as Young marched alongside King and other great Africans across US towns and cities 10 years earlier heroically proclaiming and demanding freedom and liberation for America’s oppressed African populations, Obasanjo and his pulverising league of sergeants and brigadiers and corporals and colonels and majors and troopers and the like at the other side of the African Atlantic were engrossed in the encirclement and the fire-storming of Igbo towns, cities, villages, everything “that moves or doesn’t move”, to quote the outburst of one of his notorious comrades-in-arms at the time: murdering, raping, burning, looting, wasting 3.1 million Igbo lives in four long years of genocide not seen in Africa since Belgian King Leopold II’s ravages of the countries of the Congo basin during the 19th century. The Young-Obasanjo pact is therefore a relationship that Martin Luther King would have found horrifying; he would have denounced it outright … It is an association that has undoubtedly inflicted an incalculable damage on trans-Atlantic African relations. In the light of the above, Young cannot fail to contend with the distinct possibility that instead of his business associate heading for the European city with the spelling that starts with the alphabet “o”, Oslo, to collect his coveted “peace prize” later this year, he could well terminate his journey at a different city further south – still in Europe, but name beginning with “t”, The Hague: to answer charges at the international criminal court house situated there for genocide and crimes against humanity, committed during the Igbo genocide of 1966-1970. Given Young’s three decades of friendship with Obasanjo, it is not unlikely that either the prosecution team or indeed the Obasanjo’s defence panel might wish to summon Young to The Hague to testify as witness during proceedings.

Young’s 13-step march to the Nobel award committee

SO, as Young prepares his Obasanjo-support dossier for the Nobel award committee, it is unthinkable that he would omit the cardinal features of the Obasanjo legacy in 40 years of “public life” deeply embedded in the Igbo genocide. Young must ensure that he covers the following areas of his subject’s life, as this will be of immense interest to the committee:

1. What is the nature of the Mathew Olusegun Okikiola Aremu Obasanjo-Andrew Jackson Young relationship since it began in the 1970s?

2. What is the nature and extent of Young’s business interests in Nigeria since the 1970s?

3. What does Young know of the infamous fertiliser-import scandal in Nigeria of the 1970s?

4. As Obasanjo’s friend and confidant for 30 years, what does Young know about Obasanjo’s involvement in the Igbo genocide of May 1966-January 1970?

5. In May 1969, at the height of the Igbo genocide, Captain Gbadamosi King of the Nigeria air force, who was attached to an Obasanjo-led rampaging unit in south Igboland, deliberately shot down an International Committee of the Red Cross plane carrying urgently-needed relief supplies to the encircled Igbo, killing all crew on board. Obasanjo, who had known Gbadamosi King for three years before this outrage, remembers the latter with nostalgia – a “dare-devil-pilot”, as Obasanjo notes, quite affectionately, in his memoirs (see, Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command [Lagos and London: Heinemann, 1980], p. 78). Prior to Gbadamosi King’s destruction of the ICRC aircraft, Obasanjo had “challenged” the pilot, as the former recalls sardonically (My Command, p. 78), that Gbadamosi King should “produce results” to stop further international relief flights to break the Nigerian blockade of the Igbo, a crucial plank of the genocidal campaign, to which the pilot “promised to do his best”. A few days after the request, “within a week”, Obasanjo reveals meticulously, “[Gbadamosi King] redeemed his promise” (My Command, p. 79). In the end, Obasanjo’s response to Gbadamosi King’s grim crime was that of perverse satisfaction as he, himself, recalls in My Command: “The effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air force especially on 3 Marine Commando Division [name of Obasanjo-commanded slaughtering unit] 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” (p. 79). Has advisor Young ever read Obasanjo’s My Command? What does he think? What does advisor Young think should be the world’s response to those who plan and/or approve of the destruction of a clearly marked Red Cross aircraft on a humanitarian mission? What does advisor Young think should be the world’s response to someone who acknowledges the staggering crime of ordering the destruction of a Red Cross plane with such grotesque relish in his memoirs? What does advisor Young think should be the world’s response to Obasanjo and his fellow Nigerian perpetrators, military and civilian, who carried out the Igbo genocide between May 1966 and January 1970?

6. What does advisor Young know of Obasanjo’s pernicious anti-Igbo socio-economic and military programme of 1999-2007? What has been Young’s advice on this policy, which singularly defines the catastrophic tenure of a vile regime?

7. Young has been an unofficial advisor to Obasanjo since 1999. He has an elaborate executive office located at the head of regime residency in Abuja. There is no local (Nigerian) legislative oversight involved in the appointment or maintenance of this position or over the resultant benefits in cash or kind. How much has Young received for these services since Obasanjo was sworn in as head of regime of Nigeria in 1999? Is there a fixed or a more flexible salary? From what budget provisions has he been paid? Who has approved this budget? Whilst Young was an elected 2-term mayor of the US city of Atlanta, could he have appointed a foreigner, say from Turkmenistan, as advisor without approval and oversight from the city council? If not, why not? Could a US president appoint a foreigner, perhaps an Azeri, as his/her advisor with a well-furnished office and support staff at some wing of the White House in Washington without any oversight from Congress and the wider democratic institutions of the US? If not, why not? Would Andrew Jackson Young be able to procure his Abuja-brand appointment in Pretoria, Dakar, Gaborone, Brussels, London, Nouakchott, Ottawa or Alma Ata? If not, why not? What is it about Nigeria and/or Olusegun Obasanjo that ensures that such a crass anti-democratic and illegal process of public office abuse could prevail with impunity?

8. Young is an Obasanjo lobbyist in Washington. How much is he paid annually for his service? How much has he been paid since this assignment began? What exactly does this job entail?

9. In 2005, Obasanjo launched a so-called presidential library in his hometown in west Nigeria. Millions of dollars worth of “donations”, including from corporate organisations especially in oil and engineering-contracting firms located in Nigeria, were raised. Was Young involved in this project? Is Young still involved in this project?

10. Obasanjo has been Nigeria’s minister of petroleum – the key ministry in regime day-to-day business – for most of these eight years of his 2-term tenure of his regime. Does advisor Young know how the hundreds of billions of dollars that accrued to the Nigeria treasury have been spent?

11. Since 1999, 10,000 people have been murdered in Nigeria by the state and its allies. These include a number of prominent public figures such as intellectuals (Chimere Ikoku, Victor Nwankwo) and politicians (Ayo Daramola, Bola Ige, Funsho Williams). In 2003, Chuba Okadigbo, an ex-head of senate and leading Obasanjo critic, died suddenly. Okadigbo’s family has still not ruled out the possibility that the senator was the victim of another political murder of the era. In 2004, Obasanjo ordered an armed attack on the Anambra region of Igboland. It was led by Chris Uba, a self-confessed obusonjoist-operative, during which every conceivable asset of the region’s executive, legislative, judicial, information/communication infrastructure was destroyed. The total cost of this rampage ran into millions of dollars. 30 Igbo people were murdered during the brigandage. Since then, the regime has placed the entire Igbo country under a quasi-state of siege. Of those 10,000 murdered during the life of this regime, the overwhelming majority, possibly 9,000, are Igbo. Does advisor Young know the circumstances of these murders and brigandage?

12. What does advisor Young know of Obasanjo’s expansive plot during 2005-2006 to illegally extend his 2-term regime duration? According to reports in the Nigerian media at the time, the regime resorted to bribing members of the central legislative assembly (US$500,000 for senator; US$400,000 for member of lower house) for the enterprise. The venture collapsed ultimately due to sustained countrywide opposition. Did Young support or was he opposed to the Obasanjo extension scheme?

13. As these lines are written, Obasanjo is feverishly engaged in rigging the forthcoming (April 2007) head of regime elections for his self-appointed “successor”. He had earlier rigged the results of the 2006 countrywide census. Obasanjo has already tagged these elections, quite ominously, as a “do-or-die” affair. Is advisor Young aware of these developments? What does he know? What doesn’t he know?

ANDREW JACKSON YOUNG must now inform an eagerly awaiting world of what his behind-the-scene role has been in the cataclysm that is Nigeria during this long-drawn out age of pestilence – particularly in its obusonjoist 1999-2007 phase.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Consequences” – 4th movement in First Meditations {for Quartet} [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 2 November 1965])

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Nigeria does not deserve UN Security Council permanent seat

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

(French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a permanent African membership of the United Nations Security Council. Addressing a summit of  “francophonie” leaders in Montreux, Switzerland, yesterday [Saturday 23 October 2010], Sarkozy said that it is a “scandal” that Africa, a continent of 1 billion people, is not “represented” on this crucial UN body. The following essay, first published in nigeriaworld.com [12 May 2005], is reissued here as a contribution to the debate on a seat on the SC by an African country.)

It now appears very likely that Nigeria will, after all, hand over Liberian fugitive leader Charles Taylor (currently on exile in Nigeria) to the Freetown-based UN court investigating war crimes in conflicts in and around Sierra Leone. Thanks to the insistence of the US government, the Obasanjo regime is about to send Taylor to the Freetown court despite its long-held position to the contrary. The regime has until recently argued that it was against its “national honour” (whatever that means) to respond positively to the court’s request to extradite Taylor to face trial for overseeing the slaughter of 1.3 million Africans in the west central states of Liberia, Sierra Leone and (southern) Guinea whilst he was head of regime of Liberia.

Devil itself!

The irony is of course not lost on any keen observer of this development. Whatever may be the US’s strategic interests on this subject (possible Taylor links with al-Qaeda, possible Taylor involvement in millions of dollars’ worth of money laundering, possible Taylor complicity in the January 2005 attempted coup in Conakry to remove the pro-American Guinean head of regime), it has taken the intervention of a non-African power to force a disreputable African regime to hand over the head of a fellow murderous African regime to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans – not 1.3 million non-Africans. African democrats are surely unencumbered by this irony. Africa’s regimes have murdered 15 million Africans across the continent in the past 40 years in appalling spates of genocide and other murders. Even if the devil itself were to lecture African regimes to stop murdering their peoples and, in the process, help prevent just one more African been annihilated by their depraved overlords, that would be readily welcomed. African populations are under siege by brutal regimes replete across Africa. The peoples require unremitting support for the right to safeguard their lives and progress from wherever in the world. Not less.

If indeed the US administration has threatened to block Nigeria’s current so-called bid for a permanent seat on a possibly enlarged UN Security Council if it continues to keep Taylor away from facing justice, as some press reports indicate, Washington has done very well. But the Americans shouldn’t lift their threat yet, even if Nigeria dispatches Taylor to Freetown. It is breathtakingly obscene for Nigeria to wish to be considered for a permanent seat at the Security Council given the ghastly human rights records of successive Nigerian regimes in the past 40 years including the current one where statecraft, at best, is run as some medieval baronial fiefdom. The US and the rest of the world should reject this “bid” out of hand. Not to do that would be to send the wrong signal to Africa – by rewarding a band of genocidist operatives who have the blood of Africans on their hands and who have in tandem pillaged an economy whose resources alone could easily have transformed all of Africa.

Age of pestilence

It mustn’t be forgotten that Nigeria inaugurated Africa’s current age of Pestilence in May 1966 when it embarked on the premeditated massacres of its Igbo population during a stretch of five months. 100,000 Igbo were murdered during what emerged as the first phase of the genocide. The following year, the regime, headed by Yakubu Gowon and genocidist “theorist”-deputy Obafemi Awolowo, expanded the territorial reach of this campaign into Igboland itself, Biafra, for the second phase. 3 million Igbo, or one-quarter of the nation’s population then, were annihilated within 30 months. Most of Africa stood by and watched, hardly critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives, raping, sacking and plundering of towns, villages, community after community...

As the perpetrators appeared to have got off free from any forms of sanctions from Africa (and the rest of the world) for what were clearly crimes against humanity, several regimes elsewhere in Africa (alas!, including the one that would be headed 20 years later in Liberia by one Charles Taylor who was then a nondescript high school student) were “convinced” of the lessons that they had drawn from the escapades of their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder our peoples at will. There will be no sanctions from abroad”. As a result, the killing fields of the age stretched inexorably beyond the Nigerian frontiers: Liberia, Sierra Leone, southern Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan.

In the past 40 years, Nigeria has been run by a succession of genocidist generals and other operatives (military and civilian alike) who planned, executed and sustained the Igbo genocide. The current head of regime, Olusegun Obasanjo, commanded a notorious division in south Igboland which committed indescribable atrocities as it overran cities, towns and villages. Obasanjo also ordered his airforce to destroy a clearly marked International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7 aircraft flying in urgently needed relief aid to Biafra in June 1969. Indeed, Obasanjo records this crime in his memoirs most unabashedly (see Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command [Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980], p. 79.). Neither Obasanjo (who has been head of regime for a total of nine years during the period) nor any of his colleagues (most of whom are still alive) has apologised or shown remorse or, most importantly, been indicted for their crimes against humanity. On the contrary. In fact Gowon, the grand overseer of the genocide, only recently told the press in Enuugwu (political and cultural capital of Igboland) that he had “nothing to apologise” to the Igbo. Before he shot himself in a Berlin bunker in 1945, few would have expected Adolf Hitler to apologise or show remorse for his organised genocide of 6 million Jews across Europe during the Second World War. Hardly anyone, though, would wish to contemplate a Hitler travelling to Jerusalem, today, to address a press conference in which he would insist categorically:  “I have nothing to apologise for the 6 million Jews my forces annihilated between 1939-1945. What I did was right”. That would be unimaginable monstrosity. But this was precisely what Gowon did at Enuugwu a fortnight ago.

Nigeria’s “bid” to join the Security Council could not have provided the world with a better opportunity to deal with the crux of contemporary Africa’s malaise: the non-accountability of Africa’s regimes which employ genocide and pillage of the economy as twin-track instrument of power. No country in Africa is more appropriate for the world to enforce this accountability than where the disease emerged in the first place on the continent – Nigeria, the quintessentially failed and genocide-state.

Now is the time for the US and the world to insist that each and every member of Nigeria’s “leaderships” who participated in the murder of 3.1 million Africans 40 years ago, and who in effect triggered the chain of mass killings of 12 million others elsewhere in the continent must be made to account for their crimes. Besides, if Nigeria is ultimately forced to hand over Taylor to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million Africans in the 1980s/1990s, then his current hosts (Obasanjo, Enaharo, Rotimi, Adekunle, Akinrinade, Abubakar, Babangida, Buhari, Gowon, Danjuma and many many others) must also be apprehended for the murder of 3.1 million Africans in the 1960s/1970s.