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