POINTED REMINDER: Those skirmishes in the mind of Harold Wilson’s dreadful calculations during the Igbo genocide, phase-III

 

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

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

HAROLD WILSON, British prime minister at the apogee of phase-III of Igbo genocide, 1968/1969, is totally unperturbed as he informs Clyde Ferguson, the United States state department special coordinator for relief for Biafra – in response to this British-coordinated premeditated mass murder campaign of Igbo people that had been comprehensively besieged, starved and bombarded by land and sea and air for 44 months, that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” its client and co-genocidist state 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)

Indices of annihilative power

JUST who is Harold Wilson who is so contumelious to go on record to call for the genocide of Igbo people of Biafra, 3150 miles away in southwestcentral Africa, 23 years after the end of the perpetration of the horrendous Jewish genocide by Germany in Europe in which it murdered 6 million Jews and 20 years after the declaration of the seminal 1948 UN convention on the crime of genocide (see UN “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”, [https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf], accessed 12 October 2017)?

1. Harold Wilson is not some dictator, some leader of a loony party, a fascist party, or anything of that brand

2. Harold Wilson is elected politician, a politician in an advanced western representative democracy

3. Harold Wilson is leader of the British Labour party, one of Europe’s leading social democratic parties (also incorporates democratic socialists, other strands of socialists, trade unionists)

4. Harold Wilson is prime minister of Britain

5. Harold Wilson is therefore not the prime minister of some “peripheral”/seemingly inconsequential country

6. Harold Wilson is 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 in 1945 – barely 23 years earlier

7. Harold Wilson is prime minister of a “centre” state and power (sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of global war in 1945) that was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 UN “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide”

8. Harold Wilson’s administration joins successive British governments in the past that have sought to “punish” the Igbo for the latter’s vanguard role (during 1930s-October 1960) in the African peoples’ freedom project to liberate Nigeria, one of Britain’s “prized African occupied states” from 60 years of the British conquest; previous British governments had connived at the premeditated devastating pogroms of Igbo people organised and executed by the Fulani leadership (on the ground African strategic ally of the British occupation who Wilson would soon work with to unleash the Igbo genocide) in the north Nigeria towns of Jos (1945) and Kano (1953)

9. Harold Wilson pursues his genocide drive against the Igbo steeped in that overarching ideological rubric of the expressed “diminution-of-African life” that constitutes the engaging, subjugating template of 400 years of pan-European enslavement of the African humanity in the Americas and elsewhere, beginning in the 15th century, and Europe’s consequent occupation of the African homeland itself

10. Harold Wilson oversees the mass slaughter of the Igbo from his 10 Downing Street London official residence

11. Harold Wilson embarks on the savagery of this campaign by constructing an alliance of willing and ruthless pan-African constituent nations in Nigeria itself including, particularly, the Fulani (who had already demonstrated their expertise in Igbo mass slaughtering in the pogroms of 1945 and 1953 cited earlier), Hausa, Kanuri, Jawara, Nupe, Bachama, Tiv, and Jukun of the north region, and the Yoruba, Urhobo and Edo of its west provinces

12. Harold Wilson’s target of a half “a million dead Biafrans”represents 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at this time

13. Harold Wilson realises 6-9 months after his “a half a million dead Biafrans”-wish declaration, 12 January 1970, that his co-Nigerian genocidists on the ground have instead murdered 3.1 million Igbo people – 2.6 million more or 25 per cent of the total Igbo population; definitely, the Nigerians have handsomely obliged their “massa” Harold Wilson’s wish...

14. Harold Wilson is not the least surprised of this outcome, thanks to British weapons his government supplied its co-Nigerian genocidists to accomplish their exterminating mission – as Wilson recalls in his memoirs, published in 1971, the Nigerian military expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative goal in Biafra than the amount used by the British armed forces  “during the whole” of the Second World War (Harold Wilson, Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, p. 630, added emphasis)

15. Harold Wilson’s government’s diplomatic mission military advisor in genocidist Nigeria at the time, Robert Scott, acknowledges his employer’s empirical evidence albeit linguistically (at the height of the genocide, mid 1968- January 1970) that as the Nigerian genocidists unleashed their campaigns across Biafran cities, towns and villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970)

Igbo resilient spirit

What has evidently underpinned the tenets of Harold Wilson’s very brazen role as this advocate of mass-slaughtering-of-a-people in the world of mid/late 1960s is his sheer confidence of a stunning “victory” in his mission: Harold Wilson believes fervently that given all the power at his disposal, and these are indeed immense, as we have shown, he will destroy Igbo people… There is, however, one feature in this outstretched power resource, a critical one for that matter, which Wilson is not in control of. Harold Wilson has no access to the resilient spirit of Igbo people, that forte that ensures Igbo survival of the genocide.

BY SURVIVING the genocide, the Igbo have not only repudiated the gruesome Wilsonian logic of Igbo mass slaughter most assuredly, but they are poised today, 52 years later, as the Biafra freedom movement has grown inexorably, to resume the interrupted construction of their beloved state of Biafra – the Land of the Rising Sun.

(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be” [personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 6 June 1968]) 

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