50th anniversary of genocidist Nigeria military’s gruesome shooting down of an international Red Cross aircraft over south Biafra

(O Obusonjo... day of beastly monstrosity: “... [c]hallenged ... Gbadomosi King [genocidist Nigeria air force pilot] to produce results ... He [Gbadomosi King] redeemed his promise...”)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THERE WAS HARDLY any day during the entire 44-month duration of phases I-III of the Igbo genocide (29 May 1966-12 January 1970) that the Nigerian assault on Biafra did not register some dreadful mark of infamy, such was the sheer savagery of this murder mission – the most gruesome in Africa since the first decade of the 1900s when Germany carried out the devastating stretch of genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of contemporary Namibia.

5 JUNE 1969, exactly 50 years ago, today, was not different. Genocidist commander Olusegun Obasanjo had, on this day of beastly monstrosity 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 London publishers. Obasanjo had “challenged”, to quote his words, Captain Gbadomosi King, genocidist air force pilot in south Biafra (the region that the genocidist high command in Lagos had assigned specifically to Yoruba, Edo, Urhobo and other west Nigerian genocidist troopers “to ravage, to slaughter, to steal”), who he had known since the launch of the genocide in 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.

(DC-7 aircraft similar to the ICRC relief-carrying plane shot down over south Biafra by genocidist Nigeria air force on the orders of commander O Obusonjo)

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 slaughtering 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 “massa” 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 “massa” Prospero, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson (as he, “boy boy” Obansanjo, indeed acknowledges unashamedly in his My Command), to “sort out” the raging international outcry generated by the destruction of the ICRC plane... This request once again underscores Harold Wilson’s coordinating role in the prosecution of the Igbo genocide from the comfort of his offices and residence at 10 Downing Street, London, 3000 miles away. Anglo-Nigeria duo genocidists murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or 25 per cent of this nation’s population during these three phases of this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. In 2012, forty-three years after the downing of the relief aircraft, Olusegun Obasanjo was duly proclaimed “godfather of modern Nigeria” by the London Financial Times (14 April 2012) in further acknowledgement for his services of evil.

OLUSEGUN OBASANJO must now make the most honourable move over this crime and surrender himself, voluntarily, with his 1981-published memoirs, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Holland, 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” at once – to 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. How/What exactly did Harold Wilson do to “sort out” this crime, as requested by Obasanjo, 50 years ago?

(Andrew Hill Septet, “Premonition” [personnel: Hill, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, bass clarinet; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Renaud Simmons, conga, percussion; Nadi Qamar, percussion, African drums, thumb piano; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 8 October 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

4th anniversary of oba or king of Lagos’s proclamation to murder Igbo people in Lagos, genocidist Nigeria

(Rilwan Akiolu)

(commentary published soon after news of Akiolu’s Igbo murder-proclamation became public, 6 April 2015)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

RILWAN AKIOLU, the oba or king of Lagos, genocidist Nigeria, has issued a proclamation to murder Igbo people domiciled in Lagos if they, the Igbo, do not vote for the king’s “preferred candidate” in the forthcoming Lagos region head of regime’s election. The king’s proclamation is published widely in the Nigeria media including Premium Times (Lagos), Vanguard (Lagos) and saharareporters.com (New York).

According to saharareporters.com (6 April 2015), the “Oba of Lagos threatened Igbo during a meeting in his palace in downtown Lagos. The traditional king of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu, told representatives of the Igbo during the meeting that if they refuse to vote for his preferred candidate Akinwunmi Ambode of the All Progressive Congress [the party the overwhelming majority of the Igbo electorate voted against in the Saturday 28 March 2015 ‘poll’ for ‘president’ in Nigeria: http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/a_6.html] they will die in the Lagos lagoon in 7 days”. Saharareporters.com’s report, on its website, includes an audio clip of Akiolu’s murder threats with haunting “cheers” and chants by courtiers in Yoruba: kabiyesi, kabiyesi – “the unquestionable one”, “the unquestionable one”…

Outrage, clinical precision, no agency

AKIOLU is a lawyer and was an assistant chief of the genocidist Nigeria police before his accession to the Lagos throne in 2003. He is respected if not revered by his Yoruba subjects. The world can and must stop Akiolu from carrying through his proclamation. 

Akiolu’s proclamation is a grim alert to the world, just coming a few days after islamist insurgents operating in a university college in Kenya murdered 147 African christian students, initially separated from their muslim counterparts. The world’s heads of state, heads of government, even heads of regime, the United Nations, statespersons, non-state/civil organisations, scholars, students, men and women of freedom and goodwill should today, now, register their unqualified outrage in response to this call by the Lagos hereditary monarch to murder the Igbo, based on the latter’s exercise of their choice in a seemingly democratic contest. Phone calls of protest should be made or emails sent at once to one’s nearest Nigeria consulate/embassy. Nigerian genocidist officials/operatives who not too unroutinely call openly for the mass murder of Igbo people over the decades have been so emboldened in their stock-in-trade especially since Nigeria secured unflinching backing from the British government at the onset of the Igbo genocide in 1966. To underscore the point, we should recall that it was to British Prime Minister Harold Wilson that Nigeria’s genocidist trooper Olusegun Obasanjo turned to in June 1969 to “sort out” the world-wide revulsion that followed Obasanjo’s orders to his air force to shoot down over south Biafra the International Committee of the Red Cross DC-7, clearly marked, relief-carrying aircraft to the encircled, blockaded and bombarded Igbo, resulting in the catastrophic loss of the plane’s 3-person crew (Olusegun Obasanjo, My Command, Ibadan and London: Heinemann, 1980: 165).

(Olusegun Obasanjo)

FINALLY, back to the Igbo in Lagos and genocidist Akiolu... Millions of Igbo live in Lagos. Igbo experience in Nigeria since the 1945 Igbo pogrom in Jos (central region) has been that calls for the “murder of Igbo” by officials (religious, monarchial, other state operatives) have usually been carried out with almost clinical precision in orchestrated mass actions. Akiolu’s reference to the Lagos lagoon is therefore ominous because this is the bight where hundreds of Igbo slaughtered during phase-I of the Igbo genocide, especially after 29 July 1966, were dumped by their assailants. 

Pointedly, Akiolu’s murder-proclamation comes in the wake of the expulsions of Igbo citizens from Lagos in recent years by Raji Fashola, the region’s head of regime, another lawyer, indeed a senior advocate of the Nigerian bar. 

AS I INDICATED during the Fashola expulsion (“Igbo deportation from Lagos” – see link below), the Igbo must leave Lagos and relocate to Biafra. No agency in Lagos nor in the wider Nigeria virulent political space can or is willing to safeguard Igbo security and wellbeing: (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Igbo deportation from Lagos”,
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/igbo-deportation-from-lagos_2.html)

(Andrew Hill Septet, “Premonition” [personnel: Hill, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, bass clarinet; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Renaud Simmons, conga, percussion; Nadi Qamar, percussion, African drums, thumb piano; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 8 October 1965])

*****Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019) and co-author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa (2018)

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

57th anniversary of French nuclear bomb “test” in Sahara Desert

(27 December 1960, explodes bomb at Regganne, west Algeria)

IN FLAGRANT disregard for the lives of African peoples and their environment and those of future generations, France carries out an atomic bomb “test” over the Sahara Desert, the third in the year (earlier explosions had been conducted in February and April) – exploded bomb has plutonium with yield of 10,000-14,000 TNT, equivalent to one-half power of atomic bomb the United States air force dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, 6 August 1945; instructively, at no occasion during this entire grim epoch does the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, which has authorised these bomb blasts, consider carrying out the “tests” in any provinces or regions of France or indeed Europe

(Charles de Gaulle: ... his presidency couldn’t consider carrying out these bomb “tests” anywhere in France...)

(Emmanuel Macron: ... What is current French president’s position on these “tests”)

(Andrew Hill Septet, “Premonition” [personnel: Hill, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, bass clarinet; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Renaud Simmons, conga, percussion; Nadi Qamar, percussion, African drums, thumb piano; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 8 October 1965])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

56th anniversary of French nuclear bomb “test” in Sahara Desert

(27 December 1960, explodes bomb at Regganne, west Algeria)

IN FLAGRANT disregard for the lives of African peoples and their environment and those of future generations, France carries out an atomic bomb “test” over the Sahara Desert, the third in the year (earlier explosions had been conducted in February and April) – exploded bomb has plutonium with yield of 10,000-14,000 TNT, equivalent to one-half power of atomic bomb the United States air force dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, 6 August 1945; instructively, at no occasion during this entire grim epoch does the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, which has authorised these bomb blasts, consider carrying out the “tests” in any provinces or regions of France or indeed Europe

(Charles de Gaulle: ... his presidency couldn’t consider carrying out these bomb “tests” anywhere in France...)

(Andrew Hill Septet, “Premonition” [personnel: Hill, piano; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; John Gilmore, bass clarinet; Richard Davis, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; Renaud Simmons, conga, percussion; Nadi Qamar, percussion, African drums, thumb piano; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 8 October 1965])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe