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(Harold Wilson:“would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe BRITISH SUPPORT FOR the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-Present Day, is driven principally by one factor: to “punish” Igbo people for playing the vanguard role in the mid 1930s-October 1960 movement to terminate 100 years of Britain’s conquest and occupation of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa that it calls Nigeria. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adamant: “[I] 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 & New York: Quartet Books, 1977, p. 122). HAROLD WILSON probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian co-genocidist league of slaughters on the ground in SWC Africa, 3140 miles away from Britain, perform far in excess of their “massa”’s grim target by murdering 3.1 million Igbo instead – an outcome coldly recounted indeed in Wilson’sownmemoirs where he notes that the Nigerian génocidaires, duly led by Hausa-Fulani/islamists trenchantly opposed to the mid 1930s-1960 African peoples’ restoration-of-independence goal and therefore equipped zealously by Britain, expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative mission 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, emphasis added).
(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965])
(Harold Wilson:“would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took...”)
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe BRITISH SUPPORT FOR the perpetration of the Igbo genocide, this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, 29 May 1966-Present Day,
is driven principally by one factor: to “punish” Igbo people for playing the
vanguard role in the mid 1930s-October 1960 to terminate 100 years of Britain’s conquest and occupation of the constellation of states and peoples of this southwestcentral region of Africa that it calls Nigeria. At the apogee of the genocide, 1968/1969,
British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is adamant: “[I] 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, 1977: 122).
Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having
his Nigerian genocidist subalterns on the ground in SWC Africa,
3140 miles away from Britain, perform
far in excess of their “massa”’s grim
target by murdering 3.1 million Igbo instead – an outcome coldly recounted in
Wilson’sownmemoirs where he
notes that the Nigerian génocidaires, equipped zealously by Britain,
expended more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative
mission 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, 1971: 630, added
emphasis).
(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965])
1. Sean Coughlan, “Smallpox general…”, BBC News, London, Wednesday 18 November 2015, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34802747, accessed 18 November 2015) 2.“FWD: Nomenclature galore… What’s in a name? History… Whose history? Now a jump over the pond from Jesus College, Cambridge to Harvard!”,
FWD: Sean Coughlan, “Harvard abolishes ‘master’
in titles...”, BBC News, London, Thursday 25 February 2016, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35659685, accessed 25 February 2016) See also:
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 murder43 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, murdering38 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, murdering300 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),
murdering8 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, murdering11
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, murdering4 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, murdering29
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), murdering8 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).TheNigerian subalternson
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.
Undoubtedly, 2016 begins on a more optimistic note for
Africa. 2016 will be a year of intense multifaceted peoples’ activities across
Africa to terminate the continent’s genocide-state – particularly Nigeria’s,
its ghastly prototype. The year marks the 50th anniversary of the beginning of
the Igbo genocide when Nigeria and its British principal ally slaughtered 3.1
million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population.
Britain supported the genocide politically,
diplomatically, and militarily because it was riled by the Igbo vanguard role to
terminate 60 years of its conquest and occupation of Nigeria during the course
of thirty years of the restoration-of-independence movement, 1930s-October
1960. Such was the gripping zealousness to “punish” the Igbo for this historic role
that Harold Wilson, the British prime minister directing the genocide from
London, was staggeringly unfazed to go on record 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, 1977: 122).
The Nigerian subalterns on the ground, indolent, toady and vindictively anti-African operatives, handsomely obliged their “massa”, slaughtering
far beyond the grim target of 500,000 Igbo by 12 January 1970. Nowhere else in Africa nor indeed the South World, during the
1950s-1970s, does any of the seemingly departing European occupying-power in a conquered
country effectuate the crime of genocide of a constituent people as a means of
safeguarding its strategic interests subsequently as Britain’s sordid record in
Nigeria shows. The genocide continues unabated since January 1970 with tens of thousands of Igbo murdered across Nigeria but especially in the
north region including those massacred by the Boko Haram terrorists in the past
five years.No other peoples in
Africa have suffered such an extensive and gruesome genocide and incalculable
impoverishment in a century as the Igbo.
The
Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa.
It inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. Africans elsewhere remained
largely silent on the gruesome events in Nigeria but did not foresee the grave consequences
of such indifference. Just as the Nigerian operatives of mass murder
appeared to have got away without censure from the rest of Africa and the world,
other brutal African regimes soon followed in Nigeria’s footpath murdering
those in their countries considered “opponents” or “undesirables”. The haunting
killing fields would subsequently stretch from Biafra to 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 in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, southern Guinea, Ethiopia,
Somalia, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, Burundi and north/northcentral Nigeria. The
12 million murdered in the latter bloodbaths would probably have been saved if
Africans had intervened, robustly, to stop the initial genocide against the
Igbo people.
African-centred
states
Fifty
years and 15 million murders on, Africans finally realise that there cannot be
any meaningful advancement without the dismantling of the genocide-state. This
state is the bane of African existence and progress but a treasure for its
pan-European World creator in perpetuity. Africans on the ground are working
tirelessly for the emergence of extensively decentralised African-created new
states that halt the genocide and ensure full democratic participation and
representation of all constituent peoples. Already, 50 years
since the first murders of the genocide were committed in north Nigeria on 29
May 1966, the Biafrans have written an extraordinary essay on human survival
and fortitude, a beacon of the tenacity of the spirit of human overcoming of
the most desperate, unimaginable brutish forces. Biafraisa realisation, a profound reclamation of that which makes usall human
and part of humanity.
It is
within this context that the current heightened political developments in Biafra
become intelligible. Since Friday 6 November 2015, hundreds of
thousands of peaceful and disciplined Biafrans have turned their cities and
towns and villages into panoramic freedom park marches, unprecedented in
Africa, demanding the restoration of the sovereignty of their beloved Biafra,
currently occupied by Nigeria, and insisting on the release of Nnamdi Kanu, Radio
Biafra freedom broadcaster and leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra,
illegally detained by the Nigeria regime. Biafrans are redefining the dynamics
of the march for freedom in Africa. Biafra will be free.
Referendum This march will be
intensified in 2016 and will have progressive, liberatory consequences across
Africa. The freedom movement should now embark
on organising a binding referendum in which all electorally eligible Biafrans
from its population of 50 million at home and in the diaspora in Nigeria and
elsewhere in the world vote on whether they want to belong to the Biafra state,
or Nigeria. Biafrans and all peoples of goodwill in the world will respect and accept the
outcome of this democratic enterprise.
Sam Rivers Quartet, “Ellipsis” [personnel: Rivers, tenor saxophone; Jaki Byard, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 11 December 1964])
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is specialist on the state and on genocide & wars in Africa in the post-1966 epoch – beginning with the Igbo genocide, 29 May 1966-present day, the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of this nation’s population were murdered by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. Africa and the rest of the world largely stood by and watched as the perpetrators enacted this horror most ruthlessly. The world could have stopped this genocide; the world should have stopped this genocide. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocide in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/DRCongo (variously, since the late 1990s) and Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004) and in other wars in Africa. African peoples have, presently, no other choice but exit/dismantle the extant genocide-state (the bane of their existence & progress) & construct own nation-centred states that serve their interests. He is author of several books & papers on the subject and his new book is entitled The longest genocide – since 29 May 1966 (2019).
