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]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Why Barack Hussein Obama must tell the world why he supported the Igbo genocide

(Barack Hussein Obama: ... supports Igbo genocide ... unconscionable tragedy of a presidency)

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

On 30 March 2016, I published an essay on Barack Hussein Obama entitled “‘African American son’, US foreign policy and Africa: A statement” 
(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-this-piece-is.html). The former US president had just had a wide-ranging interview in The Atlantic magazine on his foreign policy during his two-terms in office, conducted by Jeffery Goldberg and captioned “The Obama Doctrine”. My essay is essentially a response to that entire Obama-Goldberg Atlantic conversation.

Africa, African affairs, African subjects, hardly feature anywhere in this foreign policy review. Barack Hussein Obama only refers to Libya, recalling the outcome of the tripartite US-Britain-France invasion which overthrew the Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, but even here Libya is discussed within the sphere of Middle East/islamist world geopolitical priorities and not Africa’s. Nowhere in the interview, for instance, is the very important subject of France’s routinised military interventionism in the so-called francophonie states of Africa raised. President George W Bush had blocked these French invasions throughout most of his presidency as “punishment” for the 2003 French opposition to the US-led war in Iraq but Barack Hussein Obama reinstated it soon after taking office, enabling the French to resume their invasions of Africa with impunity. Soon, France carried out its most notorious invasion of the era – its attack of Côte d’Ivoire (its 49th invasion of an African state since 1960) and the ousting of its president and the latter’s replacement with a preferred French choice, and the murder of 2300 Africans during the course of the assault. Several business and residential districts of capital Abidjan were destroyed during this French invasion.

Presidential legacy

BUT MOST IMPORTATLY, though, the Atlantic interview did not focus on the very gruesome template that defines the catastrophic legacy of the Barack Hussein Obama presidency – that Barack Hussein Obama, first person of African descent to be elected to the position of president of the United States 233 years after the founding of this republic, supported the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa which has been waged by Britain and its Nigeria client state since 29 May 1966 and continues till this day with all its interlocking virulence, 51 years after.

Barack Hussein Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide was pursued with virtual devotional zealousness. It formally began in March 2015 when he imposed Muhammadu Buhari, one of the vilest Nigerian genocidist operatives during these 50 years of the Igbo genocide, as head of Nigeria regime. This imposition was carried out with then British prime minister David Cameron. Muhammadu Buhari has been a genocidist operative in the Nigeria military – straight ahead from the launch date of the Igbo genocide and during the Nigerian expansive trail of the mass slaughter of Igbo military and civilians alike in north and west Nigeria regions from 29 July 1966-July 1967 to encapsulate phases I-II of the genocide timeframe. During phase-III of the genocide, the invasion of Biafra, July 1967-January 1970, Buhari was commander of a genocidist corps in north and northcentral Biafra, slaughtering to the hilt. As from 13 January 1970, beginning of phase-IV of the genocide, Buhari has adhered rigidly to or overseen the Nigeria regime’s blanket policy of non-development of occupied Biafra, the regime’s aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life in Biafra, and the regime’s exponential expropriation of the rich oil reserves of Biafra. Biafran assets looted by the occupation stand at US$1000 billion. Over time, since 13 January 1970, Buhari has exhibited a calculated, deafening silence over the course of the murder of those tens of thousands of Igbo people across Nigeria but especially in his north Nigeria homeland by regime forces/allied forces including those massacred by the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in the past six years.

SINCE Buhari was installed in power by the Barack Hussein Obama-David Cameron duo, 2000 Igbo across Biafran cities, towns and villages have been murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations. Neither Barack Hussein Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his embassy in Nigeria ever condemned any of these murders. It had been left to the audacious outreach of the London-based Amnesty International to shatter the deafening silence that emanated from the Barack Hussein Obama presidency on this ongoing genocide by publishing widely on the genocide (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 12 May 2017). 

In sharp contrast, we mustn’t forget to note, the Barack Hussein Obama administration issued a robust response on 12 December 2015 when a Buhari regime’s military brigade operating in Zaria, northcentral Nigeria, attacked and murdered several shiite muslim protesters in a procession. The US statement was clearly unambiguous in its outrage: “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”. This same Barack Hussein Obama US-led government wouldn’t, didn’t follow up with similar or any other statements of concern in the entire stretch of genocidist massacres perpetrated by its imposed Buhari client on the Igbo population in Biafra throughout the period.

Why? Why? Why?

Barack Hussein nwa Obama, O gini ka ndiigbo melu gi? Barack Hussein child of Obama, what is your problem with the Igbo of Biafra, southwestcentral Africa? What is it about the historic Igbo heritage of unrelenting resistance against African subjugation for freedom across the Americas during the 400 years – the enslaved plantation estates of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Jamaica, Barbados, St Lucia, Belize, Trinidand & Tobago, Guyana, Surinam, Saint-Domingue, Brazil… – that you must find very anguished? Or, is it the Igbo vanguard role, 1930s-October 1960, in freeing Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation which constitutes your problem with the Igbo? It is the latter that riles the British and for Harold Wilson, prime minister, the Igbo genocide becomes an opportunity to “punish” the Igbo for playing this cardinal role in terminating its occupation in this part of Africa (Harold Wilson had insisted that he “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]).

Barack Hussein Obama, when/how/why did your own anti-Igbo hate originate? Whilst studying in California after the relocation from Hawaii? Whilst studying in New York, Harvard, living in Chicago, campaigning for the US presidency? Whilst, earlier on as a younger person living in Indonesia? When? Why? Why? Why? Barack Hussein Obama must tell the world everything about why he supported the Igbo genocide, this odious trail of Igbo hate...

THE IGBO STUDIES ASSOCIATION had in a conference held at Howard University in April 2012 on “Nigeria and Boko Haram terrorism and its impact on the Igbo population in north Nigeria” noted the overall silence by the Barack Hussein Obama administration over this emergency. Barack Hussein Obama remained unrelentingly adamant, throughout this phase of his presidency, of not designating the islamist Boko Haram, a terrorist organisation despite the latter’s murder of thousands of African peoples, overwhelmingly Igbo, at the time (it wouldn’t be until November 2013 that the US declared Boko Haram “terrorist” because Washington judged the group was “[now] develop[ing] links with other [islamists] such as al-Qaeda … to wage a global jihad”).  This was despite the evidence, from the grounds in Nigeria, that those who supported Boko Haram, including Muhammadu Buhari who Barack Hussein Obama would soon impose as head of the state’s regime, were well known to the Goodluck Jonathan regime in power. Jonathan himself personally made an astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world to this effect: “Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security [services] … Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house”. Despite this Boko Haram terrorist-pressure on Jonathan, Barack Hussein Obama had no sympathies for the plight of this regime whatever. Olusegun Adeniyi in his Against the Run of Play (2017), quotes Jonathan “[that] Obama made it clear [right from the outset] that he wanted a change of government in Nigeria” (allafrica.com, 26 April 2017). Jonathan, an Ijo zoologist, is the first personnage without any connections or roles in the Igbo genocide to occupy the position of head of regime in Nigeria since 29 May 1966.

No US president, since the outbreak of the Igbo genocide in May 1966 during the Lynden Johnson presidency, has unambiguously supported the mission of genocidist Nigeria as Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama has in fact disrupted the fulsome goodwill for the people of Biafra begun by the Richard Nixon presidency (Republican president, “right wing”!) soon after the end of phase-III of the genocide (12 January 1970) (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html) and continued by subsequent presidencies to date, Republican or Democrat, of an enhanced Igbo emigration programme to the US. This accounts for the hundreds of thousands of Igbo Americans presently, 50 years on, many of them in very influential positions in academia, the corporate world, media and information and the state, and their children and grandchildren thriving appreciably...

Unconscionable

IT IS SURELY an unconscionable tragedy of incalculable historical consequences that Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president of the US republic in 233 years of existence was elected in office in November 2008 to end up with a dreadful presidential legacy supporting the Igbo genocide – executed on the ground by Nigeria, an islamist-led state, and its suzerain state Britain. The duo genocidist states have murdered 3.1 million Igbo and tens of thousands more since the launch of the genocide on Sunday 29 May 1966.

(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be” [personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone;  Jimmy Garrison, bass; Ben Riley, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 29 January 1968])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Biafra freedom and our times

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Biafrans must be eternally focussed on their quest to restore their independence and end the ongoing Igbo genocide. I can’t see how this can be achieved otherwise. Their responses to the challenges ahead, even if any of these appears innocuous, will be dictated, primarily, by the strategic architecture of the goal – the restoration of sovereignty. The restoration of Biafra will be one of the defining breakthroughs in human freedom of our age.

(Alice Coltrane Quartet, “Lord, help me to be” [personnel: Coltrane, piano; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone;  Jimmy Garrison, bass; Ben Riley, drums; recorded: Coltrane home studio, Dix Hills, New York, US, 29 January 1968]) 

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe