Amnesty International’s report on the Igbo genocide shatters this orchestrated silence

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Denial is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide … try to cover up the evidence … They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern … with impunity … unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts...” (Gregory Stanton, president, Genocide Watch; professor in genocide studies and prevention, George Mason University, Virginia)

ONE OF THE cruellest tragedies of the aftermath of 400 years of pan-Europe’s enslavement, conquest, unparallelled expropriation and occupation of the African World is that concocted pedestal of “moral authority” that successive West/Euro-American leaders have erected and from which they lecture African presumed leaderships in “post”-(European)conquest Berlin-states and estates on how the latter treat their populations.

The West leaders are expressly contemptuous of these African “leaderships”, understandably, because most have been created or implanted invariably on the African scene by the extant imperium. The West is therefore untiring as it ritualistically lectures its stretch of puppets across Africa: 

1. “Respect the human rights of your people”

2. “Stop murdering your people…”

3. “You are corrupt, very corrupt! You steal your people’s money – stop it! You must be transparent and accountable!”

4. “Institute a bill of rights, respect the rule of law”

5. “Run free and fair elections! Don’t turn your presidency into a life-long estate as we really don’t want you to deal with our own next generation of leaders, our children’s”…

Hotchpotch

Even then, no truly focussed democrat should be disoriented by this astonishing irony emanating from the West. African “leaderships”, quite often in league with some of their West’s hypocritical traducers, have murdered 15 million Africans across the continent in the past 50 years in appalling spates of genocide, beginning with the Igbo genocide on 29 May 1966, and in other wars in virtually every region of Africa. Even if the devil, itself, were to lecture African “leaderships” to stop murdering their own peoples and, in the process, help prevent just one more African from being annihilated by their depraved overlords, that would be readily welcome. African populations are under siege by brutal regimes replete across Africa especially the genocidist hotchpotch in Nigeria and the Sudan. The peoples here and elsewhere require unremitting support for their right to safeguard their lives and progress from wherever in the world. Not less.

There is of course nothing in these apparent pro-African freedom/liberatory sentiments by West leaders, referred to above, to suggest that the latter really care about the African humanity they and forebears have spent nearly half of a millennium to obliterate/dehumanise nor do they indeed look forward to the day when they will deal with a democratic Africa where its leaderships are accountable to their own, their home publics. To the contrary, if that were to occur, the West would cease to exercise the stranglehold it currently has on Africa. No responsive leadership ever plays the overseer role which these African regimes engage in.

Crucially, to the score, the West’s singular mission in castigating its African “leaderships” is to continue desperately to cover the tracks of its heinous historical crimes across Africa, to expunge these, if possible, from any form of reckoning and eventual systemised censure. But even in the pursuit of this venture, the West is often highly selective on who or what “leaderships” they wish to focus on – such decisions ultimately rest on the individual West’s state-interest(s) at the time, thus enabling it, for instance, to ignore some “misdeeds” from a client-leadership who is considered “our son of a b****” as Franklin D Roosevelt, a former US president, would colourfully describe it.

Vile genocidist operative

Very recently in London, England, in May 2016, the world witnessed in full public display a classic of this selective choice tinkering of some “misdemeanour” from one of its African “leaderships” which a West leader had wished to focus on for the occasion of a state banquet for the 90th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, in March 2015, in collaboration with US President Obama, had imposed Muhammadu Buhari, the vile genocidist operative during the Igbo genocide, as new head of regime in Nigeria, dramatically addressed the Queen in the company of some other influential guests: “[Your Majesty], We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain … Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world…”

Noticeably, during this entire apparent puppet show, Cameron didn’t mention the gravest attribute in the grim Buhari portfolio spectrum which was key in the former’s joint decision with Obama to install the genocidist operative in power in Nigeria – namely, to continue to wage the genocide against Igbo people, begun 50 years ago. Buhari was pleased with his puppet “massa” for his deft choice from the available range of cv data and the “boy” obliged, accordingly, by acknowledging, also publicly whilst walking next to Patricia Scotland, secretary-general of the Commonwealth, to a reception, that his “country is [indeed] corrupt”.

Buhari has been known to the British for 50 years – since the outbreak of the May 1966 Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, launched by its client state Nigeria with firm British military, diplomatic and political support. Harold Wilson, the British prime minister then, personally supervised and coordinated the prosecution of the genocide from his London’s No 10 Downing Street residence. During phase-III of the genocide, the invasion of Biafra, July 1967-January 1970, Buhari was commander of a genocidist brigade in north and northcentral Biafra, slaughtering Igbo children, women and men to the hilt. 3.1 million Igbo or 25 per cent of their population were murdered during the 44 months of phases I-III which ended in January 1970. Since his March 2015 Cameron-Obama imposition, Buhari has duly resumed his Igbo slaughtering mission. In response, predictably, both the Cameron administration and its successor Theresa May’s, and the Obama government have all remained deafeningly silent over this catastrophe.

The Amnesty International’s courage in publishing two major reports on this ongoing genocide, one in June 2016 
(https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/06/nigeria-killing-of-unarmed-pro-biafra-supporters-by-military-must-be-urgently-investigated/, accessed 10 June 2016) and the second just recently, 24 November 2016
(https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/peaceful-pro-biafra-activists-killed-in-chilling-crackdown/, accessed 23 November 2016), cannot be commended enough. These reports, particularly the latest, shatter an orchestrated silence initiated at the highest levels of government in both Britain and the US to attempt to shield these states’ active involvement in the crime of genocide against Igbo people, this crime against humanity.

Breakthrough

Nigeria and its backers must now know that no force can stop the determined will of a people. No other African peoples have suffered such an extensive and gruesome genocide and incalculable impoverishment in a century as the Igbo. Yet the Igbo have written a stunning essay in the past 50 years on human survival and resilience, a beacon of the resilient spirit of human overcoming of the most desperate, unutterably brutish forces in Nigeria. Genocide, it should be reiterated, is a crime against humanity. There is therefore no statute of limitations in international law for the apprehension and punishment of those responsible for this crime. Igbo seek and will achieve justice for the perpetration of this crime.

The Igbo are primed to restore their sovereignty in their Biafran homeland. This will be one of the most outstanding breakthroughs of the freedom movement of the 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

Year 50 – Biafra before Brexit

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Denial is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide … try to cover up the evidence … They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern … with impunity … unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts...” (Gregory Stanton, president, Genocide Watch; professor in genocide studies and prevention, George Mason University, Virginia)

On 6 July 1967, Nigeria expands the territorial range of its execution of the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, which it launched 14 months earlier, 29 May 1966, murdering 100,000 Igbo people. Now, it embarks on a land, air  and sea-borne invasion of Biafra, with the British government, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, playing a key if not central role in the campaign (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html).  Indeed without British support, pointedly if not ironically 50 years before Brexit, the Igbo genocide, this crime against humanity, would probably not have occurred. This phase-III of the genocide stretches for 30 months during which 3 million Igbo are murdered.

Definitive mission

Nigeria is supported militarily, diplomatically and politically in its invasion by a string of allies, notably Britain,  as already stated, Egypt, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. Right from the outset, genocidist Nigeria establishes on the ground and employs rape and abduction of Igbo girls and women and the public execution of Igbo boys and men as pivotal instruments in waging the campaign. Its ghoulish anthem of the genocide, broadcast uninterruptedly on state-owned Kaduna radio (shortwave transmission) and television and with editorial comments on the theme, regularly published in both state-owned New Nigerian (daily) newspaper and (Hausa) weekly Gaskiya Ta fi Kwabo during the period, has these lyrics in Hausa:

Mu je mu kashe nyamiri
Mu kashe maza su da yan maza su
Mu chi mata su da yan mata su
Mu kwashe kaya su 
(English translation: Let’s go murder the damned Igbo/Murder their men and boys/Rape their wives and daughters/Cart off their property)

This genocidist intent, particularly its empirically earmarked specifics, is unequivocally explicit and its overarching method sets the precedent of the savagery and barbarity that are the hallmarks of the genocide and subsequent genocides in Africa as Rwanda (1994), Darfur/Nuba Mountains/Blue Nile/South Kordofan (the Sudan, variously since 2004), and Democratic Republic of the Congo (since the late 1990s) attest.

At the apogee of the Igbo genocide, beginning from the second-half of 1968 when thousands of Igbo children and older citizens die daily from starvation, one of the genocidist’s publicly-stated “weapons” in the prosecution of the crime as articulated by chief “theorist” Obafemi Awolowo himself, British Prime Minister Wilson insists, most unconscionably, when he informs Clyde Ferguson (United States state department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, Harold Wilson, “would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” the Nigerian génocidaires 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]: 122). Nigeria in fact ends up murdering 3 million Igbo – 2 and one-half million more than Wilson’s grim 500,000 Igbo-death wish. Furthermore, it is indeed a telling irony, given British support for Nigeria and the génocidaires’ strategy of rape and abduction of Igbo womanhood in Biafra, that it is in London, in June 2014, forty-seven years later, that the first international conference on “rape and sexual violence” in war, with emphasis on Africa (and particular focus on the Democratic Republic of the Congo), is hosted by none other than the British government in which foreign secretary of state William Hague describes rape as “‘one of the great mass crimes’ of modern times” (BBC News, 10 June 2014).

In Biafra, beginning 6 July 1967, every Igbo town or village overrun by the Nigerian génocidaires becomes  a gruesome milestone in an inexorable march of rape, death, and destruction: Obollo Afo ... Obollo Eke ... Enuugwu-Ezike ... Opi ... Ukehe … Nkalagu ... Owgwu ... Abakaleke … Eha Amuufu ... Nsukka ... Enuugwu ... Agbaani ... Asaba ... Ogwashi-Ukwu ... Isele-Ukwu ... Onicha-Ugbo …Agbo …Umunede ... Onicha ... Nkpo …Oka ... Aba ... Udi ... Ehuugbo ...  Ehuugbo Road ... Okigwe ... Umuahia ... Owere ...Abagana ... Igwe Ocha ... Ahaoda ... Obiigbo ... Azumini ... Umu Ubani/Bonny ... Igwe Nga/Opobo ... Ugwuta ... Amasiri ... Akaeze ... Uzuakoli ... 

Clearly invoking Nazi-style “search through population-round off-isolate-and-destroy”-tactics in overrun non-Igbo towns and cities such as Calabar, Oron, Ikot Ekpene, Uyo, Ogoja, Obubara, Obudu, Nkarasi and Eket, the genocidists meticulously profile Igbo nationals. Thousands of such profiled Igbo are shot at sight or marched off and later executed at city limits, forest firing-range sites, river banks, or at specifically dedicated genocidist-occupied barrack venues…

Incubation & manifestation

As contemporary Nigeria demonstrates, most graphically, as these lines are written, grounded genocidist advocates/“theorists”/operatives especially Obafemi Awolowo, Tony Enaharo, Hassan Katsina, Alison Ayida, Olusegun Obasanjo, Gbadomosi King, Umaru Dikko, Benjamin Adekunle, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Murtala Muhammed, Yakubu Danjuma, Ibrahim Haruna and Ibrahim Taiwo are perhaps just coming to terms with the realisation that their thoughts and deeds have incubated within their very own and become hauntingly cyclical across generations – DNA signature. This is precisely why survivors from these purveyors of state-directed mass slaughter, such as the Igbo, for example, must keep well away from the latter’s tent. Boko Haram insurgents now ravaging swathes of territory across the north, northeast and northcentral and elsewhere in Nigeria are remarching along the paths first trodden by their parents/grandparents/greatgrandparents/Nigeriãna-génocidaires, beginning 29 May 1966, 50 years ago to the day.

As for Nigeria’s genocide-prosecuting ally Britain, again 50 years to the day, it has, alas, caught up with Biafra, via Brexit, to engage, critically, with exercising its right to self-determination – in this instance,  to determine whether or not it wishes to be part of the supranational state called the European Union. Unlike the Biafrans, who, 50 years ago, exercised this same right but in staggeringly existential circumstances, Britain hasn’t sought Brexit from the European Union because it has been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by the latter. On the contrary. Similarly, the 5 million constituent Scottish people in Britain do not, 50 years after Biafra, currently seek to exercise their right to self-determination from Britain because they have been threatened or subjected to the crime of genocide by Britain. Not at all. 

Just as the Biafrans, 50 years ago, the underlying awareness by the British, as a whole, collectively, or the Scots, separately, is that this right to self-determination is inalienable and its exercise by any people across the world is not dependent  on prevailing circumstance(s).

(Andrew Hill Sextet, “Dedication” [personnel: Hill, piano; Kenny Dorham, trumpet; Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet; Joe Henderson, tenor saxophone; Richard Davis, bass; Tony Williams, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 21 March 1964])

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

When Nigerian genocidists waged war on the sun

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

“Denial is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide … try to cover up the evidence … They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern … with impunity … unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts...” (Gregory Stanton, president, Genocide Watch; professor in genocide studies and prevention, George Mason University, Virginia)

Abolish the sun!

For a genocidist state, the pressing task after perpetrating its heinous crime couldn’t be more predictable: memory erasure of the crime scene at the targeted nation is pursued aggressively and unrelentingly. On the morrow of the conclusion of its execution of the third phase of the Igbo genocide in January 1970, Nigeria wheeled out pretentious cartographers to embark on erasing the illustrious name Biafra from all maps and records that it could lay its hand on! During its meetings, the genocidist junta in power banned the words “sun”, “sunlight”, “sunshine”, “sundown”, “sunflower”, “sunrise” or any other word-derivatives from the great sun star that unmistakably reference the inveterate Land of the Rising Sun. This task and symbolism of sun-banning and sun-bashing, some inter-stellar assault, were of course bizarre if not daft as the junta itself was to discover much sooner than later – and from a most unlikely source indeed… 

Poland

At the time, a British military advisor to the junta, who was out dining with a senior member of the cabal in Lagos, unwittingly compared Igbo national consciousness and tenacity, displayed brazenly during their defence against the genocide, with that of the Poles. The advisor, who had studied modern history at university and was a great admirer of the exceptional endurance of Polish people in history, stated that the Igbo had demonstrated similar courage in the latter’s defence of Biafra and that the “rebirth of Biafra is a distinct possibility in my lifetime” – this was unlike the 123 (one hundred and twenty-three) years it took the Polish state to re-appear in history after its disappearance from the world map! The advisor was then in his early 30s and the obvious implications of his Igbo-Polish analysis were not lost on his host. The junta member co-diner was understandably most outraged by the advisor’s crass insensitivity on the subject which he readily shared with his camarilla colleagues. Predictably, the immediate consequence of the hapless advisor’s impudence was an early recall home to Britain. 

Biafra

There were other bouts of farcical treats on display in Nigeria during the period aimed at erasing the memory of the Igbo genocide. Junta and other state publications and those of their sympathisers would print the name Biafra, a proper noun, a name on ancient world maps centuries before the British conqueror-regime in west Africa concocted “Nigeria” at the turn of the 19th century, with a lower case “b” or box the name in quotes or even invert the “b” to read “p” – such was the intensity of the schizophrenia that wracked the minds of the members of the cabal over the all-important subject of the historic imprint of Igbo resistance and survival. Finally, Nigeria abolished the teaching of history in its schools subsequently in the desperate hope that its Igbo genocide-denial stratagem was complete. 

3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s population were murdered in the genocide between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970 by Nigeria and its allies, principally Britain. This is the foundational and most gruesome genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. As the slaughter of the Igbo intensified, particularly in the catastrophic months of 1968-1969, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson unabashedly informed Clyde Ferguson of the United States state department 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).  As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo demonstrates, Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian subalterns perform far in excess of the prime minister’s grim target.

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

Business-as-usual
Despite the catastrophic stretch of slaughter in 44 months, it was business-as-usual, or so it appeared, for the genocidists after the conclusion of phase-III of the murder on 12 January 1970. Lest we forget, the new phase was pursued with utmost vengeance, with the added highly prized fiscal and capital assets sequestrated by the genocidists – namely, the pillaging of the multibillion(US)dollar-Igbo economy at home and those located in Nigeria, particularly in the Lagos/greater Lagos industrial-commercial region. Many operatives who worked as advisors, at varying layers of the genocidist command and control infrastructure, went to, or returned to universities and colleges as professors and researchers, some became university administrators, bureaucrats, media editors and executives, company chief executives and directors, ministers of state, ministers of religion, businesspeople; many of the commanders and commandants became “generals” and “admirals” and “marshals”, and state legislators, administrators and the like; some even sought the highest office of state – head of regime (Obafemi Awolowo, variously, without success; Olusegun Obasanjo, three times successful; Muhammadu Buhari, twice successful; Murtala Muhammed, once successful; Ibrahim Babangida, once successful; Sanni Abacha, once successful; Abdulsalami Abubakar, once successful).

(O Obusonjo: ... from genocidist commanding in south Biafra to head of Nigeria regime for 11 years)

Awolowoist/Awolowoid

The Awolowoists and Awolowoids (supporters of Obafemi Awolowo – junta deputy chair, genocidist “theorist”, “starvation-weapon” strategist, head of finance ministry) on the junta even toyed with the idea of abolishing money altogether in the economy of the soon occupied-land of the resourceful and enterprising Igbo. They reasoned that this would deliver the “final solution” that had eluded them during the “encirclement, siege, pounding and withering away”-strategy of the previous 44 months… They ended up with the “compromise” pittance of £20.00 sterling (twenty pounds sterling only) per the surviving male-head of the Igbo family – a derisory sum, which, they reckoned, stood no chance of averting the catastrophe of social implosion they envisaged would occur in Igboland subsequently. We mustn’t fail to note that the £20.00-handout excluded the hundreds of thousands of Igbo families whose “male-heads” had been murdered during the genocide… Dreadfully, the accent placed by Nigeria on this phase-IV of the genocide, starting from 13 January 1970, was the economic strangulation of the 9 million Igbo survivors…

(Obafemi Awolowo: £20.00 sterling dole-of-vengeance per surviving Igbo family male-head...)

Survival

Igbo survival from the genocide is arguably the most extraordinary feature for celebration in an otherwise depressing and devastating age of pestilence in Africa of the past 49 years. Few people believed that the Igbo would survive their ordeal, especially from September 1968 when 8-10,000 Igbo, mostly children and older people, died each day as the overall brutish conditions imposed by the genocidist siege and bombardment deteriorated calamitously. 

The Igbo are probably the only people in the world who were convinced that they would survive. And when they did, the aftermath was electrifying. In spontaneous celebration, the Igbo prefaced their exchange of greetings with each other, for quite a while, with the exaltation, “Happy Survival”! 

Igbo survival, at the end, does represent the stunning triumph of the human spirit over the savage forces unleashed by Nigeria and its allies that had tried determinably, for four years, to destroy it.

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Sun ship” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Impulse!, New York, US, 26 August 1965])

(John Coltrane Duo, “Jupiter” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone, bells; Rashied Ali, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliff, NJ, US, 22 February 1967])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Longest genocide – Since 29 May 1966

“Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide …try to cover up the evidence … They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims…” – Gregory Stanton, president, Genocide Watch; professor in genocide studies and prevention, George Mason University, Virginia, US

Today, Wednesday 29 May 2013, is the 47th anniversary of the beginning of the Igbo genocide. Starting from that fateful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 and through the course of 44 months of indescribable barbarity and carnage not seen in Africa since the German-led genocide against the Herero people of Namibia in the early 1900s, the composite institutions of the Nigeria state, civilian and military, murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population. The Igbo genocide is the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa. It is still continuing. It is the longest, the most expansive, and the most gruesomely-sustained genocide of the contemporary era. This genocide inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence.

Yakubu Gowon headed the junta that executed the genocide and Obafemi Awolowo, a lawyer, was his deputy, effectively the prime minister, the genocidist “chief theorist” for the campaign and head of the all-powerful finance ministry. Awolowo also principally initiated and programmed phase-IV of the genocide aimed, strategically, to dismantle/degrade the Igbo economy in perpetuity. The Igbo economy, pre-genocide, was Africa’s most dynamic and resourceful.

Today’s commemoration will, as in the past, be a day of meditation and remembrance in every Igbo household in Igboland and the Igbo diaspora in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world for the 3.1 million murdered, gratitude and thanksgiving for those who survived, and the collective Igbo rededication to unrelentingly tell the story of the genocide to the world at large (expressively and exhaustively, covering each and every contour of its four discernible phases: 29 May 1966-29 October 1966, 30 October 1966-5 July 1967, 6 July 1967-12 January 1970, 13 January 1970-Present Day) and, finally, strive to achieve the urgent goal of the restoration of Igbo sovereignty.

These latter two Igbo endeavours have undergone a quantum leap since September 2012, thanks to the publication of the incomparable, There was a Country. The book has opened up the continent of possibilities that has indeed channelled the Igbo march to freedom to a steadier, assured victory – much sooner than most keen observers of this process of liberation would have contemplated this time last year. This is yet another priceless gift, as always, from the illustrious Chinua Achebe, the Father of African Literature himself, to his people. There was a Country is a resolute reminder to an oft-complacent world of the Igbo genocide and the incredible survival of Igbo people. Not many people in the world thought that the Igbo would survive, such was the savagery of the onslaught that they were subjected to by Nigeria and its allies. It is precisely this dual-track mission of There was a Country that has been most troubling to those fanged assailants of Achebe’s memoirs who, since, have been thrown into utter disarray.  Any reminder of the Igbo genocide and, particularly, the Igbo survival therefrom, riles the sensibilities of assailants whose life’s quest is to continue to dart around the crumbling edifice of a spurious sage, more demonstrably a genocidist “chief theorist” who insensately advocated and co-supervised the murder of 3.1 million children, women and men. That any human being would wish to be associated with the memory of such a vicious personage in history must be one of the most troubling cases of the human condition to be visited and revisited for analyses for quite a while…
 

We mustn’t ever fail to state and re-state that the Igbo could not have survived the genocide if they still remained Nigerian. They rightly chose the former course of their fate and not the latter which they cast adrift. For the Igbo, the renouncement of Nigerian citizenship on that horrific Sunday morning, 29 May 1966, is the permanent Igbo indictment of a state that had risen thunderously to murder one of its constituent peoples. Consequently, Nigeria collapsed as a state with few prospects for the future as illustrated most cogently and graphically today – 47 years to the day. Despite the four murderous years of siege unprecedented in recent African history, the Igbo demonstrated a far greater creative drive towards constructing an advanced civilisation in Biafra than what Nigeria has all but wished it could achieve in the past four decades of frightening and pitiable hopelessness. Surely, Nigeria couldn’t, cannot recover from committing this heinous crime – this crime against humanity. This is its epitaph.

Igbo will never forget. Happy Survival! Land of the Rising Sun. 



Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

Ozoemena, Never again

“Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide …try to cover up the evidence … They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims…” – Gregory Stanton, president, Genocide Watch; professor in genocide studies and prevention, George Mason University, Virginia, US

Today, Sunday 27 January 2013, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is dedicated by the United Nations as a worldwide memoriam for the six million Jews murdered by Nazi Germany during the course of the Second World War. Today also marks the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of most notorious Nazi concentration camps in its occupied Poland where the Jewish genocide was perpetrated in addition to camps elsewhere in east and central Europe.

On 29 May 1966, just about six months to the day after the world commemorated the 21st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and made the customary solemn declaration of “Never Again”, Hausa-Fulani emirs, muslim clerics and intellectuals, military officers, politicians and other public figures in Nigeria defiled that season of reflection, commiseration and hope. They planned and executed the first phase of the Igbo genocide, the foundational and most expansive genocide in post-(European)conquest Africa. Apparently emboldened by the scant criticism of this crime from across Africa and the rest of the world, including, particularly, the United Nations, the Nigerians expanded the territorial range of their genocidal campaign on the Igbo by attacking Biafra, Igboland, in July 1967. A band of intellectuals from west Nigeria led by Obafemi Awolowo, a lawyer, provided the genocide-perpetration with its presumed “theoretical” cover. Awolowo himself doubled as chief genocidist “theorist” and head of the finance ministry and vice-chair of the waging junta. 3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of this nation’s total population were slaughtered during the 44-month duration of the genocide.

Age of pestilence

The Igbo genocide inaugurated Africa’s prevailing age of pestilence. It is the launch pad for the haunting killing fields that have expanded almost inexorably across the African geographical landscape since. During the period, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in the ever-expanding genocidal killing fields of the continent in Rwanda (1994), Zaïre/Democratic Republic of the Congo (variously, since the late 1990s), Darfur – west of the Sudan – (since 2004), Abyei – south of the Sudan – (ongoing) and Nuba Mountains/south Kordofan – south of the Sudan – (ongoing) and in other killings in Liberia, Ethiopia, Congo Republic, Somalia, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau, Côte d’Ivoire, Chad, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Kenya, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mali.

The lives of these additional 12 million Africans would probably have been spared if Africa and the world had worked robustly to prevent the genocide of the Igbo. The United Nations could have stopped this genocide; the United Nations should have stopped this genocide instead of protecting the interests of the Nigeria state, the very perpetrator of the crime. In the wake of the Jewish genocide, Africa was, with hindsight, most cruelly unlucky to have been the testing ground for the presumed global community’s resolve to fight genocide subsequently, particularly after the 1948 historic United Nations declaration on this crime against humanity.

The Igbo genocide is one of the most comprehensively documented crimes against humanity. Nonetheless, Igbo intellectuals must endeavour, assiduously, to continue to inform the entire world of the nature and extent of the genocide, examining, especially, the variegated contours of the expansive trail of this crime, the parameters and strictures of the monstrosity of denialism of the crime especially by some clusters of the core perpetrators of the crime in Nigeria and their collaborators abroad including some in academia and media, and the debilitating and oppressive burden of 43 years of Nigeria’s occupation of Igboland.