Twenty-six years later,
beginning on 31 March 1967, Nigeria, very similar to this reviewed Nazi Germany’s
strategy in Leningrad, the Soviet Union (http://www.literaturadeazi.ro/content/siege-leningrad-genocide-starvation, accessed 17 February 2015), embarks on the comprehensive land, naval and aerial blockade
of Biafra in the second phase of the Igbo genocide which it enforces till 12
January 1970 with devastating consequences in this Africa’s most densely populated
region outside the Nile Delta. Nigeria employs starvation as one of its critical
weapons to prosecute the genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest
Africa, formally launched earlier on 29 May 1966 (phase-I). Obafemi Awolowo (lawyer
and senior advocate of the Nigerian bar), Nigeria’s chief genocidist “theorist”,
deputy head of the prosecuting regime in Lagos and head of the powerful finance
ministry publicly states, right from the outset, that starvation of the Igbo is
a “legitimate instrument” of the campaign, a policy voiced openly and variously,
throughout the period, by several other senior regime officials including, especially, Anthony
Enaharo (head of information ministry), Allison Ayida (special regime advisor), and field commanders Benjamin Adekunle and Olusegun Obasanjo.
Adekunleist
Benjamin Adekunle, one of the most notorious of the
genocidist commanders in south Igboland, reminds the world of his regime’s starvation
strategy in an August 1968 press conference which includes foreign correspondents:
“I want to prevent even one I[g]bo having even one piece to eat before their
capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into
the centre of I[g]bo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that
don’t move” (The Economist, London, 24 August
1968). It is also in pursuit of this starvation strategy that Olusegun
Obasanjo, who takes over this sector’s command from Adekunle later in 1968,
orders his air force, in May 1969, to shoot down any Red Cross planes flying in
urgently-needed relief supplies to the millions of surviving but encircled,
blockaded and bombarded Igbo. Within a week of his
infamous order, 5 June 1969, Obasanjo recalls, nostalgically, in his memoirs,
unambiguously titled
My Command (London: Heinemann, 1981),
genocidist air force pilot Gbadomosi King “redeem[s] his promise”, as Obasanjo clinically asserts (Obasanjo, 1981: 79)
– the “promise”: Gbadomosi King shoots down a clearly marked,
incoming relief-bearing International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) DC-7
aircraft near Eket, south
Biafra, with
the loss of its 3-person crew. Obasanjo’s perverse satisfaction over the
aftermath of this crime is fiendish, grotesquely revolting. He writes: “The
effect of [this] singular achievement of the Air Force especially on 3 Marine
Commando Division [name of the death squad Obasanjo, who subsequently becomes
head of Nigeria regime for 11 years,
commands] 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” (79).
Unfazed
The British government under Prime Minister Harold Wilson is
Nigeria’s principal ally in this campaign – militarily, politically,
diplomatically. Britain had since been riled by the Igbo vanguard role, begun
in the 1930s, to terminate its conquest and occupation of Nigeria (one of the
very prized lands of the British conquest of Africa). By supporting the
genocide, Britain seeks to “punish” the Igbo for the latter’s historic role in
the liberation of Nigeria. During
the course of the 1968/69 gruesomely catastrophic apogee of the campaign when thousands
of Igbo are dying daily from starvation, disease and enhanced land and aerial bombardment of survivors
in ever-shrinking territory encapsulated by the siege, Harold Wilson is totally
unfazed when he informs C. Clyde Ferguson, the US state department special
coordinator for relief to Biafra, 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 [London
and New York: Quartet Books, 1977]: 122).
For the record, Wilson’s “a half a million dead Biafrans”
represents 4.2 per cent of the Igbo population at this time; by the time that
this third phase of the genocide comes to an end, 6-9 months after Wilson’s
wish-declaration, 25 per cent of this nation’s population or 3.1 million Igbo
people are murdered by the genocidists. Undoubtedly, the Nigerians have
handsomely obliged Harold Wilson’s wish...
It must be stressed that Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a
half a million dead Biafrans”-wish is not a declaration made by some dictator,
some leader of a loony party, a fascist party or anything of that ilk; on the contrary,
this is a declaration made by an elected politician, a politician in an
advanced western representative democracy, the leader of the British Labour party, one of Europe’s leading social democratic parties. “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if
that was what it took”-declaration is made by the prime minister of Britain;
not the prime minister of some “peripheral”, seemingly inconsequential country
but the 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 barely 23 years earlier. This is a prime minister of a “centre” state and
power (sixth to occupy this exalted position since the end of the war) that
was one of the key countries that worked on the panel that drafted the historic 1948 United Nations “Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide” – in the wake of the 1930s-1940s deplorable perpetration of the Jewish
genocide and other genocides in Europe. 6 million Jews were murdered then by
Nazi Germany. It is to ensure that no human beings are ever subjected to what
the Jews and others went through in central Europe and
elsewhere that this genocide convention is rated as one of the key
international documents of the new age. Britain is
a signatory to the convention. Surely, Harold Wilson’s “[W]ould accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it
took”-declaration cannot fit into the hallowed pages of the UN “Convention on
the prevention of the Crime of Genocide”.
Defoliant
Finally, a senior British foreign office official, who echoes
Harold Wilson’s disposition to the Igbo slaughter, is no less chilling in their
own characterisation of
Britain’s
strategic goal. Describing the British response to the concerted international
humanitarian effort to dispatch urgently needed relief material to the
blockaded and bombarded Igbo, this official notes that the British government
position is designed to “show conspicuous zeal in relief while in fact letting
the little buggers starve out” (Morris: 122). In a courageous and admirable
public admission he makes in 1970, Colonel Robert Scott breaks ranks with his
employer, the British diplomatic mission in Lagos where he works as military
advisor, to acknowledge, gravely, that as the Nigerian genocidists unleash
their Adekunleist campaigns across Igbo cities, towns and
villages, they are the “best defoliant agent known” (Sunday Telegraph, London, 11 January 1970).
(John Coltrane Quartet, “Wise One” [Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin
Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 27 April 1964])
Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe
