The Biafra Story

by Frederick Forsyth

  Nevertheless, the ‘neutrality’ mask almost worked, even with the Biafrans. Many senior people in the Biafran régime wanted to believe in it, even though the evidence reaching their desks told them otherwise. Sir Louis Mbanefo, the Biafran Chiefjustice and senior negotiator at Kampala, later talked for weeks with British Government officials and Lord Shepherd in the hopes that their assurances of neutrality and desire for peace were sincere.

  If the charade almost fooled the Biafrans who were taking a deep interest in the situation, it certainly fooled other governments whose interest, though concerned, was less profound. On 9 September 1968 Mr Richard Nixon, then conducting his Presidential campaign, gave an unwitting indication of the world’s attitude of hesitancy towards facing the Nigeria-Biafra situation head-on. He said:

  Until now efforts to relieve the Biafran people have been thwarted by the desire of the central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional victory and by the fear of the Ibo people that surrender means wholesale atrocities and genocide. But genocide is what is taking place right now – and starvation is the grim reaper. This is not the time to stand on ceremony, or to ‘go through channels’ or to observe the diplomatic niceties. The destruction of an entire people is an immoral objective even in the most moral of wars. It can never be justified; it can never be condoned.

  And yet what the world did throughout 1968 was to stand on ceremony, to try to go through channels, and to observe all the diplomatic niceties. This is not to say that a frank declaration of factional interest by Britain would have brought forward initiatives from other world leaders, or that any such initiatives would inevitably have succeeded in bringing peace. But it is fair to say that Britain’s ‘Hands Off’ warning and her own self-appointed monopoly of the mediator’s role ensured that no such other initiatives ever stood a real chance of getting off the ground.

  The debate in the House of Commons on 27 August is worth a brief description inasmuch as it provided what correspondents the next day described as ‘one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of hostility [against the Government] seen for many years in the Commons’ (Financial Times); ‘a shoddy day’s work’ (Guardian); and ‘fantastic disorder’ (The Times).

  There were two debates that day – one in the Commons and one in the Lords. Both were on Nigeria–Biafra. A few hours after the Earl of Cork and Orrery described the use to which British arms were being put in Nigeria, Mr Thomson placed the British Government squarely in its true role. Referring to the outbreak of the war thirteen months previously, he told the House: ‘Neutrality was not a possible option for Her Majesty’s Government at that time.’*

  What followed was that he and his colleagues made the Nigerian case more devotedly, more passionately, more partially and on occasions more violently than even the Nigerians could have done themselves.

  Mr Thomson started by making it clear that Britain had unequivocally taken sides in the bloodiest local war in decades; that it had adopted this course thirteen months previously. He went on to opine that the Lagos Government were prepared to be accommodating on the constitutional form through which unity was to be interpreted, and even mentioned confederation. (This was never confirmed by Lagos, who indeed have maintained just the contrary.) But throughout Mr Thomson’s description to the House of the exchanges between the regimes of Gowon and Ojukwu which preceded the war, he never once mentioned that Colonel Ojukwu had consistently pressed for confederation as a way of preserving unity without recourse to war.

  If there were any doubts left in Members’ minds about the total partisanship of the British Government they were dispelled by the Minister of State, Mr William Whitlock. Reading word by word from his notes prepared in the Commonwealth Office by a civil servant, this Minister gave what witnesses later described as the most biased version of a foreign government’s propaganda output that the Commons had ever heard.

  He launched into a slashing attack on Biafra, denigrated its case, and picked as his especial target its Overseas Press Service and the small Geneva-based firm of public relations agents who disseminate the Biafran news to the international Press. He accused Members who believed anything from Biafra of being gullible. By some freak of reasoning he assured the House that the Nigerian final offensive against the Ibo heartland, which had been personally announced by General Gowon on British television screens the night before, was not, despite what Gowon had said, the final push, but the continuing preparations for a final push.

  He followed this by reading from his notes almost verbatim most of the Nigerian war propaganda claims, which had long since been proved by independent investigation to be misleading or totally untrue.

  Whitlock’s job was to ‘talk out’ the last thirty-two minutes of the debate so that the House could rise at ten p.m. without a vote. The rules of the debate had been agreed the previous day. But as the true position of the Government became clearer and clearer to an at first bemused and later outraged House, pandemonium broke loose. Nineteen times Whitlock was interrupted by Members who wished to express their indignation. Dame Joan Vickers, not normally given to outbursts, interjected: ‘In his opening remarks the Secretary of State [Thomson] said that the British Government would be neutral. Does the Honourable Gentleman think that his speech is following the lead given by his Right Honourable friend?’*

  Whitlock put the matter straight. He reminded Dame Joan that Mr Thomson had said the Government in this situation could not be neutral. With that he carried on.

  By this time the House wanted a chance to vote. It was too late. It was no use Sir Douglas Glover protesting that when the Members had agreed the previous day not to have a vote they had no idea of the line of argument the Government would take. The debate was talked out and while the estimated death rate in Biafra continued at between 6,000 and 10,000 a day the Members went home to resume their holidays. Ironically the issue that occasioned the recall of Parliament from summer recess was not Biafra but the Soviet move into Czechoslovakia, an aggression in which less than one hundred people died.

  After 27 August the position became clearer. The mask was off and the lines were drawn. For the partisans of Nigeria, inside and outside Whitehall, the rein of pretence could be discarded. Not dissimulation but justification was the order of the day. The pro-Gowon campaign hotted up. Leaders of opinion in and out of Parliament were taken aside in bars and clubs, and carefully primed with the weary arguments of impending balkanization of Africa, the absolute necessity of preserving not only Nigeria but Gowon’s Nigeria, the latent evil of the scheming Ibo and the personal frightfulness of Colonel Ojukwu.

  Correspondents attending the daily briefing at the Commonwealth Office were primed with ‘authoritative’ reports of massive French aid moving towards Biafra from Gabon, which obviously made more guns, bullets and Saladins from Britain a necessity. The latent anti-French or at least anti-de Gaulle sentiment in some sections of the Press, the Conservative Right and the Labour Left were vigorously titillated.

  Back in the House of Commons on 22 October Mr Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary now also in charge of the Commonwealth since the merger of the two departments, was once again blaming Colonel Ojukwu for the impending death of his own people, ‘confirming’ that no genocide had ever taken place and insisting that Britain must continue to supply arms.*

  A vigorous campaign at all levels was launched to discredit not only Biafran propaganda, but even reports from Red Cross and Press sources about the death toll through starvation, the killing of civilians by the Nigerian army and the fate of the Biafrans in the event of their being conquered.

  A thorough study of this campaign rings a sinister bell in the minds of those who remember the small but noisy caucus of rather creepy gentlemen who in 1938 took it upon themselves to play devil’s advocate for Nazi Germany, partly by seeking to persuade their listeners that any talk of German ill-treatment of the Jews was motivated propaganda that could safely be discounted. The tactics evolved, the arguments put forward, the bland
assumption of congenital bias in anyone who claimed to have seen with their own eyes what was going on, and the almost personal fervour brought to the vilification of the best-informed strike a note of remarkable similarity in the two instances.

  Not only are the arguments rather similar but so are the sources and those who permit themselves to become sources by passing on the message. In the main they are either rather stupid parliamentarians and other men in public life who are susceptible to the inoculation of ideas passed on through the ‘old boy’ network; or people with vested personal, political, financial or reputation interests; or people who have spent happy years in a country and cannot abide to hear ill alleged of it; or journalists of the not-too-astute variety whose typewriters can be bought for the price of a Government-paid tour with a charming young Information Ministry escort and lavish hospitality. Most of these allow themselves to be used as vehicles for propaganda quite unintentionally, although a few days spent checking the reliability of what they are told would probably pay dividends.

  But as in the case of the pro-German apologists of pre-war days there is always a small group whose orientation is based on a purely personal and sometimes passionate loathing of a racial minority and in the desire to see that minority suffer. In the present instance it is unfortunate that the spiritual headquarters of that kernel is to be found inside the British High Commission in Lagos and in the Commonwealth Office in London.

  OIL AND BIG BUSINESS

  Not being required to explain its policy at Question Time, big business has been able to keep much quieter over its true attitude towards the Nigeria–Biafra affair and participation in it than Government. To this day the role played by business interests and particularly oil remains something of a mystery and open to widely varying interpretations.

  In pre-war Nigeria foreign investment was preponderantly British. The total sum has been estimated at £600 million of which a third was in the Eastern Region. Of investment in that Region the bulk was in oil.

  There was one significant difference between the oil interests and all other financial and commercial interests held by Britain in Nigeria. The bulk of the oil investments were in the East, with a minority in the rest of Nigeria. But for all other business the bulk was in the rest of the Federation and the minor share in the East. Of the total investment, about £200 million has been estimated to have been in oil.

  Although subsequently accused by the Biafrans of having backed Lagos from the start, it seems likely that in their own interest business houses and oil companies were genuinely uninvolved at the start and wished to remain so. Ironically, with their opportunities for making money damaged on both sides by the protracted war, and with much of their plant and machinery damaged, destroyed or commandeered by both sides, the commercial interests have suffered and still been blamed by each party far more then the diplomats who were the architects of the ‘support Gowon’ policy which the British Government elected to follow.

  Any participation which business firms, directly or indirectly, may since have been involved in on the side of Nigeria remains something of a mystery. However, the trade union of all British business interests in West Africa is the influential West Africa Committee, based in London, and it is axiomatic that the West Africa Committee will always follow British Government policy in West Africa, once that policy has been firmly decided upon.

  Basically the interests of big business are to exploit, trade, and make a profit, and for this reason it was in its interest that the war be short. But to say it was in the interests of either oil or other business that Biafra should be crushed is not strictly true. Businessmen interviewed at the start of the war said privately they did not care much either way; it would have involved little extra expenditure on their part to have run two separate commercial operations, one in Nigeria and the other in Biafra, and, so long as the two countries were living at peace side by side, business could have continued as normal. What they did not want was a protracted war.

  For oil interests this was of particular importance. The oil from the Midwest of Nigeria is not exported through the coast of the Midwest, but is piped across the Niger Delta to Port Harcourt in Biafra, where it joins the oil flowing out of the Biafran wells and proceeds through another pipeline to the tanker-loading terminal on Bonny Island. When Biafra pulled out of Nigeria and was blockaded, both Biafran and Midwestern oil was cut off. The major firm affected was Shell–BP, an Anglo-Dutch consortium which held the majority of concessions in both Regions.

  In August 1967 the Biafrans sent a strong lobby to London consisting of Chief Justice Sir Louis Mbanefo and Professor Eni Njoku to try to persuade the British Government to reverse its existing policy of favouring Nigeria. For three weeks the pair sat in the Royal Garden Hotel and talked with a stream of civil servants and businessmen of the West Africa Committee. As a result there was a definite wavering in the Commonwealth Office, and the business interests on the Committee were known to be pressuring the Commonwealth Office towards at least a strict neutrality. In the first ten days of September all this changed with a surprising suddenness. It was later learned that this was the period when Banjo’s plot to kill Ojukwu was coming to fruition. In the first week of September, according to one of the Englishmen involved, some information arrived from Lagos which caused Whitehall to swing quickly back to the former policy of backing General Gowon, and the businessmen were informed accordingly. The two Biafrans found themselves talking to a void, and left. From then on the Commonwealth Office and the City seem to have marched hand in hand, although business firms had increasing misgivings in the latter half of 1968. Nevertheless shortly after September 1967 the sum of about £7,000,000 owing for oil royalties earned prior to the start of the war was paid to General Gowon’s government, despite Biafra’s protests that it was rightfully theirs.

  Long before the end of 1968 all commercial interests had become sick and tired of the war and highly sceptical of the Government’s assurances that it would all be over in a few more weeks. A number of individual businessmen employed by major operators in West Africa, who had served for years in the East and who, like Mr Parker, warned that the situation should not be prejudged, are being listened to again. In the early days their forebodings were discounted in London as stemming from their personal liking for the Eastern people. Moreover, it is becoming steadily clearer that even in the event of a Nigerian military victory, the chances of a return to economic normality in Biafra are slim, in the face of the bloodshed, the bitterness, the certain flight into the bush of the Biafran technicians and senior staff, the wrecking of the economy and the escalating guerrilla war.

  Except possibly for oil: this produce needs comparatively little supervision to export in its crude form, and some production had already started by the end of 1968 from wells firmly in Nigerian hands. But whether the oil companies believe it or not, the chances of uninterrupted flow in the face of a bitter guerrilla war are as slim as those of a flourishing trade in other commodities.

  But oil is different from other commodities. It has strategic value. With the Middle East apparently destined to a period of instability to which no end can be seen, alternative oil sources excite interest. Biafra provides a big alternative source. For France, Portugal and South Africa (to name but three) oil is a major strategic factor. Apart from the fact that not all the oil concessions in Biafra are bespoke, the Biafrans have repeatedly warned that the price of the British Government’s policies towards them over the duration of the war could lead to a renegotiation of the existing oil concessions to other takers.

  There is reason to believe that, like the British Government, British business, having backed one horse on the assurance that it would win with ease, has now gone so far that it must continue backing that horse to win no matter what the price; that it is committed to a policy which it might privately like to reverse, but cannot see how to do so. If that is so, the oil companies and other business firms have the added irritation of knowing that it was not their policy in
the first place.

  THE BRITISH PUBLIC

  It took the British public a full year from the outbreak of the Nigeria–Biafra war to acquire even a hazy and largely uninformed outline of what was going on. But, seeing through press and television that people were suffering appallingly, the British public reacted. In the next six months it did everything it could within constitutional limits to change the Government’s policy over arms to Nigeria and to donate assistance to Biafra.

  There were meetings, committees, protests, demonstrations, riots, lobbies, sit-ins, fasts, vigils, collections, banners, public meetings, marches, letters sent to everybody in public life capable of influencing other opinion, sermons, lectures, films and donations. Young people volunteered to go out and try to help, doctors and nurses did go out to offer their services in an attempt to relieve the suffering. Others offered to take Biafran babies into their homes for the duration of the war; some volunteered to fly or fight for Biafra. The donors are known to have ranged from old age pensioners to the boys at Eton College. Some of the offers were impractical, others hare-brained, but all were wellintentioned.

  While considerably less mobilization of parliamentary, press and public opinion in Belgium and Holland managed to bring the governments of those countries to modify their policy of shipping arms to Lagos, the efforts of British popular opinion have failed to budge the Government by one iota. This is not an indictment of the British public but of the Wilson Government.

  Normally such an enormous and broadly based expression of the popular will has an effect on Government, for although Britain has no written constitution it is generally accepted that when a British Government’s policy, other than a cornerstone of defence of foreign commitment, has been condemned and opposed by the Parliamentary Party and the Opposition, the Party Executive, the Churches and the Trade Unions, the Press and the public at large, then a Prime Minister will normally heed the wishes of the great majority of his electorate and reconsider the policy.