About the massacres of 1966 enough has been said. It is generally admitted that the size and scope of the killings gave them ‘genocidal proportions’ and there exists ample evidence to show that they were planned, directed and organized by men who knew what they were about; that no inquiry was ever instituted by the central government, nor any punishments, compensations or restitutions exacted, which may in law be taken to presume condonement.
The widespread killing of Biafran civilians and of Ibo inhabitants of the Midwest State is equally incontrovertible. After the withdrawal of the Biafran forces from the Midwest in late September 1967 after a six-week occupation, a series of massacres started against Ibo residents. The explanation that it was difficult to differentiate between soldiers and civilians cannot hold water, for as has been explained the armed forces were withdrawn in almost every case before the Second Division of the Federal Army came within firing range. These massacres were witnessed by numerous foreign residents of the various Midwestern towns concerned and widely reported in the international press. Some examples will suffice:
New York Review, 21 December 1967: In some areas outside the East which were temporarily held by Biafran forces, as at Benin and the Midwestern Region, Ibos were killed by local people with at least the acquiescence of the Federal forces. About 1,000 Ibo civilians perished at Benin in this way.’
Washington Morning Post, 27 September 1967: ‘But after the Federal takeover of Benin Northern troops killed about 500 Ibo civilians in Benin after a house-to-house search.’
London Observer, 21 January 1968: ‘The greatest single massacre occurred in the Ibo town of Asaba where 700 Ibo males were lined up and shot.’
New York Times 10 January 1968: ‘The code [Gowon’s Code of Conduct] has all but vanished except from Federal propaganda. In clearing the Midwest State of Biafran forces Federal troops were reported to have killed, or stood by while mobs killed, more than 5,000 Ibos in Benin, Warri, Sapele, Agbor and Asaba.’
Asaba, referred to above in the Observers report, lies on the western bank of the River Niger and was a wholly Ibo township. Here the massacre occurred after the Biafran troops had crossed the bridge back into Biafra. Later Monsignor Georges Rocheau, sent down on a fact-finding mission by His Holiness the Pope, visited both Biafra and Nigeria. At Asaba, by then in Nigerian hands, he talked with priests who had been there at the time. On 5 April 1968 he was interviewed by the French evening newspaper Le Monde, to whom he said: ‘There has been genocide, for example on the occasion of the 1966 massacres… . Two areas have suffered badly [from the fighting]. Firstly the region between the towns of Benin and Asaba where only widows and orphans remain, Federal troops having for unknown reasons massacred all the men.’
According to eyewitnesses of that massacre the Nigerian commander ordered the execution of every Ibo male over the age of ten years.
The Midwest killings had nothing to do with the prosecution of the Nigerian war effort, and for the Biafrans they represented what was widely interpreted as a taste of things to come. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the Ibo population of the Midwest stayed behind after the withdrawal of the Biafran troops under Banjo’s orders indicated that they were confident neither they nor their fellow-Ibos from across the Niger had done anything to warrant reprisals. If they had taken advantage of the armed Biafran presence to inflict suffering on their non-Ibo fellow Regionals, they would have fled helter-skelter with the retreating Biafrans.
Later, at Calabar in Biafra, more massacres took place. Mr Alfred Friendly reported in the New York Times of 18 January: ‘Recently in Calabar, a port in the secessionist region captured by Federal forces, soldiers were said to have shot at least 1,000 and perhaps 2,000 Ibos, most of them civilians… . Some killings have included the members of the Efik tribe, one of the minority groups whose allegiance, Lagos maintains, is to federalism, not secession.’
These reports merely skim the surface of what happened. I have deliberately confined them to foreign correspondents, but the testimony of the refugees now runs to thousands of transcript pages. Since the autumn of 1967 the Ibo population of the Midwest has been drastically reduced. Calabar marked the last town in which the Ibos stayed behind, believing they would come to no harm. Since then all have fled, almost without exception, some few returning timorously months later. But all the towns of Biafra now in Nigerian hands, even the very first to be captured, have remained ghost towns in comparison to their former selves.
One could go on to quote many newspaper reporters’ accounts of what they saw or were told, but it would serve no purpose. In forays behind the Nigerian lines with the Biafran Commandos I have seen the hinterland of desolated villages, wrecked farms, sacked and looted buildings, burned habitations and by the wayside the executed bodies of peasants foolish enough or slow enough to be caught in the open by the Federal Army. The killings of civilians have not been confined to Ibo land; the Efiks, Calabars, Ibibios and Ogonis have suffered heavily as the reports of their emissaries to Colonel Ojukwu describe. Nor was the killing process a flash in the pan, the first reaction of an army in the grip of the heady elation of victory or the vengeful gloom of defeat. The practice has been too standardized, too methodical for that.
It continued after the troops of the Third Nigerian Division of Colonel ‘Shoot anything that moves’ Adekunle crossed the Imo and started to move through the river basin. At Akwa, accompanying Biafran reconnoitre scouts, I saw the corpses of the occupants of the refugee camp at that place, about 500 wasted forms who in life had already fled once from further south. They had been caught by surprise and exterminated. South of Aba, in the villages of Ubute and Ozata, moving with a small group of shock troops, we came across two more examples of communities caught before they had time to flee. The menfolk had had their hands tied before shooting; to judge from appearances the women had been subjected to appalling mutilations either before or after death. The bullet-broken bodies of the children lay scattered like dolls in the long grass.
At Onitsha in March 1968,1 was present with the Biafran 29th Battalion when it pursued the Second Division spearhead down the main road into the city. There 300 members of the Apostolic Church who had stayed behind while others fled, to pray for deliverance, had been dragged from the church and executed. One woman survived by feigning death; she was later treated by another Englishman, Dr Ian Hyde.
In war there are bound to be innocent victims, occasional excesses, here and there a wanton brutality conducted by soldiers of a low level. But seldom has such a remarkable pattern of bestality been established over such a wide territory by such diverse army units.
The evidence of the Biafran survivors continues to mount, and to be discounted outside Biafra as forming part of the all-purpose evil, the Ojukwu propaganda machine. A group of foreign observers, put together at the suggestion of the British Government, has accompanied Federal soldiers in various sectors and produced a report saying that they had found no evidence of genocide. The initiative was a white-washing operation and it worked, for their findings were widely published and have since become the basis for several complacent statements in the British House of Commons.
But the mission was also irrelevant. Failure to find evidence of a crime, when one is being conducted to the site by the alleged perpetrators, is a practice hardly likely to convince even a police cadet. In terms of evidence in court, when a man is accused of murder it is no use for the defence to produce witnesses who said they did not see anything, particularly when they were guided by the accused. The evidence of those who did see something is still being largely disregarded by a world that would prefer not to know.
The testimony of the Ibos, Efiks, Calabars who saw and survived cannot be so easily discounted. The evidence that hanged the Nazi war criminals did not come from a few observers accompanying the Wehrmacht; ninety per cent of it came from the survivors among the victims, Jews, Russians, Poles and so forth. Their evidence was not discounted at Nuremburg as Jewish propaganda. Of the rema
inder about nine per cent came from Nazi documentation, and barely one per cent from confession from the German side.
In a country like the Midwest and Biafra, quite thickly populated with Europeans engaged on various projects, it would be unlikely for much to occur without their being aware of it. It may then be wondered why, apart from some doctors and priests, few have spoken out. The answer would appear to be the same as in all cases where witnesses are hard to come by, a situation often experienced by police officers in all countries. There is a strong tendency not to want to get involved, least of all when such involvement might bring sanctions. Broadly speaking the European population of both areas falls into three categories.
Businessmen are often prepared to say over a private drink what they saw in their own area, but then hastily add ‘Not for publication, old boy. My firm would be right in the mire if that ever got out.’ Most businessmen in both areas are employed by firms with other interests elsewhere in Nigeria and fear reprisals if their employees start leaping into print with tales injurious to the Federal Army or Government.
Civil servants are usually very much in touch with events in their area of service and little escapes them. They too tend to shyness, for being men of few means they count on their pension in retirement and would hardly welcome expulsion in mid-career and termination of contract for a few denunciatory paragraphs in a newspaper.
The third group is the priesthood. These men probably know their parishes as well as anyone, and even after they have fled their parishioners still seek them out to report what has been going on in the newly overrun area. Inside Biafra they are outspoken in private, but seldom prepared to go into print. A priest’s instinct is to protect, but then he has to think: what would happen to the flock if he were expelled? What is his real duty, to his parishioners or to the dead? By speaking out he may endanger his own Order by provoking their expulsion, and he possibly comes to the view that he serves the parishioners best by staying on, even though he knows this means he must keep silent.
Even those in Biafra have in their possession letters from other priests continuing a precarious missionary existence under Nigerian Army control, asking them not to be too outspoken. The priesthood, and notably the Catholics, forms a nation-wide network of men who know what goes on. The attitude of the Vatican has surprised and pained the Nigerian Government, which has apparently failed to realize that the Vatican now possesses the best-documented history of what has gone on in the captured areas of Biafra.
It may be as well at this point to touch on the counterallegations. As various areas of the minority people fell to the Nigerian Army individuals were found to come forward and claim the Ibos had conducted atrocious pogroms against the minorities. These accounts caused some flutter in the Western world, and caused delight to the extremist supporters of the Federal Government. There were tales of several hundreds being lined up and forced to dig their own graves before being shot down, rather the pattern established by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe. The Roman Catholic (European) parish priests of some of the parishes where these massacres were alleged to have taken place are now in unoccupied Biafra. One of them told me: ‘I was there at the time. It would have been absolutely impossible for such a thing to have happened without the whole parish being aware. I would certainly have known about it. To my certain knowledge nothing of the kind occurred.’
A senior priest in the same Order added: ‘In this country nothing can happen without the parish priests being aware very quickly. We go out to hear confessions in the remotest areas daily, and hear all the local gossip as well. Not only the parish priest but the whole Order would soon know every detail. If anything like that happened I would be up to see Colonel Ojukwu like a shot.’
It is difficult to see why two middle-aged Irishmen should bother to cover up such a thing, had it occurred, unless they feared reprisals; and those who know Colonel Ojukwu and Biafra are aware that the Biafran leader is not a tyrant who takes reprisals on priests, and that any attempt to penalize the Roman Catholic Church in Biafra would be the end of the despot.
Of the selective killing of community leaders, the evidence to date stems exclusively from Biafran witnesses. These report executions of teachers, chiefs and elders in a wide variety of locations, but predominantly in the minority areas, partly because these form the bulk of the overrun territories, partly because the Ibos no longer stay behind expecting mercy. Reports of this emasculation of the civilian communities have come from Ikot Ekpene, Uyo and Annang (Ibibio areas); Degema, Brass and Bonny (Rivers area; the Kings of Bonny, Opobo and Kalahari are now refugees with Colonel Ojukwu); Calabar (Efik and Calabar areas); Ugep, Itigide and Ndiba (Ekoi, Igbo and South Ogoja areas); and Ognoi and Ikwerra, in the areas inhabited by people of the same name. In many cases these executions were alleged to have been public, the villagers being herded into the main square to watch. Significantly most of the refugees from the minority areas slipped through the lines into unoccupied Biafra after several days or weeks of occupation.
The air war is bound to remain controversial. Civilians have always been casualties of bombers and fighters used against ground targets. From Guernica onwards the world has come to accept punitive raids by bombers on civilian targets. In the Second World War bombers of the two opposing sides pulverized each others’ cities by day and night, though these cities were usually industrial centres as well. Bombing cannot be accurate to the nearest street, even when Pathfinders are used. But the behaviour of the Nigerian Air Force, equipped by Russia and often manned by Egyptians, has managed to throw overboard any few rules remaining. Very rarely have aircraft been used in conjunction with ground forces, or against Biafran ground forces. When they have, the bombers have preferred to fly very high out of small-arms range and drop their bombs at random, which means that they usually fall in the bush. Similarly, defended targets in Biafra of a strategic nature – bridges, rail yards, barracks – have seldom been hit, or seriously aimed at, for they usually have a Bofors or a heavy machine gun in the vicinity.
Most of the air war has been conducted against the civilian population. Far too many times have the bombers and fighters roared in low to plump their cargoes right in among packed groups of people for any excuse of accident or mistake to be viable. Highly prized targets appear to be hospitals (or anything marked with a Red Cross like the Relief Airport at Obilagu), close-packed townships, churches on Sunday and market places at midday. The latter are known in Africa to be largely the preserve of women, with their babies strapped to their backs. At Awgu market on 17 February 1968 a bomber managed to kill 103 people in less than a minute, and at Aguleri market in October 510 people lost their lives. The actual number of different raids is now countless, but the death toll has topped 5,000 with several thousand more maimed for life.
Repeated pledges by General Gowon that only military targets were being selected has shown that he has no more control over his air force than over his army. Despite periodic pauses in intensity, the raids have continued throughout the war. As this book was being written in Umuahia, MiG 17s and Ilyushin 28s paid six visits in Christmas week in breach of a truce offered by General Gowon, killing over 100 people and wounding another 300 with bombs, rockets and cannon fire.
But whether the use of aircraft and high explosives against helpless civilians, to extract casualties, cram the hospitals and inspire stark terror, can be counted as forming a part of genocide is something that legal brains are still arguing.
‘Some may say it [mass starvation] is a legitimate aspect of war,’ stated the Nigerian Commissioner for Information, Chief Anthony Enahoro, usually regarded as the top-ranking politician in Lagos, at a press conference in New York in July 1968. At the peace talks at Niamey, Republic of Niger, two weeks later the head of the Nigerian delegation refused to consider further the feasibility criteria for a food corridor with the words, ‘Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war, and we have every intention of using it against the rebels.’
These two
assertions, coming from some of the highest men in the land, may be taken as representing Nigerian Government policy. The latter one forms a statement of philosophy and of intent. What happened afterwards cannot be explained away as a regretted but inevitable by-product of war. What happened was that, despite the presence close to Biafra of adequate food supplies and the availability of means of transport to bring them to the needy people, five hundred thousand children, pregnant women and nursing mothers died of malnutrition, starvation and their attendant diseases. These have been described in another chapter.
But there was no doubt of the technical ease of bringing food to those areas well behind the Federal advance points. The international agencies made available ships, planes, helicopters, trucks, vans and technical personnel. Within a short while the latter were complaining bitterly of the inability to work in the face of the Nigerian Army attitude. A ship was commandeered, a plane requisitioned, relief foods off-loaded to make way for arms, men and ammunition. Sacks of relief foods ended up in Federal Army trenches or sold on the black market. Some of the relief personnel resigned in protest.
Ironically, in the last week of October 1968, when the airlift by night to the Biafran-held areas, still technically illegal, had at last brought the malnutrition problem under control and had saved, for a while at least, the remaining child population, Mr Harold Wilson admitted that the difficulty of getting relief supplies by road even to the Nigerian-held areas was due to Federal obstructionism.
As regards the rest of the phrases in the United Nations Convention on Genocide, one refers to a ‘national ethnical, racial or religious group’. There can be little doubt that the Biafrans, either regarded as a nation or as separate racial groups, come under this heading. With regard to the ‘intent’ mentioned in Article Two the position is more complex. Intent is not easy to prove, since it concerns what happens inside the human mind, unless it is written down on paper.
The Biafra Story Page 29