By Osita Ebiem
At the end of the Biafran War many experts came to the conclusion that
genocide had been committed against the Igbo by the Nigerian government.
In an effort to suppress the scandal, the Nigerian government with some
help from Great Britain worked frantically to cover up the news about
the atrocities. For almost fifty years that effort paid off. The crime
of Biafran Genocide was carefully hidden away from the public.
However, today 2016 the agitation for
the restoration of the defunct Biafran state is in the news again. This
is coming nearly half a century after the country’s demise in 1970.
After suffering a pogrom in which more than 100,000 of their people were
killed by Nigerian civilians and various security forces of the
Nigerian government, Igbo people with other southeasterners who also
were affected in the killings declared an independent Biafran state in
mid-1967. Immediately following the secession the Nigerian state levied a
genocidal war of aggression that lasted two and half years against
Biafra. With the help of Great Britain, USSR (Russia) and Islamic Arab
states; all those countries supplied arms to Nigeria and the war
resulted in the genocide of Igbo people.
The war was prosecuted with the declared
intention of wiping out the Igbo from the face of the Earth. By the
time the war was over a quarter of Igbo population, that is 3 million of
them were further exterminated. About 2 million of the casualties died
from starvation resulting from the Nigerian government official policy
of “hunger as a legitimate weapon of war.” Almost fifty years after that
horrific genocide which tends to have been largely forgotten by much of
the world community, a new generation of Igbo people who are majorly
Animists and Christians are reviving the call to free themselves and
territory from the largely Islamic state of Nigeria.
A close look at most of the people who
are championing the new struggle to separate Biafra from Nigeria reveals
that they either did not witness the Biafran War or they were mere
children during the war. For this reason some people have asked the
question; why are people in this age bracket bent on defiantly reviving
such a horrific episode and experience in their history half a century
on. Some people have argued that it has something to do with the fact
that the Nigerian government barned the teaching of history in Nigerian
schools soon after the Biafran War. People were prohibited from
mentioning the name, “Biafra” for many decades afterwards. The
government wanted to hide the genocide permanently from public
consciousness. As a result, subsequent generations which did not witness
the war are unable to appreciate fully the devastating impacts of the
war on their parents’ generation. But since the years following the war
even the generations of Igbo people who did not witness it are being
punished and marginalized by the Nigerian state. And this is part of
what is fueling the independence protests.
Remembering how horrible the war was,
people like the current Muslim President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari who
incidentally fought on the Nigerian side to defeat Biafra have asked
the new agitators for a revived independent state of Biafra to forget
it. Of course he did not find it necessary to express any remorse about
the Igbo Genocide which he helped to orchestrate. He instead believes
that the people will just forget just because he asked them to forget
the heinous crime that was committed against them. Insensitively, the
president went on to argue that the agitators are doing this because
they did not experience or witness the war. This has made many observers
to interpret Buhari’s highhanded response by killing the peaceful
nonviolent agitators as his way of trying to teach the “inexperienced”
agitators a lesson. In the past one and half years Buhari has rolled
out, on many occasions, the full strength of his country’s military
force to violently suppress the peaceful nonviolent Biafran independence
movement.
The human rights organization; Amnesty
International reports that since the advent of Buhari administration in
2015 till now – the tail end of 2016, Nigerian government has killed
more than 300 Biafrans and wounded many more while they held peaceful
protests for Biafra’s independence. Amnesty International says that many
of those pro-Biafra protesters were shot and killed in their sleep and
others while they gathered in churches to pray. Many of the protesters
were shot and killed from behind while they tried to escape.
The fact is that the peaceful protests
for the separation of Igbo territory (Biafra) from Nigeria has been
going on since the year 2000. The group known as Movement for the
Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) had spearheaded
these protests. Various Nigerian administrations before the advent of
the present one in 2015 had used mostly the incarceration of the leaders
of the movement in trying to deal with and suppress it. MASSOB’s former
leader Ralph Uwazurike suffered many jail times in Nigerian prisons.
Sometimes the MASSOB leader was detained for many years at a time. Apart
from many of the agitators who are being killed extra-judicially by
government forces there are some notable individuals who are being held
in various Nigerian prisons just because they are agitating for Biafra’s
independence. Some were snatched off the streets into prisons for
merely wearing vests with Biafran insignia or just being in possession
of Biafran flags. There are such people like Benjamin Onwuka the leader
of Biafra Zionist Movement (BZM,) Chidiebere Onwudiwe whose home was
invaded by Nigerian security agents in the middle of the night. He was
taken away from his house at 2 AM and has not been heard from again
since the last one year. Then there is Nnamudi Kanu who runs an online
radio called Radio Biafra London (RBL.) These individuals except for
Onwudiwe whose fate is yet to be known, can be described as almost lucky
because Buhari’s government has not yet executed them and their cases
have been celebrated because of the relatively wide media publicity they
have attracted.
But there are many unsung pro-Biafra
agitator-victims who are not as lucky. They are currently suffering
various kinds of persecutions in many detention centers around the
world. Some of these less known victims are being prosecuted in
different courts of law in many places around the world simply because
they demonstrated publicly for the independence of Biafra. These people
are being deprived of their freedom or are being subjected to other
forms of hardships and inhumane treatments because of their involvement
in Biafran freedom activism.
Over the years many critics have
complained that the Nigerian government has used some unorthodox
diplomatic manipulations to influence how some foreign government
agencies carry out their duties in its effort to suppress Biafra’s
independence and hide the Biafran Genocide. Since the time of Biafra War
till now, Nigeria has deployed its diplomatic tentacles across the
world to make sure that those who agitate for Biafra anywhere are
suppressed. We will cite two little known examples of those who are
going through persecutions in so-called civilized societies like
European countries of Norway and England.
Lotachukwu Okorie used to serve as
MASSOB’s District Officer in southeast Nigeria before he emigrated to
Norway, fleeing from persecution by Nigerian government authorities. On
getting to Norway, a civilized society, he believed that his problems
were over and his human rights would be protected. Unfortunately, he
discovered that they had only just begun. In what looked like a remotely
influenced operation the Norwegian government detained Okorie and
charged him with illegal immigration crime. He was then detained for one
year and six months without any conclusive decision on his case.
According to Norwegian laws he overstayed in jail the period he was
legally supposed to. Just before he was arrested, Okorie was so
frustrated by the various dehumanizing treatments he was receiving from
Norwegian security agents that he was driven to attempt suicide with a
kitchen knife.
Another case which is fast becoming a
source of embarrassment to the British government is that of Yahgozie
Immanu-el victim of political persecution by British authorities that
apparently are trying hard to please Nigerian government which it is
believed are tele-guiding and influencing the current ordeals of
Yahgozie. It appears that the British government is willing to
compromise their country’s very reputable centuries-old national respect
for the fundamental human and civil rights of all people simply to
please the Nigerian government. Yahgozie is an independent journalist as
well as a pro-Biafra activist who is based in London. He got arrested
by the British police while he covered the recent official visit to
Britain by the Nigerian President Buhari. He was subsequently taken to
court on frivolous and trumped up charges that he was trying to attack
President Buhari’s motorcade. Some eyewitnesses of the incident are
still unable to understand how the actions of someone who only had a
microphone and was trying to cover the unfolding events could have been
interpreted as an intention to attack President Buhari. Yahgozie’s case
comes up again in the City of London Magistrates Court later in this
month of November. Many people think that the case is actually turning
into an embarrassment to the human rights image of the British
government.
Osita Ebiem is our special correspondent on African
Continent. He is a rights activist based in New York City. He writes
about and calls attention to the Biafran genocide. From time to time he
writes critical analysis of issues in Africa south of the Sahara. Osita
is the author of “Nigeria, Biafra and Boko Haram: Ending the Genocides
through Multistate Solution” and the forthcoming “Biafra Genocide: The
Crime and Pending Justice.”
Written by Restore Biafra
We are Creative Bloggers who have decided to take on the Biafra restoration issues until that republic is fully restored.
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