Towards the end of 1969 observers were again entertaining faint hopes that, with the lassitude towards the war present in both armies and civilian disturbances mounting in Western Nigeria against the war, the New Year might bring some fresh and more meaningful initiative for peace.
Two things, however, militated against such a breakthrough. One was the lack of a mediator who combined the respect of both sides for his strength and the acceptance of both sides for his integrity. The other factor was the Federal regime’s determination to cling to its original belief that a total and decisive solution to the Nigeria–Biafra problem could be achieved by continuing hostilities. In this its mainstay and support remained the British Government, whose ministerial statements in the closing months of 1969 made clear to observers that the official view in London remained that of sustaining and supporting Lagos for a complete victory over Biafra, to be attained if necessary by starvation in the absence of a victory by force of arms.
CHAPTER 13
The Question of Genocide
Genocide is an ugly word. It is the name given to the biggest crime man is capable of. What constitutes genocide in the modern world? What degree of violence offered towards a people justifies the use of the word? What degree of intent is necessary to justify the description? After years of study, some of the world’s best legal brains assisted in drawing up the definition written into the United Nations Convention on Genocide adopted on 9 December 1948. Article Two specifies:
In the present Convention genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:
a.
Killing of members of the group;
b.
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c.
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about i
ts physical destruction in whole or in part;
d.
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e.
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article One states that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or war, is a crime under international law, and Article Four makes plain that constitutional rulers, public officials or private individuals may be held responsible.
Obviously, in time of war men get killed, and as they belong to a national, ethnical, racial or religious group this paragraph is perhaps too wide to be practicable. It is the use of the phrase ‘with intent’ that separates the usual casualties inflicted during war from the crime of genocide. The killing party must be shown to have had, or to have developed, intent to destroy, and the victims must be a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
There are two other points about genocide that have become habitually accepted in law: one is that intent on behalf of the Head of State of the inflicting party need not be proved. An individual general can direct his troops to commit genocide, and the Supreme Commander is held responsible if he cannot control his armed forces. Secondly, the deliberate decimation of the leadership cadres of a racial group, calculated to leave that group without the cream of its educated manpower, can constitute genocide even if the majority of the population is left alive as a helpless mass of semi-literate peasantry. The society may then be presumed to have been emasculated as a group.
The Biafran charges against the Nigerian Government and armed forces rest on their behaviour in five fields: the pogroms of the North, the West and Lagos in 1966; the behaviour of the Nigerian Army towards the civilian population they encountered during the course of the war; the behaviour of the Nigerian Air Force in selection of its targets; the selective killings in various captured areas of chiefs, leaders, administrators, teachers, technicians; and the allegedly deliberate imposition of famine, which was predicted in advance by foreign experts and which during 1968 carried away an estimated 500,000 children between the ages of one and ten years.
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.