Britain support for genocide remains the same, from Nigeria to Yemen

About 2 million civilians died in the Nigerian-Biafran war - many of them children -from starvation and disease. The war for Biafran independence lasted from July 6, 1967, to Jan. 15, 1970

January 23, 2020 | The Biafra Times

By Robert Inlakesh

More than 50 years now since the Biafran/Nigerian civil war, Britain is again backing a genocidal force against a national liberation movement. Showing that the British policy of endorsing weaponized man-made famine and indiscriminate bombings of civilians has remained exactly the same. Sending a strong message to the world that the UK government willingly participates in what many consider to be genocidal military adventurism.

On January 15, 1970, the Nigerian civil war officially ended after three years of untold horrors. The war was fought against Biafran separatists, who sought to fulfill their nation-state aspirations, and the Nigerian government, which was run by puppets installed by the British. Due to the British interests in Nigeria, the UK government instantly stood behind the Nigeria government forces.

The UK stood by as the first-ever fully televised, man-made famine was broadcast to the world. The tactic of famine was weaponized by the UK’s puppet government in Nigeria as a means of applying pressure on the Biafran opposition. In its entirety, the famine was estimated to have mass-murdered roughly around one million ethnic Igbo-Biafrans. Not only, however, was it famine that was used as a means of illegal warfare but also indiscriminate bombings of civilian population centers. To give an indication of how extreme the warfare was, within the space of the three-year war, Nigeria used more small arms ammunition than the Western-allied forces did in all of WWII.

The British link to the genocidal act of weaponized famine was clear to all, so much so that those suffering from severe malnutrition would be regularly referred to as caught Harold Wilson syndrome. Harold Wilson was the then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.



What makes all of this worse, of course, is that since the Biafran war, Britain has not changed its mentality toward the global south. Allowing millions more to perish as Britain has stood behind illegal wars in all corners of the globe. Most notably now is Britain’s role in the ongoing Saudi-led coalition war on Yemen.

Over one hundred thousand people have been killed in the illegal, indiscriminate and targeted bombardments of civilians in Yemen. The UK has not only been implicated in this slaughter via their weapon sales and diplomatic support for Saudi Arabia, but has also admitted to directly playing a role in the coordination of strikes against the people of Yemen.

What is perhaps most disgraceful, on the part of the UK government, is the role they have played in justifying Saudi Arabia’s brutal blockade of Yemen, which has led to famine and outbreaks of diseases such as cholera. It will not be long before over one million people will have starved to death in Yemen and, depending upon how long this genocidal war against the people continues, perhaps many more than that.

If anything, due to the UK being allowed to get away with its role in the Genocide of Biafrans, it has been emboldened by the international community. This sense of entitlement and lack of regard for human rights has now paved the way for the British to commit a crime much greater in volume against the Yemeni people. Instead of a three-year war, this war has been currently ongoing for five years in Yemen, with many years of battles occurring even before this.

The only difference between now and 50 years ago is that despite the impact of social media and the global awareness of the ongoing genocide in Yemen, there is even more global apathy.

The only question now remaining is: how many more illegal wars will the UK get away with participating in before they are brought to justice? And for how long will the Union Jack stay submerged in the blood of those living — or dying — in lands far from their own.


Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and political analyst, who has lived in and reported from the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He has written for publications such as Mint Press, Mondoweiss, MEMO, and various other outlets. He specializes in analysis of the Middle East, in particular, Palestine-Israel. He also works for Press TV as a European correspondent.)

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Biafra War: It Is January 15 Again

January 15, 2020

By Princeewill Akubumma | For Biafra Writers

January 15 of every year in the history of Nigeria means two different things to Biafrans and to Nigerians. To Nigerians, it is a day to mark the end of the civil war that started on July 16, 1967, and ended on January 15, 1970.

To Biafrans, it is a day to remember the atrocities committed against our people in that genocidal war that saw over five million Biafrans dead. It is a day to remember the ingenuity of our gallant soldiers who against all odds stood their ground to defend our land not just against the Nigerian state, but also against United Kingdom, Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Bulgaria and USA who all assisted Nigeria in the genocide visited upon Biafra.

January 15 of every year leaves us with sober reflections on how we fought a war of survival. It is a day that our gallant soldiers temporarily laid down their arms. They did so with the conviction that, having resisted the Nigerian aggression for three years, the Nigerian state must have learnt enough to attend to the conditions that birthed the war. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, they have continued in the provocative path, unleashing everything evil on the peace-loving people of Biafra.

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It should be recalled that Gen. Philip Efiong warned the then Nigerian Military government that if what led to the war is repeated and if the Nigerian government continues to treat unfairly the children of those Biafran soldiers who are putting down their arms, then those Biafran children will rise to fight for a separate state of Biafra. You cannot whip a child and expect him not to cry. Obviously, the Nigerian government has failed to learn from their past mistakes.

Worthy of note here is the fact that after the war many international humanitarian organizations approached the federal military government of Nigeria seeking to rebuild Biafra region. Out of sheer hatred for the Biafran, the Nigerian government turned down the offer on the pretext that Nigerian can handle it.

Well, the inhumanity against Biafra has not stopped, and as predicted by General Philip Efiong, the new generation of Biafra has risen up to demand an independent state of Biafra.

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A Brief History of Biafra

July 24, 2019

By Nelson Ofokar Yagazie | Biafra Writers

The nation Biafra is descended from the seventh son of Jacob, Gad. Three of Gad’s sons – Eri, Arodi, and Areli – left Egypt with their households at the heights of Pharaoh’s torment, and wandered down west Africa to settle in the part today inhabited by their descendants, Biafrans. Eri, the eldest of the three brothers, settled in Nri – the ancestral home of all Biafrans. His own eldest son, Agulu-Eri, founded the Agulu-Eri town where he built the famous Obu Gad in the loving memory of his grandfather, Gad. Obu Gad is today a historic site, evidencing many Biafran Jewish heritage.

Arodi settled at Arochukwu – the city taking its name from its founder, Arodi. The youngest of the brothers, Areli, went down to settle at the riverine area, giving birth to most of the riverine non-Igbo speaking Biafrans.

As is evidenced in various maps of ancient Africa – maps of 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries – the nation Biafra has been in existence for over five thousand (5000) years. In the 18th century, however, Biafra was conquered by British forces and ruled as a British colony.

In 1914, the colonial administration of Fredrick Lugard, seeking to use the resources in Biafra land to balance the budget deficit in the area today referred to as Northern Nigeria, lumped three separate nations together as one country. Thus, Biafra was forced into the unholy union today called Nigeria. Biafra territory then became known as Eastern Nigeria.

In 1945, the other parts of Nigeria began the killing of Biafrans in a very coordinated form. The pogrom reached an alarming rate in 1966 when about four hundred thousand (400,000) Biafrans were killed. Efforts by the then governor of Eastern Nigeria, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, to get the Nigerian government to stop the pogrom proved abortive.

With the Yakubu Gowon led government of Nigeria turning its back on the agreements reached in the peace talk in Aburi, Ghana, (commonly referred to as Aburi Accord), and the carnage snowballing into a full-scale genocide, Biafrans were left with no alternative than to seek an identity separate from the Nigerian Identity.

Acting in his capacity as the governor of the oppressed Eastern Nigeria and on the mandate of the ruling council of the then Eastern Nigeria, heads of parastatals, Academic Staff Union of Universities, and everyone that mattered in the land, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu on the 30th of May, 1967, declared the then Eastern Nigeria with her territorial waters a sovereign state known, called and referred to as Republic of Biafra – her ancient name.

Nigerian government encouraged by the British government under Harold Wilson then visited war on the young republic, killing, according to Irish report, over six million people in the space of three years the war lasted. In January 1970, Biafra was again forced into the Nigerian union that has no better offer than periodic carnage on Biafrans.

Within the three years of war, Biafran expertise and technological know-hows came to fore as Biafra, blockaded and under heavy bombardments, built her own bombs, guns, armored tanks, telecommunication system, airport, oil refineries, as well as converting passenger planes to fighter jets. Biafra by her achievements in those three years of existence, although under war situation, became the most technologically advanced black nation in the world.

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Civil War: Why Nigerian Army wasn't hard on Biafrans - Buhari': A Rejoinder

By IPOB Central Command of the Directorate of State

June 5, 2018

In the Vanguard newspaper published on June 4, 2018 and other media, it was widely reported how this version of 'Buhari' claimed that Nigerian soldiers were 'soft' on Biafrans during the Civil War. He further made claims that Gowon had issued the commanders general orders to be humane in the prosecution of the war. We, the Indigenous People of Biafra state categorically and without equivocation that Buhari's claims are as false and as strange they come, especially in the face of quantum evidence to the contrary, chronicled by independent observes of the wartime atrocities committed by Nigerian forces against innocent Biafran civilians, including women and children. We doubt if it is the same Buhari that addressed Eastern Youth Corpers in 2016 in his country home in Daura Katsina State on the horrors, pains, misery and suffering of the war, that made this latest 'soft' on Biafrans statement. It couldn't have come from the same person.

To better understand the Nigerian atrocities during the war, one needs to trace back to 1945 and then 1953 when the Hausa-Fulani political leadership in northern Nigeria planned and executed two premeditated pogroms on Biafran immigrant populations in Jos and Kano in an unpatriotic and envy driven opposition to the leading role Biafrans played in the struggle for Nigeria's independence from Britain. Vast numbers of easterners not just Igbos,  were murdered on those occasions and their properties looted or destroyed. Neither in Kano nor Jos did the colonial regime apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and destruction, which expectedly and tragically emboldened the murderous northerners for the worst that was to come between 1966 -1970.

The perpetrators, whose scions like Buhari subsequently seized power in 1966 on the blood of their fellow officers of eastern extraction, continued their bloodletting that directly led to the war. And when the war came, Gowon deceptively labeled it a police action but what went on underneath was a genocide of epic proportions. There were extensive coverage of the genocide in the international media throughout its duration. According to accounts, the real Buhari committed grave genocidal atrocities of his own in the theaters where he participated or commanded, namely the battles for Nsukka, Abagana and Nkpor Junction, where Buhari had held command positions. This is subject of an ongoing suit filed at the ICC by IPOB.

During the battles for these sectors, Buhari’s officers and men torched entire villages and massacred the civilians that could not evacuate before the enemy arrived. These included children, the sick, infirm and elderly. At the conclusion of the massacres, the soldiers began their macabre dance of jubilation and Buhari was said to have told them that “Nnewi is next“. Yes - 'next' -as in the next massacre. It was on the heels and ashes of these genocide that the Gowon had, during the war, boasted publicly that his men had killed three million Biafrans. But given that the numerical strength of the entire Biafran armed forces hovered around 50,000 men, one can only concluded that the three million slaughtered were hapless Biafran civilians. Such atrocities is the reason why history of the Biafra-Nigeria was hurriedly removed from school curriculums.

In addition to Buhari, there were other self confessed butchers of Biafrans. One is Benjamin Adekunle, a notoriously gruesome commander of Nigerian forces who had no qualms in boasting about the goal of this horrendous mission o exterminate Biafrans. He stated at an August 1968 press conference, attended by journalists including those from the international media: ‘We shoot at everything that moves, and when our forces march into the centre of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything, even at things that do not move’. True to type, Adekunle duly carried through his threat with clinical precision both on his ‘everything that moves’ - targeting, especially southern Igboland where his forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands, and on the ‘things that do not move’-assault category. Adekunle’s infamous destruction of the famed Biafran economic and social infrastructure was indescribably barbaric.

In July 1968, the British mission in Nigeria estimated that 200-300 Biafrans were dying every day. However, these estimates were based on numbers reported by the Nigerian government, as the British did not have access to the Biafran enclaves. Two months later, during the height of the crisis, the International Committee of the Red Cross (which traversed Biafran during the war) estimated 8,000 and 10,000 deaths per day. It obtained these figures based on random samples of death rates in villages, refugee camps and hospitals across Biafra, and it cautioned that the estimates were likely to be conservative. Jean Mayer, Professor of Nutrition at Harvard’s ..  School of Public Health, similarly argued that estimates of 10,000 deaths a day appeared to be accurate. We reckon that Buhari would rather wish all these away but it won't work. It is a fact of history.


The Asaba Massacre is but another fact of history that clearly debunks Buhari's junk narratives. According to credible reports, Nigerian troops entered Asaba and began ransacking houses and killing civilians, claiming they were Biafran sympathisers. Reports demonstrate that several hundreds were killed individually and in groups at various locations in the town. Later, community leaders summoned the townspeople to assemble on the morning of October 7, 1967 hoping to end the violence through a show of support for "One Nigeria." Hundreds of men, women, and children, many wearing the ceremonial akwa ocha (white) attire paraded along the main street, singing, dancing, and chanting "One Nigeria." At a junction, men and teenage boys were separated from women and young children, and gathered in an open square at Ogbe-Osowa village. Then Nigerian troops under the command of Murtala Mohammed and Ibrahim Taiwo gave orders to machine gun "everybody". It was reliably estimated that more than 700 men and boys were killed, some as young as 12 years old, in addition to many more killed in the preceding days. Bodies of some victims were retrieved by family members and buried at home. But most were buried in mass graves without appropriate ceremony. Many extended families lost dozens of men and boys. Federal troops occupied Asaba for many months, during which time most of the town was ravaged, many women and girls were raped or forcibly "married," and large numbers of citizens fled and never returned until the war ended in 1970.

We shall conclude this Rejoinder by quoting Robert Melson, a foreigner, a Holocaust survivor and a Nigerian expert who witnessed what happened between 1967 -1970. In his book, 'Revolution and genocide', Melson states that: "I could not help but make the connection between their experience and my own. Biafrans were being killed purely for their identity: it was as if the twenty-some years after the Second World War had been compressed into a few minutes. The Holocaust monster was on the prowl again, and it was no use trying to escape its implications in Africa or elsewhere".

It appears after each successive sit-at-home directive by IPOB, the powers that be remember Biafra. Our quest for freedom, liberty and justice can never be dismissed. At the end of this whole process Biafra will be fully restored as a civilised nation by the grace of God.


COMRADE EMMA POWERFUL

MEDIA AND PUBLICITY SECRETARY FOR IPOB