The Biafra Story

  It takes a government of unprecedented and unique arrogance first to deceive the people’s representatives for a year, then to snub the expressed will of Parliament and people, and their institutions. But a government of unprecedented and unique arrogance, coupled with a flabby and gutless Opposition, is precisely what Britain has had since October 1964.

  THE RUSSIAN INVOLVEMENT

  From December 1968 the steadily increasing Soviet build-up inside Nigeria became of mounting concern to observers outside the conflict. Although the first shipment of Russian MiG fighters and Ilyushin bombers arrived in Northern Nigeria in late August 1967, and further shipments, accompanied by two or three hundred Soviet technicians, continued to arrive over the next fifteen months to replace losses, it was not until the signing of the Soviet–Nigerian pact of November 1968 that the door opened wide to Russian infiltration.

  The pact had already incurred the disquiet of Western diplomats while it was still in the discussion stage between the two sides, and the British made three attempts to dissuade the Nigerians from signing it. Each effort managed to bring about a delay, but the pact was finally signed on 21 November in the presence of an unusually strong delegation from Moscow.

  In the following weeks the Russian presence became increasingly noticeable to the disquiet not only of the British and Americans but also of many Nigerian moderates.

  The pact specified certain fields of assistance for Nigeria from Russia, such as the construction of an iron and steel industry. But it seems that the signing was linked to other activities. Shortly after the signing, reports began to come through from Northern Nigeria of a nightly airlift of Soviet infantry weapons in large quantities being ferried through airfields in the Southern Sahara to Kaduna, and thence to the Nigerian First Division at Enugu. Previous presence of Russian military equipment had been in fighters, bombers, bombs, rockets, naval patrol boards and, for the infantry, bazookas and hand-grenades. In the latter half of 1968 lorries, jeeps, trenching tools and Soviet NCOs operating the support weapons began to make their appearance. Of the equipment, identification was easy from captured examples, and the presence of Soviet advisers was given away by prisoners, notably a Yoruba company commander who claimed the Russians made no secret of their nationality and ordered junior officers to attend lectures extolling the virtues of the Soviet way of life.

  But towards the end of the war, after the signing of the pact, the First Division was re-equipped for the January 1969 push against the Biafrans largely with Soviet ground weaponry, including thousands of RK 49 sub-machine guns, the standard Warsaw Pact infantry guns, and Kalashnikov machine guns.

  Elsewhere in Nigeria, correspondents began to notice teams of Russian advisers in various fields. Some were introduced as mineralogists, geologists, agricultural experts and the like. Fears were expressed that the Nigerian extreme Left, already strongly impregnating the Trade Union movement, would become stronger than ever, and anti-Western demonstrations were seen at the end of the year. In Ibadan the American and British flags were torn down, burnt and trampled on by a chanting mob of students and labour organizers.

  By the end of the year 1968 the long-term Soviet aim in Nigeria was still a subject for speculation. Some saw the Soviet aim not as being towards a quick end to the war, but towards an extension of it until such time as Nigeria should be so hopelessly in debt as to become sufficiently pliable to accede to Russian wishes for concessions far removed from mutual assistance. Others saw the aim as being to acquire a long-term monopoly of Nigeria’s cashcrop produce, like ground-nuts, cotton, cocoa and palm oil, taken in lieu of cash payments for weapons and other aid, which would have the same effect on Nigerian independence from Soviet pressure in the 1970s. Yet others saw the final aim as being strategic – the obtaining of air bases in Northern Nigeria and perhaps a sea base along the south coast. These observers recalled Britain’s chain of air bases from England through Gibraltar, Malta, Libya, Cyprus, Aden, the Maldives and Singapore which gave Britain in the 1960s the option of fast intervention East of Suez. The reasoning was that Russia, with access from the Crimea to Damascus, Port Said, Upper Egypt and the Sudan, needed only Kaduna and Calabar to have a chain of air bases straight into Southern Africa. In fact, by the end of 1968 Russian technicians had set up a base at Kaduna and had improved both Kaduna and Calabar from small municipal airstrips to full-length runways capable of taking Ilyushin bombers and Antonov freighters with all facilities for bad-weather and night landings.

  To quote at length, with all the minutiae of dates, names, places and references, the actions and utterances of the British Government during 1969 in pursuing its avowed policy of support for Nigeria in the war, would be repetitious in view of the what has already been written in this chapter.

  It suffices to say that, despite ever-mounting evidence of the appalling sufferings to which the British Government’s policy continued to give rise, and on the basis of the realities of the situation, the policy was ill-starred and incompetent. However, that policy continued unchanged. Throughout the year ministerial and official statements continued to twist and distort the facts of the situation, even though in most cases the facts were available for checking in well-founded contemporary records. On several occasions Press, Parliament and public were fed deliberate lies in an effort to secure popular support for the Government’s policy of support for the Nigerian regime’s war and starvation policy.

  On those occasions when an effort towards peace appeared at the time to be made by the British Government, it was inevitably and only when popular and editorial opinion in Britain made advisable some sop to conscience. Seen and examined in retrospect, each apparent initiative turned out to be no more than a propaganda exercise, commending itself to the gullible but deliberately achieving no concrete results.

  The first of these initiatives occurred in the wake of the storm of protest in Press and Parliament occasioned by Mr Winston Churchill’s articles in The Times in March. One of the upshots of the concern in Britain over Mr Churchill’s reports was increased pressure inside Parliament, which culminated in yet another debate, this time on 20 March. It was another exercise in futility. The major argument against Government policy of shipping arms to support a war resulting in human suffering on the Biafran scale was avoided. The Conservative Party, to judge from the uninformed nature of its spokesmen, did not appear to have any constructive policy, or be prepared to oppose intelligently the Government on the one major issue on which it could command the united support of the Liberal Party and some measure of support from Mr Wilson’s own back benches.

  But in the wake of the debate Mr Wilson announced that he himself would go to Nigeria. Scepticism about the value of such a personal appearance, and of its practical usefulness, was manifest in Press and Commons. It looked at the start, and turned out to be, another example of the personal gimmickry that the public had come to expect from the Labour Prime Minister. But since the Foreign Secretary, Mr Michael Stewart, told the House on the eve of Mr Wilson’s departure that ‘the Prime Minister would not rule out the possibility of a visit to Biafra’, and since political correspondents were hinting that moves to enable such a visit to take place were already afoot, optimists began to hope that perhaps at last the British Government might be prepared to examine both sides of the question and not simply those parts that suited its own preconceptions.

  Apparently in this hope General Ojukwu issued an invitation to Mr Wilson to visit Biafra, an offer that cost him great effort in overcoming internal opposition to the idea of entertaining a man whom the Biafran populace loathes so heartily.

  The optimism was as premature as Ojukwu’s offer had been disconcerting to British officialdom. It was known that Mr Wilson wished to return to London and report to the Commons his eyewitness impressions. Following Ojukwu’s invitation it became difficult to imagine how Mr Wilson could go to Biafra, see what he would see and report what he had seen, while at the same time keeping what he had to say commensurate with his own previous
policy and his colleagues’ utterances. The problem was knotty, but soon solved.

  In the Sunday Telegraph of 30 March Mr H. B. Boyne, accompanying the Premier’s party through Nigeria, set puzzled readers’ minds at rest. ‘Incidentally,’ he wrote, ‘Mr Wilson never had any intention of going into secessionist territory now.’

  In the Sunday Times of the same date Mr Nicholas Carroll gave his readers what could be construed as the explanation for his colleague’s brief aside. ‘Still, superficial though Mr Wilson’s visits have had to be, he did see quite enough to confirm what he had already heard from both his hosts and from his own advisers.’

  But nothing more. Which, presumably, was the object of the exercise.

  One strange but revealing sidelight on this visit was cast months later, when Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, V.C., who had been touring Biafra and speaking with General Ojukwu in the week prior to Mr Wilson’s visit to Lagos, revealed why he had gone there. In an article in the Guardian Weekly Magazine of 22 November, the former bomber pilot and war hero revealed for the first time that he had gone to Biafra as an emissary of the Foreign Office, albeit an amateur one.

  This had been no surprise to the Biafrans at the time, in the last ten days of March, nor to some others inside Biafra, but the secret had been well enough kept for British readers to have heard it for the first time in November.

  Group Captain Cheshire revealed that he had been asked by a personal friend at the Foreign Office to go to Biafra and try to speak to General Ojukwu to see what his feelings were about the prospects of peace. He was also asked to make his own evaluations and report back to Mr Wilson personally in Lagos.

  This he did. Disconcertingly for those who sent him, his findings were:

  I shall always remember my interview with Ojukwu for the impression of utter sincerity … In Lagos, where I arrived the day before the Prime Minister’s visit, I made a full report to a senior member of the British delegation and was then given fifteen minutes or so with Mr Wilson. I told him that Biafra was a country fighting for a passionately held belief, not one duped by its political leaders … I stressed my conviction of Ojukwu’s good faith and pleaded with him to visit Biafra on the grounds that this was the only hope of peace. He replied that a visit was out of the question …

  At the end of the article Group Captain Cheshire related how he was debriefed in the Foreign Office in London by a plainly sceptical official, who remarked when he had finished his description of his findings, ‘Curious how every single person who goes to Biafra seems to fall for it.’

  The patronizing condescension that greeted Group Captain Cheshire, who, it should be recalled, was chosen by the Foreign Office in the first place to undertake the mission, is typical of the attitude accorded by the Foreign Office advisers on Nigeria policy to every single person returning from an on-the-spot assessment of the situation. The list of those so treated is long, ranging from Lords and MPs through clerics and professional men to reporters and photographers. For this group of advisers everyone is wrong but themselves, who have rarely been to Nigeria and never to Biafra at all.

  And so it continued throughout 1969 until the end of that year. In October 1968 an amalgamation had taken place between the Commonwealth Office, whose advisers had got Britain into the Nigeria–Biafra mess in the first place, and the Foreign Office, traditionally regarded by political observers in London as a more professional institution than the Commonwealth Office. It could hardly have been less so.

  Some hopes were therefore entertained that with the Foreign Office now firmly on top and some of the deadwood from the Commonwealth Office being quietly retired in the merger, a more realistic attitude to the whole Nigeria–Biafra question might be adopted during 1969. This was not to be so.

  The fact that no change, even on the basis of pragmatism, took place in British policy during 1969 was very largely due to the Foreign Secretary Mr Michael Stewart, a politician whose mental flexibility is reminiscent of the laws of the Medes and Persians. Before he had long been in sole charge of all Britain’s foreign affairs, he had made quite clear through public and private utterances that he was a man who did not like to be confused with facts once his mind was made up. And on Nigeria his mind was well and truly made up, unchangeable by anything short of the use of explosives, even before the merger of the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office took place. Thus on the question of relief to the starving inside Biafra he made plain on many occasions in the House and elsewhere that so far as he was concerned the failure to reach an agreement for the transshipment of relief food by the International Red Cross after it had been forced to stop night-flying in June was the fault of General Ojukwu and no one else. No recital of the step-by-step sequence of events, revealing that the Federal offer of daylight flights was a cynical sham, will ever shake Mr Stewart’s belief that the members of the Federal régime in Lagos may be likened to angels of mercy.

  In order to try and persuade his colleagues in the Commons, the Press and the public, Mr Stewart nevertheless went to some remarkable lengths, even for a politician. When the International Red Cross, under pressure from Lagos, handed over its multimillion-dollar relief operation to the Nigerian Rehabilitation Commission and suspended its night flights to Biafra, cutting as it did relief supplies to Biafra by fifty per cent, the move was openly backed by Britain. Defending the move in the House during June, Mr Stewart said the IRC action had the support of the combined relief operations. This was a blatant untruth and was promptly and vigorously denied by the churches concerned under the umbrella of Joint Church Aid.* On 17 November in the Commons, after the failure of an attempt to reach agreement between Lagos and Biafra on daylight relief flights, Mr Stewart made much effort to belittle General Ojukwu’s military reasons for declining to open the Uli Airport during daylight hours. During the course of this he stated that if there were such daylight flights the Americans would be ready to guarantee that there would be no military advantage to the Federal side. In fact no such American guarantee is or ever was available. Indeed, it was significant that no power at all was prepared itself to guarantee that the Nigerian Air Force would respect the inviolability of the airplanes and the airport during a daylight flights agreement.†

  Commenting about this particular performance of the Foreign Secretary in the Commons, the Guardian Weekly Magazine the following Saturday observed: ‘Once again Mr Stewart has been disgracefully misleading about Britain’s role in the Nigerian war.’‡

  It is lamentable to have to state that during Mr Stewart’s term of office as Her Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs, distortions and untruths, which it is extremely hard to believe were the result simply of bad briefing, became so frequent, at least on this issue, that they no longer continued to arouse much editorial comment at all.

  * Hansard, 25 January 1966, col. 21.

  * Hansard, 20 December 1966, col. 263.

  * To the author, Enugu, July 1967.

  * References to these occur in Financial Times, 9 August 1967; Birmingham Post, 15 August 1967; The Times, 3 January 1968; Hansard, 22 July 1968, col. 68.

  * Hansard, 29 January 1968, cols. 599 and 600.

  † Hansard, 16 May 1968, cols. 1397 and 1398.

  * Hansard, 2 March 1966, col. 316.

  † ibid., 12 June 1968, col. 290.

  ‡ ibid., 12 June 1968, cols. 289–90

  § Hansard, 22 July 1968, col. 106.

  * BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Part 4B, Non-Arab Africa, ME/2677/B/2.

  * Hansard, 27 August 1968, cols. 754–5.

  * Speech at Kaduna, 24 November 1967; BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, Non-Arab Africa, ME/263l/B/2.

  * George Knapp, Aspects of the Biafran Affair, London, 1968, pp. 27, 28, 53 and 54.

  * Hansard, 20 June 1967, col. 1376.

  * Hansard, 25 January 1968, cols. 437–8.

  † ibid., 13 February 1968, cols. 90–91.

  ‡ ibid., 21 May 1968, col. 266.

  * Hansard, 27 August 1968
, col. 1446.

  * Hansard, 27 August 1968, col. 1527.

  * ‘Yesterday in Parliament’, Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1968.

  * Walter Schwarz, ‘Mr Wilson and Biafran Starvation’, Guardian Weekly Magazine, 22 November 1969.

  † ‘Britain’s Role in Nigeria’, editorial comment, ibid.

  ‡ ibid.

  CHAPTER 11

  Refugees, Hunger and Help

  It was the starvation in Biafra that really woke up the consciousness of the world to what was going on. The general public, not only of Britain, but of all western Europe and America, though usually unable to fathom the political complexities behind the war news, could nevertheless realize the wrong in the picture of a starving child. It was on this image that a press campaign was launched which swept the western world, caused governments to change their policy, and gave Biafra the chance to survive, or at least not to die unchronicled.

  But even this issue was fogged by propaganda suggesting that Biafrans themselves were ‘playing up the issue’ and using the hunger of their own people to solicit world sympathy for their political aspirations. There is not one priest, doctor, relief worker or administrator from the dozen European countries who worked in Biafra throughout the last half of 1968 and watched several hundred thousand children die miserably, who could be found to suggest the issue needed any ‘playing up’. The facts were there, the pressmen’s cameras popped and the starvation of the children of Biafra became a world scandal.

  The graver charge is that the Biafrans, and notably Colonel Ojukwu, used the situation and even prevented its amelioration in order to curry support and sympathy. It is so serious, and so much of the mud has stuck, that it would not be possible to write the Biafra story without explaining what really happened.

  It has been explained elsewhere in this book that the starvation of the Biafrans was not an accident, or a mischance, or even a necessary but regrettable by-product of the war. It was a deliberately executed and integral part of the Nigerian war policy. The Nigerian leaders, with commendably greater frankness than the British ever got from their leaders, made few bones about it.