Colonel Ojukwu replied by saying his people did not wish to accept money or aid from Mr Wilson’s Government, alleging that the sum involved was less than one per cent of the sales of the arms which had caused the disaster in the first place, and that so long as arms shipments went on they found donations of milk from the British Government unpalatable. At the same time he made clear that assistance from the British people would be received with genuine gratitude. However, as Lord Hunt’s mission was concerned with the modalities of administering the Government gift, there was no point in his coming to Biafra.
Some observers in Biafra felt this decision was hasty, since Lord Hunt and his companions could have seen, had they visited Biafra, the practicability of an airlift into Annabelle. But Colonel Ojukwu knew that his people were massively against the Hunt visit. He came within a ace of changing his mind, but an injudicious statement by Mr Thomson to the effect that world opinion would condemn him utterly unless he accepted the Awgu corridor made it impossible for Ojukwu to do other than stick by his original decision.
So for two weeks Lord Hunt visited various war-fronts on the Nigerian side of the fighting line, but had no opportunity to hear arguments other than those advocating the Awgu corridor, which the British Government had said during Hunt’s absence it intended to support. The usefulness of Lord Hunt’s subsequent report has yet to be proved. In later weeks and months it became somewhat doubtful if £250,000 worth of food would ever get delivered to the suffering behind the Nigerian lines, let alone through them.
Some in Britain did see the Biafrans’ anxieties. On 22 July in the House of Commons, protesting against the continuing supply of arms, Mr Hugh Fraser said: ‘In the name of humanity it would be foolish to ship instruments of war which would convert corridors of mercy into avenues of massacre.’*
To make the case for the Awgu corridor more plausible it was necessary to deal with the question of an airlift, notably by denigrating the suitability of Annabelle airport, by now being referred to by its real name of Uli. This was duly done. Mr George Thomson referred to Uli as ‘a rough grass strip’, and said it could not take an airlift. There were, apart from Mr Kirkley, at least a score of journalists within a mile of Whitehall who could have testified that it was not a rough grass strip and could take heavy aircraft. Their experience was not sought, and when the precise specifications of Uli were provided to the Commonwealth Office, they were smoothly and hurriedly brushed aside.
The runway of Uli is 6,000 feet long, that is, twice as long as Enugu runway and half as long again as Port Harcourt. It is 75 feet wide, slightly less than a pilot would like, but wide enough for most undercarriages with room to spare, and it has an all-up load capacity of 75 tons. It was built by the same Biafran who before independence was the project engineer for the construction of the main runways at Lagos and Kano international airports in Nigeria.
Nevertheless, the British Government’s campaign stuck, and millions in Britain were duped into thinking that Colonel Ojukwu was refusing a land corridor under any circumstances, and that in this way he was responsible for any deaths that might occur among the Biafran people.
In point of fact, he never received from the Nigerians, directly or indirectly, a formal proposal for the Awgu corridor. After Mr Arikpo’s press conference, the red herring by then swimming nicely, the matter was dropped. It was briefly raised again by the Biafrans when they met the Nigerians at Niamey, but when the respective arguments were examined for the various alternative proposals, the Nigerians realized that on feasibility alone the Biafran proposals were better, and they then backtracked on everything and told the Biafrans they intended to starve them out. This is described more fully in a later chapter.
However, when he left Niamey to return to Lagos the chief negotiator for the Nigerian side, Mr Allison Ayida, was interviewed by the Observer which published on 28 July 1968 the following:
According to Mr Ayida the Biafrans were prepared to accept a land corridor even without winning their own demand for a day-time air corridor into Biafra, provided the land corridor was patrolled by an armed international police force.
After the Nigerian spokesman at Niamey, Mr Allison Ayida, had made the Nigerian intention plain once and for all, any real hope of getting an agreement to fly, drive or ship food into Biafra went out of the window. It is difficult to see why in this case such a fuss was made about negotiating a corridor at all. The only way to get food in was to fly at night and thus technically at any rate break the blockade. Only the churches realized this, and without clamour or publicity quietly flew in as much food as they could. By this time each of the two church bodies had bought planes of their own, but Wharton still controlled them, and the churches wanted to set up their own operations.
The difficulty was the opposition of Wharton himself to the idea of losing his monopoly of flights into and out of the country. The churches could not hire their own pilots and servicing crews and fly in independently because Wharton’s pilots alone knew the vital landing codes by which a friendly aircraft identified itself to the control tower at Uli.
Apart from the churches, even the Biafrans hesitated to affront Wharton by breaking his monopoly; for one thing they depended on him for their arms flights. But at last they decided to give the codes to the Red Cross and the churches. This was not so easy. One Biafran emissary flying to São Tomé was refused access to the aircraft at Uli by a Wharton pilot because the pilot suspected (quite rightly) that he had the codes in his pocket. It was eventually through a delegate of the Biafrans going via Gabon to Addis Ababa for the Peace Conference that the codes were smuggled out, and in the Ethiopian capital that they were handed over to a representative of the Red Cross, who later passed them on to the churches.
Whether this breaking of his monopoly had anything to do with Wharton’s later activities over the non-arrival of Biafran desperately needed ammunition supplies towards the end of August when the Nigerian ‘final offensive’ was on, is something that only Wharton can answer.
On 15 July Nigerian anti-aircraft fire started from flak-ships in the creeks to the south of Biafra, and Wharton’s pilots decided the pace was getting too hot. They quit and for ten days no planes came into Uli. They eventually started again on 25 July after certain reassurances not entirely uninvolved with hard cash.
On 31 July the Red Cross at last started its own operation from Fernando Poo, an island then a Spanish Colony and much nearer to Biafra than São Tomé, being only forty miles off the coast as opposed to the 180 miles to the Portuguese island. But Fernando Poo was due for independence on 12 October, and the mood of the future government of Africans was not known. In the event the party that won the elections was not the expected one and subsequently proved thoroughly unhelpful, a state of affairs for which the constant pressure brought by the Nigerian Consul on the island was largely responsible.
Many criticisms have been levelled at the International Red Cross from both sides, and from journalists. They are accused of not doing enough, of spending more money on administrative gallivanting than on getting the job done, of being too concerned with not treading on political toes and not concerned enough in passing out relief.
But their position has not been easy. By the nature of their charter they have to remain totally neutral. Their neutrality must not only be kept, it must be seen to be kept. They had to operate on both sides of the fighting line. Certainly they could have been more efficient and made fewer mistakes. But it was the first time any operation of this size and scope had ever been undertaken anywhere. There were teams from various nations attached to the International Red Cross, and other teams from the same nations working under the flag of their own national Red Cross. Thus in Biafra there were two French teams, one attached to the IRC, the other sent by the French Red Cross. The effort was often disparate and uncoordinated. It was to bring some order into the state of affairs that Mr August Lindt, Swiss ambassador to Moscow and a former United Nations senior servant in refugee and famine matters, was
asked by the IRC to come and head the whole operation.
Of the accusations usually made that the IRC was not tough enough in brushing aside the obstacles, one weary spokesman said: ‘Look, here in Biafra we get all the cooperation we need. But on the other side they’ve made it quite plain they don’t want us. They don’t like what we are doing, which is saving lives a lot of them would privately like to see waste away, they don’t like our presence because it prevents them doing certain things we think they would like to do to the civilian population.
‘If we get too stroppy with them they can just as easily order us to leave. OK, fine, so we get a day in the headlines. But what about the million people our supplies are maintaining in life behind the Nigerian lines? What happens to them?’
But one criticism that can reasonably be made is that the International Red Cross in Geneva took a disastrously long time to wake up and get moving. Although they were kept informed from the very earliest days by Mr Jaggi of the urgency of the situation, and although the money that came in from all sources during July ran into millions of dollars, it was not until the last day of the month that the first all-Red Cross plane flew into Uli. Even throughout the month of August, with their own air operation, the Red Cross only brought in 219 tons of food, while the churches with less money and still relying on Wharton for transport shifted over 1,000 tons. But as the generally accepted required tonnage of 300 tons a night would have meant that this combined quantity should have come in every four days, Mr Kirkley’s gloomy prediction came true.
It is not the intent of this chapter to paint gaudy pictures of human suffering; it is rather a chronicle of events to explain to the puzzled reader what really happened. Besides, the pictures have been seen, in newspapers and on television, and highly emotional world-portraits have been painted by scores of journalists and writers about what they saw. A brief résumé will suffice.
By July, 650 refugee camps had been set up and they contained about 700,000 haggard bundles of human flotsam waiting hopelessly for a meal. Outside the camps, squatting in the bush, was the remainder of an estimated four and a half to five million displaced persons. As the price of the available foodstuffs went up, not only the refugees but also those indigenous to the unoccupied zone suffered.
Wildly varying figures have been hazarded to describe the death toll. The author has tried to achieve a consensus of estimates from the best-informed sources within the International Red Cross, the World Council of Churches, the Caritas International and the orders of nuns and priests who did much of the field work of food distribution in the bush villages.
Throughout July and August the politicians postured and the diplomats prevaricated. A land corridor, even if it had been set up at that period, could not conceivably have been in operation in time. The donations from British and West European private citizens were pouring in; several Governments, notably in Scandinavia, indicated privately that they would not be unsympathetic to a request from the Red Cross for the loan of a freighter and aircrew, if asked. The Red Cross in Geneva preferred to negotiate with a private firm whose pilots said they would only fly into Biafra if Nigeria accorded them a safeconduct guarantee; and to ask Lagos for that guarantee. As ever it was refused.
The death-toll spiralled as predicted. Starting at an estimated 400 a day, by its peak it had reached what the four main foreignstaffed bodies of relief workers in Biafra reckoned to be 10,000 a day. The food imports throughout July and August were pitifully small. While some of the deaths occurred in the camps, and could be noted, far more occurred in the villages where no relief percolated at all. As so often, the most heart-breaking tasks and the dirtiest work were undertaken by the Roman Catholics.
There are no words to express nor phrases in this language to convey the heroism of the priests of the Order of the Holy Ghost and the nuns of the Order of the Holy Rosary, both from Ireland. To have to see twenty tiny children brought in in a state of advanced kwashiorkor, to know that you have enough relief food to give ten a chance of living while the others are completely beyond hope; to have to face this sort of thing day in and day out; to age ten years in as many months under the strain; to be bombed and strafed, dirty, tired and hungry and to keep on working, requires the kind of courage that is not given to most men who wear a chestful of war ribbons.
By the end of 1968 the consensus estimate of deaths within unoccupied Biafra was three-quarters of a million, and the most conservative estimate to be found was half a million. The Red Cross, whose colleagues were working on the other side of the fighting line, reported an estimated half a million dead in the Nigerian-occupied area.
It must be stated that much of the food bought with the money donated by the people of Britain, Western Europe and North America that did not go to Biafra direct did not reach the hungry at all. While reporters like Mr Stanford and Mr Noyes Thomas of the News of the World were reporting in June and July the scenes of human degradation they witnessed at Ikot Ekpene, an Ibibio town which Lagos had quite correctly been claiming for twelve weeks to be firmly in their hands, other journalists in Lagos were uncomfortably reporting that piles of donated food were rotting on the docks. Red Cross workers there were complaining of being deliberately frustrated at all official levels.
Despite this, Red Cross sources also later reported quiet efforts by British diplomacy in August and September to persuade the IRC to discontinue their aid to Biafra direct, on the grounds that Biafra was finished anyway, and to hand over the problem on the Nigerian side to the Nigerian Red Cross who, they said, were ‘more efficient’.
In the first week of August 1968 the two church relief organizations, having got the vital landing codes from the Red Cross, also broke away from Wharton and set up their own operations, but still from São Tomé. On 10 August, against all advice, Count Carl Gustav von Rosen, a veteran Swedish pilot from Transair, flew in a hedgehopping daylight relief flight to show it could be done. This was the first flight of yet another relief organization, Nord Church Aid, an association of the Scandinavian and West German Protestant churches. Later the three church organizations merged at São Tomé under the title Joint Church Aid.
Meanwhile the Biafran idea for a separate airport had been resuscitated as hopes to get Nigerian permission for daylight flights into Uli faded. An airport and runway was available at Obilagu, but there were no electrical installations, nor a fully fitted control tower. The Red Cross agreed to fit these off its own account, and work started on 4 August. On 13 August an agreement was signed between Colonel Ojukwu for the Biafran Government and Mr Jaggi for the Red Cross. It provided that either side could rescind the agreement on demand, but that so long as it operated the airport should be demilitarized.
M. Jean Kriller, a Geneva architect, became the Red Cross commandant of the airport. His first act was to insist on the removal of all troops and military equipment, including antiaircraft guns, to outside a five-mile radius of the centre of the runway. The Biafran Army protested that with the advance positions of the Nigerian Army only thirteen miles away, this would affect the defensive position. Colonel Ojukwu backed Kriller, and move they did. Kriller’s next act was to paint three 60-foot-wide white discs at equidistant intervals down the runway with a big red cross painted into each. Thus protected, he took up residence in a tent on the side of the runway. On 20, 24 and 31 August the airport was bombed and rocketed, smack on the target. Half a dozen food-porters were killed and another score injured.
On 1 September 1968 the first token flight into the new airport was made from Fernando Poo. The Red Cross was still trying to get permission from Lagos for daylight flights, and felt its case to be enormously strengthened now that it had its own airport. But the answer was still No. Then on 3 September Lagos changed its mind, or seemed to. Daylight flights would be permissible, but not for Obilagu, only for Uli.
While the Red Cross politely pointed out that it was not at Uli that the relief food flights were coming in any more, but at Obilagu, and argued that if the aim was t
o bring in the maximum amount of food to save lives, then it was at Obilagu that the daylight flights should take place, Colonel Ojukwu’s advisers considered this sudden and to them surprising decision from Nigeria in another light.
Why Uli, and only Uli, they wondered. After thinking it over they could only come up with one answer. Although Uli had been frequently raided by day, that is, when it was out of use, the Biafran anti-aircraft fire, although not terribly accurate, was good enough to force the Nigerian bombers to fly high and to put them off their aim. As a result the actual runway had not been hit with a big bomb. Small rocket craters from diving MiG fighters could be easily filled in. But if the ack-ack were silenced by day to allow the big DC-7s from Fernando Poo and São Tomé to bring in food, it would only need one Nigerian Soviet-built freighter like the Antonovs sometimes seen passing high overhead to sneak into the circuit with a 5,000-lb bomb slung under it to blow a hole in the runway that would close the airport for a fortnight. With the Nigerians sweeping into Aba and preparing for a big push to Owerri, and with the Biafrans desperately short of ammunition and almost scanning the skies for the next arms shipment, Colonel Ojukwu could not risk the destruction of his weapons airport.
On 10 September the Nigerians made a dash for Oguta and secured the town. Although they were pushed out forty-eight hours later, Ojukwu had to rescind his agreement on Obilagu’s exclusivity. When Oguta was occupied, being uncomfortably close to the Uli airfield, Uli was evacuated. It opened again on 14 September, but for three days, with ammunition planes at last beginning to come in, Ojukwu had to give them landing permission at Obilagu. From then on both arms and relief flights came into both airports without discrimination. Not that it mattered much, since there was at that time no Nigerian bomber activity at night and no apparent chance of getting permission for daylight flights to the relief airport. On 23 September Obilagu fell to a big push by the Nigerian First Division and Uli once again became the only operational airport.