'Not genocide': Biafran refugees
EC Ejiogu (“In search of a new spirit of African unity”, May 25) asserts that pan-Africanism in a postcolonial context must accommodate diversity if it is to prevent genocides such as allegedly occurred during the 1967 to 1970 Nigerian civil war.
But there was no genocide in Nigeria, as I confirmed through dozens of interviews with military and civilian leaders of the Biafran secession immediately after the war. Biafra’s “head of state”, the late Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, told me he knew that political reunification and control of oil, not genocide, was the aim of the federal government. But he gambled that the worsening humanitarian crisis in his embattled enclave would spur Western intervention and diplomatic recognition, ensuring Ibo domination of the eastern region and beyond.
Nearly all the Ibo civilian deaths were from disease and hunger during the final 18 months of the conflict and they were as much the victims of Ojukwu’s political ambition as of Nigerian military action. Under the “no victors, no vanquished” policy of Nigerian leader General Yakubu Gowon, all who participated in the rebellion were granted full amnesty. Within weeks I met several prominent Biafrans who had returned to Lagos to reclaim their properties, collect rents and seek job reinstatement.
Gowon is now a revered senior statesman and last weekend he was in Lesotho as head of the African Union’s election-observation mission.
This reminds us that any accommodation of diversity in Africa or elsewhere should be based on the rule of law and constitutional governance, not Ejiogu’s anachronistic appeal to ethnic nationalism. — John Stremlau, author of ‘The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War’