The Biafra Story (1969)
Fredrick Forsyth
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 the 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.
In view of this the conclusion becomes inevitable that there was no concession Colonel Ojukwu could have made which would have enabled the relief food to come into Biafra faster and in greater quantities than it did, other than those concessions which Nigeria and Britain wanted him to make, which would have ,entailed the complete demise of his country.
All the 'offers' put forward by the Nigerian Government, often after joint consultation with the British High Commission, and usually accepted and welcomed in good faith by the revealed ingenuous British Parliament, press and public, were on examination to contain the largest tactical and strategic perspectives in favour of the Nigerian Army.
All proposals put forward by Colonel Ojukwu and other concerned parties like the International Red Cross, the Roman Catholic Church, and some newspapers, which contained no built-in military advantage to either side, were flatly turned down by the Nigerians with the full blessing of Whitehall.
This then is the story. Biafra is roughly square in shape. Running down the Eastern edge about a third of the way in is the Cross River, with its fertile valleys and meadows. Along the southern edge just above the creeks and marshes runs another strip of land watered by numerous small rivers which rise in the highlands and flow to the sea. The rest of the country, representing the top left-hand corner of the square, is a plateau, which is also the home of the Ibo.
In pre-war days this/ plateau had the bulk of the population of the Eastern Region, but it was the minority areas to the east and south that grew most of the food. The area as a whole was more or less self-supporting in food, being able to provide all of its carbohydrates and fruit, but importing quantities of meat from the cattle-breeding north of Nigeria, and bringing in by sea dried stockfish from Scandinavia, and salt. The meat and fish represented the protein part of the diet, and although there were goats and chickens inside the country, there were not enough to supply the protein necessary to keep over thirteen million people in good health.
With the blockade and the war the supply of imported protein was cut off. While adults can stay in good health for a long time without adequate protein, children require a constant supply of it.
The Biafrans set up intensive chicken and egg-rearing farms to boost production of the available protein-rich foods. They might have beaten the problem, at least for two years, had it not been compounded by the shrinking of their territerritorial area, the loss of the food-rich peripheral provinces, and the influx of up to five million refugees from those provinces.
By mid-April they had lost the Cross River valley along most of its length and part of the south, the Ibibio homeland in the provinces of Uyo, Annang and Eket, and land containing the richest earth in the country. At about this time reports from the International Red Cross representative in Biafra, Swiss businessman Mr. Heinrich Jaggi, from the Catholic Caritas leaders, from the World Council of Churches, the Biafran Red Cross, and the doctors of several nationalities who had stayed on, showed that the problem was getting serious. The experts were noticing an increasing incidence of kwashi 'okor, a disease which stems from protein deficiency and which mainly affects children. The symptoms are a reddening of the hair, paling of the skin, swelling of the joints and bloating of the flesh as it distends with water. Besides kwashiokor there was anaernia, pellagra, and just plain starvation, the symptoms of the last named being a wasting away to skin and bone. The effects of kwashiokor which was the biggest scourge, are damage to the brain tissues, lethargy, coma and finally death.
At the end of January Mr. Jaggi had appealed to the Red Cross in Geneva to seek permission from both sides for a limited international appeal for medicine, food and clothing. The agreement came from Colonel Ojukwu as soon as he was asked, on 10 February, from Lagos at the end of April. In the meantime the refugee problem had been increasing, though it should be said that a refugee problem is the almost inevitable outcome of any hostilities and no blame can necessarily be attached to governments involved, provided they take reasonable measures to alleviate the sufferings of the displaced until the latter feel safe enough to return home.
However, in the case of the Nigerian Government and mihtary authorities, journalists and relief workers operating in areas far behind the fighting line on the Nigerian side later reported that these authorities consistently frustrated the operations mounted on foreign-donated money to alleviate the suffering, hampered the transport of the relief materials, appropriated transport paid for by foreign donation, and forbade access to areas where suffering was great and risks minimal. The Commander of the Third Nigerian Division, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, left no doubt in the minds of the many reporters who visited him and listened to his speeches that he had no intention of even letting relief workers operate at all to save lives, let alone assisting them. This attitude, which was noticed and reported at all levels, was all the more odd since from the Nigerian standpoint the suffering civilians were their fellow-Nigerians.
The great majority of the civilian population fied from the fighting zone into rather than out of unoccupied Biafra. By the end of February 1968 there was an estimated one million refugees inside the unoccupied zone. In the main these were not Ibos but minority peoples. The extended family system which had assisted the Easterners to absorb their refugees from the North and East eighteen months previously could not operate, since most of the refugees had no relatives with whom to stay. Most therefore huddled in shelters built in the bush on the outskirts of villages, while the Biafran authorities with the assistance of the Red Cross and the Churches set up a chain of refugee camps where the homeless could at least have a share of a roof and a meal a day. Many of these camps were set up in the erupty schools, where most of the housing facilities were already in situ, and later provided targets for the Egyptian pilots of the MiGs and llyushins.
By the end of April, for military reasons explained earlier, the refugee wave had increased alarmingly, to an estimated three and a half million.Caritas and the World Council of Churches, being organizations not operating on the Nigerian side of the fighting line, and not being required by Mr. Jaggi's charter to go through procedural channels before bringing relief, hid decided to go it alone. From early in the year onwards they were purchasing abroad various quantities of food and medicines to fly into Biafra. They had no aircraft or pilots, and therefore came to an arrangement with Mr. Hank Wharton, an American freelance who flew in Biafra's arms shipments from Lisbon twice a week, to buy space on his aircraft. But the quantities that could be brought in in this way were tiny.
From 8 April the Red Cross also started to send in small quantities of relief on Wharton's aircraft, and wishing to ask for or buy their own aircraft and hire'their own pilots, sent in repeated appeals from Geneva to the Nigerian Government asking for safe conduct for clearly marked Red Cross aircraft to fly in by day without getting shot down. These appeals were consistently refused. Attempts were made to overcome the Nigerian fear that Wharton might fly in arms under cover of such daylight flights. First it was proposed that a team of Swiss Red Cross personnel guarantee that Wharton's planes remained on the ground during daylight hours. No. It was feared the relief aircraft might carry weapons. Then it was suggested that Red Cross staff supervise the loading. No. Then that Nigerian Red Cross staff supervise the loading. No. Ojukwu agreed that Nigerian Red Cross staff should accompany each relief flight right into the airport in Biafra. No.
At that time it was still not realized even by the Biafrans that there never was and never would be any intention of letting relief Rights in. While all this was going on the Churches just plodded on regardless, sending in what they could whenever there was space available.
Colonel Ojukwu realized when he had studied the joint reports on the protein deficiency situation in mid-April that time was running short if a major disaster was to be avoided. The problem, so the relief agency representatives told him, was not to buy the food (which they felt sure they could do without much trouble) but to get it into Biafra through the blockade. This was obviously a technical rather than a medical problem and Colonel Ojukwu asked a technical committee to report back to him in the shortest possible time on the various ways in which food could be brought in.
Early in May these technicians brought him their findings. There were three ways of getting food into Biafra;'air, sea and land. The air bridge, if it were to carry sufficient quantities to cope with the problem, would have to be bigger than Wharton's three aircraft could manage, and it would be expensive. But it was the quickest by far. The sea route, through Port Harcourt or up the Niger River, would be slower, but once under way would carry more tonnage of food for less money. The land route, bearing in mind the food would have to come into Nigeria by ship in the first place, cross hundreds of miles of Nigeria to get to Nigerian-occupied Biafra, then be carried down roads made unusable by broken bridges and clogged with Nigerian military traffic, would be slow, arduous and expensive. It offered neither the speed adv?,Lntages of the air bridge nor the cost/efficiency advantages of the sea corridor.
Impressed by the medical men's cry for urgency, Ojukwu opted for an air bridge as a temporary stopgap, and a sea route if possible later to bring in the bulk supplies. Mr. Jaggi and the other relief organization leaders were made aware of the findings of the technical experts and did not demur.
In the middle of May Biafra lost Port Harcourt and another estimated million refugees poured into the heartland, some being indigenes from the city and its environs, others being previous refugees from areas earlier overrun. But the loss of the port did not change the relief options. Uli airport, nicknamed Annabelle, opened up to replace the loss of Port Harcourt airport, and from
the sea the access to the Niger River and the Port of Oguta was still open, if the Nigerians would agree to order their navy to let Red Cross vessels through.
At the end of May the International Red Cross in Geneva had launched its second appeal, this time specifically for Biafra, since Nigeria would not agree.
But all this time the problem had remained unknown to the world public. The story had still not broken. In the middle of June Mr. Leslie Kirkley, Director of Oxfam, visited Biafra for a fifteen-day, fact-finding tour. What he saw disquieted him badly. Simultaneously Michael Leapman of the Sun and Brian Dixon of the Daily Sketch we 're reporting from inside Biafra, and it was these two men who, with their cameramen, saw the story for what it was. In the last days of June the first pictures of small children reduced to living skeletons hit the pages of the London newspapers. Throughout this month the only food that came in from outside was the small amount that could be fitted into the spare space on Wharton's Super Constellations flying down from Lisbon. But with three organizations now jockeying for space on his aircraft, there was more food to be shipped than aircraft to carry it. In the ensuing weeks all three organizations bought their own planes, but Wharton insisted that he should run them, maintain them, and that his pilots should fly them. During these weeks food started to come by ship to the Portuguese off shore island of Sao Tome, which had hitherto only been used as a re-fuelling stop, so that a shorter shuttle service could be set up from the island to Biafra for food, while the arms shipments came the different route from Lisbon to Biafra direct. Thus cargoes of dried milk and bullets once again became separated into different compartments of the Wharton operation.
Before leaving Biafra Mr. Kirkley gave a press conference in which he estimated that unless substantially larger quantities of relief food came into Biafra within six weeks, up to 400,000 children would pass into the 'no hope' period and die of kwashiokor. When asked for a figure of the tonnage required in a hurry to avert this prospect, he named the figure of 300 tons a day (or night).
Back in London this was reported on 2 July in the Evening Standard, but was widely believed to be more 'Biafran propaganda' until on 3 July Mr. Kirkley himself went on the BBC current affairs television programme 'Twenty-Four Hours' and repeated his estimates. Meanwhile public opinion was slowly being awakened by the photographs appearing in the British press. Before leaving Biafra Mr. Kirkley had had a joint meeting with Mr. Jaggi and Colonel Ojukwu, during which the Biafran leader had offered to put not any one, but his best airfield exclusively at the disposal of the relief organizations. This would separate the arms airlift from the food airlift and enhance the chances of Nigeria granting daylight access for the mercy planes. Mr. Jaggi and Mr. Kirkley accepted the offer. On 1 July in London Mr. Kirkley met Lord Shepherd, and on 3 July Mr. George Thomson. During these meetings he gave both ministers the fullest briefing on the size and scope of the problem, the necessity for urgency, the relative merits of the three possible avenues of transit for relief foods, and the offer of an exclusive airfield. As Mr. Kirkley had both landed and taken off at Annabelle airport he was able to inform both ministers that it was capable of taking heavy aircraft like the Super Constellation, and had been doing so for several weeks. Here, observers thought, was an excellent opportunity for Britain to use the influence for good which her arms sales to Lagos had (in the view of the Labour Government) given her in the Nigerian capital. A request was duly sent to General Gowon asking him to permit daylight flights of Red Cross planes into Biafra. His reply, which came on the afternoon of 5 July and was published in the evening newspapers, was brief and to the point. He would order any Red Cross planes flying in to be shot down.
Mr. Harold Wilson apparently had his moral sun-ray lamp handy. In a telegram reply to Mr Leslie Kirkley who had headed a delegation to him asking him to use his influence on Lagos, he replied that General Gowon had only meant that he would shoot down unauthorized planes flying into Biafra. As there were no Gowon-authorized planes, the point became academic and has remained so ever since.
The British Government had taken a slap in the face from Nigeria, and something had to be done to restore harmony to the partnership. It was. On 8 July the Nigerian Foreign Minister, Mr. Okoi Arikpo, held a press conference in Lagos in which he proposed a land corridor. Food would be brought by ship into Lagos. From there it would be airlifted to Enugu, safely in Nigerian hands, and then convoyed by road to a point south of Awgu, captured the previous month by Federal forces. There the food would be left on the road, in the hopes that the 'rebels' would come and take it.
The proposal was hailed. By the British Government and Press as a most magnanimous gesture No one bothered to point out that it was as expensive to bring a ship into Lagos as into Sao Tome, or Fernando Po, or the Niger River; or that an airlift from Lagos to Enugu was as expensive as an airlift from Sao Tome to Annabelle; or that the Nigerians had said an airlift could not work due to weather conditions, lack of planes and pilots; or that they did not have the trucks to run a shuttle of 300 tons a day from Enugu to Awgu; or that bitter fighting was going on around Awgu still.
In point of fact, agreement to the idea as elaborated by Mr., Arikpo was not necessary, since the cooperation of the Biafrans in the plan was not required. Actually, not one packet of dried milk powder was ever taken to Awgu for use inside unoccupied Biafra, or laid on the road for the rebels to pick up. So far as one can discern this was never even intended.
From the Biafran standpoint it was not in any case any longer simply a technical problem. There was enormous antagonism inside the country, not from Colonel Ojukwu but from the ordinary people, to the idea of taking any food at all by courtesy of the Nigerian Army. Many expressed the wish that they would prefer to do without than take food handouts from their persecutors. Then there was the question of poison. There had recently been incidents of people dying mysteriously after eating foodstuffs bought across the Niger in the Midwest by bona fide contrabandiers. An analysis of samples made at Ihiala hospital laboratory revealed that white arsenic and other toxic substances had been present in the food, This was ridiculed abroad, but non-involved foreigners inside Biafra, notably the journalist Mr. Anthony HaydenGuest, also investigated and came to the view that the reports were not propaganda. The damage done in physical terms was small, but in psychological terms enormous. For many people food from Nigeria meant poisoned food, and these people were not all Biafrans. An Irish priest said, 'I cannot give a cup of milk I know has come from Nigeria to a small baby. However small the chance, it's too big." The overriding question was the military one. Colonel Ojukwu's military chiefs reported there was a big build-up ot Nigerian military equipment going on from Enugu to Awgu, ,and for them to lower their defences to let through relief supDaily Telegraph, 8 July 1968. Father Kevin Doheny, of the Order of the Holy Ghost, at Okpu la Mission, August 1968, to the author, plies would simply open up a defenceless avenue into the heart of Biafra. Could they trust the Nigerian Army not to use it to run through armoured cars, men and guns? On previous experience the answer was no.
At a press conference at Aba on 17 July Colonel Ojukwu made his position plain. He wanted an airlift in the short term as the quickest means of getting the job done. He proposed either a neutral river route up the Niger, or a demilitarized land corridor from Port Harcourt to the front line, to, bring in the bulk supplies. He could not agree to food supplies that passed through Nigerian hands unobserved and unescorted by neutral foreign personnel, nor to a corridor that was uniquely under the control of the Nigerian Army. That night he flew off to Niamey, capital of Niger Republic, at the invitation of the Organization for African Unity's Committee on Nigeria. Here again he elaborated the choices open, if it was intended to solve the problem rather than play politics.
In Britain the Enugu-Awgu. plan was strongly supported by the Government with everything it could muster. Alternative proposals were impatiently brushed away. The Government, increasingly aware of public outcry, offered E250,000 to Nigeria to help with the problem. Although the issues at stake, the options open, and the technical eyewitness evidence were either known or available, the Government decided to send Lord Hunt out to tour Nigeria and Biafra to decide how best the British donation could be administered.
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 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 an 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 corr idor 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 ;E250,000 worth of food would ever get delivered to the suffering beWnd 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 S.%o Tome 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 Po, an island then a Spanish Colony and much nearer to Biafra than Sao Tome, being only forty miles off the coast as opposed to the 180 miles to the Portuguese island. But Fernando Po 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.
I 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 opoperation 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 French Red Cross. The effolrt 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, and 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. O. K., 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 word-portraits have been painted by scores of journalists and writers about what they saw. A brief r6sum6 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 safe-conduct 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 foreign-staffed 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 heartbreaking 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 kwashiokor, 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 areas.
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 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 S.1o Tome. 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 Sao Tome 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 local food-porters were killed and another score injured.
On I September 1968 the first token flight into the new airport was made from Fernando 136o. 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 to 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 Pdo and S1o-Tome to bring in food, it would only need one Nigerian Soviet-built freighter like the Antonovs sometimes 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 Colonel 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.
Since that time Lagos has again offered to permit daylight flights for relief planes. Ojukwu has again been widely accused of having refused this, and in consequence of being wholly responsible for the famine. What he said was that he would agree to daylight flights to any airport other than Uli, on which he dare not risk an accurate daylight attack with heavyweight bombs.
For the rest of the year, from 1 October to 31 December, the flights continued by night into Uli. During October Canada lent the Red Cross a Hercules freighter with a carrying capacity of twenty-eight tons per flight. Basing their estimates on two flights per night for this aircraft, the Red Cross prepared a hopeful plan for November. But after eleven Rights the Hercules was grounded on orders from Ottawa, and later withdrawn. In December the American Government offered eight Globemaster transports, each with a capacity of over thirty tons, four to the Red Cross and four to the churches. Great hopes were placed on these aircraft, which were due to go into operation after the New Year.
But also in December the Government of Equatorial Guinea, which now ran Fernando Po, informed the Red Cross that it could no longer carry diesel oil for its distribution trucks or oxygen bottles for its surgical operations. This change of policy originated, apparently, on the night the Guinean Interior Minister turned up drunk at the airport with the Nigerian Consul and created a disturbance in which one of the freighter pilots spoke his mind.
In October, night bombing of UH airport started. The bombing was done by a piston-engined transport plane from the Nigerian Air Force which droned around overhead for two or three hours each night dropping large-sized bombs at odd intervals. They were not particularly dangerous as with all the airport lights extinguished the plane could not find the. airfield in the darkness. But it was uncomfortable to lie face down in the passenger waiting lounge for hours waiting for the next shriek as a bomb plummeted into the forest nearby. One had the sense of unwillingly partaking in a game of Russian roulette.
By the end of November the kwashiokor scourge had been brought under control, though not entirely eradicated. Most of those surviving children who had suffered from it, although on the way to recovery, could relapse at any time if the tenuous supply line broke completely. By December a new menace threatened - measles. Along the West African coast measles epidemics among children occur regularly and usually have a mortality rate of five per cent. But a British paediatrician who had done long service in West Africa estimated that the mortality rate would be more like twenty per cent in wartime conditions.
A million and a half children were likely to suffer from it during January; that put the forecast death toll at another 300,000 children. In the nick of time, with the aid of UNICEF and other children's organizations, the necessary vaccine was flown in, packed in the special cases needed to keep the vaccine at the required low temperature, and wholesale vaccination began.
As the new year approached it became clear that the next problem would be a lack of the staple carbohydrate foods like yams cassava and rice. The January harvest was predicted as bein; a small one, partly because in some areas the seed yams had been eaten the previous harvest, partly because unripe crops had been harvested prematurely and consumed. Efforts were being made to bring in supplies of these as well, but because of their greater weight the problem of transporting a far greater tonnage called for more and heavier aircraft, or vigorous efforts to persuade the Nigerians to permit food ships to pass up the Niger.
On balance, the effort to save the children of Biafra was alternately a heroic and abysmal performance. Despite all the efforts, not one packet of food ever entered Biafra 'legally'. Everything that came in entered by a process of breaking the Nigerian blockade. In the six months from the time Mr. Kirkley gave his six Weeks deadline and his estimate of a needed 300 tons of food a night, the Red Cross brought in 6,847 tons and the combined churches about 7,500 tons. In 180 nigbts of possible flying, these 14,374 tons of food worked out at an average of 80 tons a night only. But even the average is misleading; the time when the food was really needed and could have saved two or three hundred thousand children's lives was in the first fifty days after I July. But at that time virtually nothing came in.
More than the pogroms of 1966, more than the war casualties, more than the terror bombings, it was the experience of watching helplessly their children waste away and die that gave birth in the Biafran people to a deep and unrelenting loathing of the Nigerians, their Government and the Government of Britain. It is a feeling that will one day reap a bitter harvest unless the two peoples are kept apart by the Niger River.
The British Government, behind the fagade of claiming to be doing all it could to ease the situation, fully went along with Nigeria's wishes after the snub of 5 July. Far from doing what it could to persuade Lagos to let the food go through to Biafra, the British Government did the opposite. Mr. Van Walsum, the highly respected former Mayor of Rotterdam, ex-Member of Parliament and Senator, present chairman of the Dutch Ad Hoc National Committee for Biafra Relief, has already said publicly he is prepared to testify that reports that the British Government and the American State Separtment during August and September brought 'massive political pressure' on the International Red Cross in Geneva not to send any help at all to Biafra are accurate. Checks by British journalists direct with the IRC in Geneva have confirmed Van Walsum's statement.
It may well be that later and fuller study will reveal that out of a consistently shabby policy on this issue the British Government's attempted interference with relief supplies to helpless African children was the most scabrous act of all. Statement to Mr. Peter Gatacre, quoted by Mr. Gatacre in a letter to The Times, 2 December 1968.
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