Corrected.
Ogbeni Kadiri,
Many thanks for this your last posting.
You know, sometimes a man asks stupid questions in order to get brilliant replies and sometimes a man asks stupid questions and if he already knows the answers listens very carefully to not only what the respondent replies but also listens very carefully to take note of what the respondent doesn't say, what he omits to say.
I have archived your penultimate post under the title"Ogbeni Kadiri tries to pull a fast one on me" (the one in which you want to defend your omission of my words "'starvation of Biafra's soldiers" because (and familiarity breeds that) because you were wrongly anticipating the centre of gravity of in what I was saying, whereas what I was and am saying is very straightforward indeed.
One of the qualities that I most admire about the Prophet of Islam salallahu alaihi wa salaam is that according to the various hadiths (both Shia and Sunni) he never interrupted somebody who was speaking and even more than that, before he himself would take up the thread would ask the one who was speaking to him or before him, "Have you finished?"
I hate hit and run discussions and have always enjoyed more thorough discussions and receiving an education from you mostly over the telephone. Debates are something else, things that willy-nilly that some people always want to win….
Still very sin-cerely
Cornelius
On Saturday, 5 December 2015 21:41:09 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:
I remember your Swedish man, Carl Gustaf von Rosen and his intervention in the Nigerian civil war on the side of Biafra. Without his intervention, perhaps many Biafrans would not have died of starvation. Initially, he was a relief pilot and co-ordinator for the Scandinavian Churches, NORD-CHURCH-AID from the middle of 1968 to the first quarter of 1969. According to the interview he granted to the London Observer of 6 July 1969, von Rosen disclosed, "At Christmas in Biafra 1968, I soon realised that every priest, every doctor, every Black and White man in Biafra was praying for arms and ammunition before food..." He said this to explain his Operation Biafra Baby in May 1969. He had secured Five Mini-Counter-Insurgency-Plane(...MINICOIN) from SAAB company in Malmö. With those planes Von Rosen and his other recruits from Sweden bombed federal held territories in Port Harcourt, Benin, Enugu and Ughelli in May 1969. Then in early June 1969, a DC-7 aircraft marked Swedish Red Cross was flying at nightfall towards Uli Ihiala Air strip in the rebel held territory. The Nigerian Air Force, ordered the DC-7 to change course and land in Port Harcourt for inspection before flying further. The DC-7 marked Swedish Red Cross refused to alter course and obey order. After the third warning was defied, the Nigerian Air Force opened fire and downed the plane thereby exposing the contents of the plane to be arms and ammunitions and not relief supplies that spread all over the place. All the three Swedish crews inside the plane died. Consequently, Nigerian government formally ban all unauthorised night flights through its airspace. It also ended the mandate of International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) to co-ordinate the relief operation in Nigeria and handed it over to the Nigerian Red Cross. August Lindt, the Swiss co-ordinator of the Red Cross operation, was expelled by the Federal government and declared unacceptable as the I.C.R.C.'s representative in Nigeria. Those were the consequences of Von Rosen's intervention and I leave the rest to your judgment if his actions really save more lives than it killed.
You asked, "How could the Federal government not have known what the world knew, that hundreds of thousands of Biafran brothers and sisters were dying of starvation?" From where did you get your information that the Federal government did not know that civilian Biafrans were dying of starvation? Was it not because of that awareness that Gowon offered to open an internationally supervised land corridor from Port Harcourt to the rebel held enclave for the purpose of transporting relief supplies to civilians but was rejected in 1968 by Ojukwu? What do you think the Federal government should have done when it knew non-combatants were dying of starvation? Does it not occur to you that Ojukwu were holding the starving Biafrans as hostage? Why did Ojukwu not capitulate in 1968, when he saw that he could not protect his citizens from starvation, instead of 1970? Those are the questions you should ponder over and answer yourself instead of your biased question framed with the intention of portraying the Federal government as ignorant and wicked.
Israeli military doctrine does not believe in starvation of the Palestinian Brethren as a weapon of war, you wrote; and similarly Nigerian military doctrine did not believe in starvation of the Secessionist Biafrans as a weapon of war. In order to corroborate your assertion on Israeli military doctrine, you wrote, millions of tons of food and other essentials enter Gaza every month. However, you chose to forget and add that million tons of food and other essentials that enter Gaza every month and not every day do so after undergoing inspections at any place so appointed by Israel. Should the Palestinian leader in Gaza reject pre-inspection of goods to Gaza by Israel, as Ojukwu did with the Nigerian government in 1968, the Palestinians in Gaza will die of mass starvation as the Biafrans did between 1968 and 1969. I don't think I have more to contribute on this issue after you might have responded to the questions posed to you above.
S. Kadiri
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2015 08:00:29 -0800
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Igbo QuestionOgbeni Kadiri,
I take it that you do remember the Oyibo man Carl Gustaf von Rosen's support for Biafra .
Do you care to comment on this?
Please answer this important question: How could the Federal government not have known what the world knew, that hundreds of thousands of Biafran brothers and sisters were dying of starvation?
Assuming that you and your own kith and kin had been among the besieged of Biafra, your compassionate heart and soul-mind could have been moved to think differently and should think differently and more in accordance with your mantra "We are all Nigerians" by which token every Igbo Biafran is your kith and kin, all human beings in the one great human family.
Being conversant with the history of the Iranian Revolution (and so would you if discussed the matter with an Ayatollah or two and diverse Iranians ) this is what I had in mind in a previous posting when I mentioned that SAVAK got tired of decimating their own people, the people of Iran, and that at the point where Imam Khomeini said "The army is the people and the people is the army " it was all over for the Shah. About our common humanity this is what I meant by unfortunately in the Biafra War from your perspective as repeatedly given in these discussions, it would seem that "In the case of Biafra – the Igbos were "the other people".
For me, the Igbo people and all the Nigerian people that I lived with in Nigeria for close to four years, who I ate with and in whose houses I slept in safety, they are my people. As Tony Allen says, na di same people. If my Igbo friend Bishop Titus Akanabu is not my brother, then who is he to me? (I talked with him a few days ago, told him to stay away from Boko Haram; he was laughing.)
With your own background one gets the sense that you believe that peace is preferable to war. So please let's not continue to flog a dead horse even if the horse is dead but the dream of Biafra lives on in the hearts of those in which the idea of Biafra lives.
Whether you are a military strategist or not, first of all let's (all of us) tread some common ground:
We agree that a clarion call to arms by which Igbo youths, old men and women, whosesoever would be their leaders and supporters would be pitted against the Nigerian Federal Army and would thereby effectively open up another regional front against the Federal Nigerian Army which has waged a protracted war against a ragtag terror-jihadist Boko Haram in just a small area of Nigeria with no success at all and to date has experienced so many setbacks in routing them, the latest news being that Boko Haram is making a powerful comeback. This would not be good for Nigeria. Nor should Boko Haram be underestimated. Let's face it: Boko Haram is being supported by certain internal and external forces that would like to de-stabilise the nation state Nigeria.
With all of the experience from the past (1967-70) the Biafra talk progressing from mere hot talk (disaffected hot talk/hot air ) to arms actually flowing in to the Biafra nationalist enclave and elsewhere , a detonation of bombs here and there , somewhere in Abuja, Lagos, Military headquarters in Katsina ( thereby igniting the personal wrath of Muhammadu Buhari - or someone/ someones declaring "secession" thereby putting the lives of Igbos serving in the Federal military in jeopardy, we would be back to the déjà vu of 67-70 - with Port Harcourt secured by the Feds and "Biafra" effectively sealed, landlocked, and maybe the prospect of another famine, predatory vultures looming in the air, smelling human carrion on the ground, circling their prey – if the secessionists prove as intractable as you made them out to be, refusing as you said, to let in any convoys laden with food and other life essentials, it would be another humanitarian disaster, inadvertently spelling genocide for Biafra.
Re- your words:" about what I would say if Israel were to blockade Palestinian as Nigeria did to Biafra". That was not my question. My question was what you would say if Israel used a policy of starvation as a weapon of war.
I should like to point out that in the case of Israel and the Pals (millions of tons of food and other essentials enter Gaza every month). Israeli ethics and Israeli military doctrine does not believe in starvation of the Palestinian Brethren as a weapon of war.
Apart from shedding blood , there is no abracadabra mantra or movement by which Biafra can or will come into existence other than through a peaceful constitutional route which I suppose will be possible after a Sovereign National Conference . In short that should be the first stage to a sovereign Biafra – the constitutional path - a referendum could follow shortly thereafter or if the Biafrans because of a shared history and the prospects of a shared economic future opt to remain in Nigeria but with greater regional powers/ concessions then surely these can be negotiated and then, so be it.
What sayest the peaceful Ogbeni Kadiri about this?
Sincerely,
Cornelius
We Sweden
On Friday, 4 December 2015 10:51:36 UTC+1, ogunlakaiye wrote:You seem to me, a times, to be like a bat that can neither be classified a bird nor a mouse. First you began your piece by referring to the Peoples' uprising in Iran that toppled the age long Anglo/American installed puppet King, Shar of Iran. Beset with the marrows of bat you then conflate the Iranian revolution with the Biafran hoodlums and ideological prostitutes fanning the embers of ethno-fascism in Nigeria. I am shocked!!
In your characteristic mix-up and muddle-up, you wrote, "You yourself have provided us with the rationale behind the policy which aimed at using starvation... as a weapon of war to bring the people of Biafra to their knees." I have never at any point in time and space said there was a policy, on the part of the federal government of Nigeria, which aimed at using starvation as a weapon of war to bring the people of Biafra to their knees. There was no such policy that aimed at using starvation against civilians in Biafra. This is what Achebe wrote on that issue, "A statement credited to Chief Obafemi Awolowo and echoed by his cohorts is the most callous and unfortunate: All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don't see why we should feed our enemies fat in order for them to fight harder." (page 233, There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe). Any normal person reading what Achebe wrote would easily discern that he was not sure if Awolowo made the statement therefore the expression, statement credited to Chief Obafemi Awolowo." Even if it was true that Awolowo had advocated for the use of starvation as a weapon of war, it was distinctively clear in the alleged statement to whom the weapon should be deployed. Utilizing the head not only as hat shelf and applying simple gumption, one will understand that enemies which Awolowo was alleged to have cautioned against being fed fat in order for them not to fight harder were Biafran soldiers and not unarmed civilians. Barely a year after the war had started in 1968, Achebe noted, " Gowon ... decided to open up land routes for a 'supervised transport of relief. To the consternation of Gowon, Ojukwu opted out of land routes in favour of increased airlifts of food from São Tomé by international relief agencies (page 211)." But the international relief agencies derive their operating rights from governments voluntarily signing the Geneva Convention and are compelled to a strict adherence to legality no matter how pressing the humanitarian considerations might be. Therefore, Ojukwu actually committed war crime by preventing international relief agencies from transporting relief supplies to non-combatant civilians in Biafra through Nigeria's land corridor even when it was obvious that it would be cheaper and more effective than airlifting from São Tomé. No one else but Ojukwu was responsible for the wellbeing, including food security, of the people in the territory under his control and he should be blamed for those who died of starvation under his watch.It would appear as if you have problem in comprehending a simple statement that in wars, opposing combatants exchange gun shots and bombs and not bread and butter. To say one cannot sneeze and close the mouth simultaneously cannot wisely be misconstrued to mean providing a rationale for self-asphyxiators when it is self-evident that sneezing and closing the mouth at the same time would result to self-asphyxiation. You may not think it was absurd and crazy to throw parties and slaughter cows to Christen new-born babies while there was starvation in Biafra, but I do. While the self-styled Diala (Herren Folk) Igbo were feasting and partying, the Osu (expendable slaves) Igbo were starving to death. The Osu Igbo were chasing lizards to kill for meat and Diala Igbo were killing cows for meat and that is not ridiculous to you in your up-side-down world as Fela had put it. After excerpting from Ahiara Declaration where Ojukwu lamented on the effect of blockade of his rebel held territory, you poured salt on injured flesh by asking what I would say if Israel were to blockade Palestinian, as Nigeria did to Ojukwu's Biafra? To begin with, when the Berlin wall fell in 1989, the backers of Israel, Western World, rejoiced. Yet, Israel picked the blocks from Berlin and added new ones to build the longest and highest wall against the Palestinians without dissenting voice from anywhere
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