Calls To Avoid Genocide

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32194, 13 January 1970, Page 9

Calls To Avoid Genocide

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) ROME, January 12. Pope Paul called on Nigerian troops to avoid genocide in what he called the “very, very alarming” situation in the civil war.

Speaking to pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, the Pontiff said that the war seemed to be reaching its conclusion “with the terror of possible reprisals and massacres of a defenceless population, exhausted by privations, by hunger and by the loss of everything. - “A fear torments public opinion: that the victory of arms may bring with it,the killing of innumerable gftple. There are those who even fear a sort of genocide“We to exclude such a boro-tving hypothesis for the j.«mour of the African people .and of those responsible who have themselves excluded it with so many explicit assurances.” The Pontiff said: “Today it is weapons which decide. God

wills that it may at least be followed by the effective end of the war and a return to normality and concord.” Lord Brockway, chairman of the British Committee for Peace in Nigeria, said last night that a United Nations peace-keeping force should be sent immediately to Nigeria to prevent genocide. The Left-wing peer has sent a telegram to the United Nations Secretary-General (U Thant) urging the prevention of “indiscriminate slaughter.”

At his London home, Lord Brockway said: “I have never thought that the Nigerian forces desired genocide, but the sheer course of the war now, if not stopped, will I bring about genocide on a considerable scale.”