Time Needed To Heal Nigeria’s Wounds

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32199, 19 January 1970, Page 11

Time Needed To Heal Nigeria’s Wounds

IBy LAWRENCE FELLOWS, of the New York Times News Service, through N.Z.P.A.) i LAGOS (Nigeria), January 18. “The nation is relieved,” Major-General Yakubu Gowon said in a broadcast on Thursday night. “All energies will now be bent to the task of reintegration and reconciliation... There is no cause for humiliation on the part of any group of people of this country.. .. The task of reconciliation has truly begun.” The Nigerian leader was exuberant In the afternoon he had received a delegation of five Biafran leaders to accept their formal surrender. One after another, as they walked into the conference room at Dodan Barracks. General Gowon shook their hands and greeted them warmly. “How are you? Glad to see you again,” he said to one. “How are you? Welcome back,” he said to the next. At 2 p.m., LieutenantColonel Phillip Effiong, the Biafran Chief of Staff who had taken over the leadership of the crumbling republic the Saturday before, when General Odumekwu Ojukwu fled with his family and closest: advisers, signed the surrender document, and the war was formally over. I

“ He and General Gowon fell ■ into an embrace. “Honestly,” General Gowon said, “it has been terrible.” It had been a “brutal and destructive” war, and had dragged on for more than 30 months. No-one will ever know precisely what it cost, but something like two million people died, most of them from starvation or disease. Well over a thousand million dollars was spent on the war, much of it on ammunition lobbed uselessly into the unheeding thick forest of ■ what once was Biafra. ) General Ojukwu, who had been until then a lieutenantcolonel in the Nigerian army raised the flag of the independent Biafra on May 30,1967. It was named after the Bight of Biafra on which Port Harcourt lies, i Neither Port Harcourt nor the Bight of Biafra were places of historic interest to the Ibos who led the seccession in what they felt was a matter of life or death for ’ the tribe. In the old days, the Ibos ( had driven lesser tribes down into those torrid swamps and deltas. But now Port Harcourt ' was a thriving oil port; it . was to be the fountain of , Biafra’s wealth, and her outlet to the sea. Port Harcourt fell on July 27, just three weeks after the : war began, and from there the Federal soldiers pressed into the damp forests, although sluggishly. They staved on roads, but these .had been cut across with deep trenches and laced with mines. The moist heat and : the mosquitoes and the pounding rains hampered the ad- . vancing Federal Army. Supply

lines would falter and often fail, and then the soldiers would have to withdraw again. They rarely saw the enemy, for the conflicting armies pounded each other from a distance, sometimes a mile or more.

The battleground was confused by stragglers and deserters, and frightened, hungry civilians, and by snipers who wore similar rags to those the civilians wore, or who could not be seen. The soldiers of both sides might have been more disciplined and efficient had it not been for two coups before the war that claimed many senior officers, and for the secession that split what was left of the Nigerian Army into two lopsided, ill-equip-ped, ill-prepared forces. Of the 32 lieutenantcolonels who survived the last coup, in 1966, 16 were Ibos, including LieutenantColonel Ojukwu himself. Lieutenant-Colonel Effiong, who became a major-general in the Biafran Army, surrendered it as an Ibibio, one of the lesser tribes of the Eastern Region. From the supposedly preponderant North there were only three, including Lieu-tenant-Colonel Gowon who, at 31 years of age, was the only senior officer acceptable enough, on tribal and religious grounds, to take over the leadership of Nigeria, a country four times the size of Britain and- more populous by far than any other in Africa.

Of his army of 10,000, there were perhaps 7000 left after the Ibos and their allies left. The split left him with plenty of riflemen and artillery men,

but not enough cooks and bakers, or clerks and technicians of a variety of special skills.

The Nigerian Army grew, by some accounts, to 150,000, and the Biafran Army to something close to 50,000, Small wonder that they made mistakes, that discipline sometimes failed, or that new recruits sometimes arrived at the front without bullets or without having been taught how to fire their rifles.

With millions of Ibos being pressed closer and closer into their shrinking enclave, cut off from the world except for a few makeshift airstrips that were really just straight stretches of road, growing hungrier and more frightened through the long course of the war, and with all the odds against them, it was no wonder that the rest of the world began to fear the prospect of a massacre, or the starvation of a whole population. The Biafran lobby raised the cry of genocide. Relief organisations clamoured to obtain access to the besieged republic and to the stricken people in the areas of Biafra that had been overrun.

They ran into deep, unexpected resentment in Nigeria, official obstruction, frustrating delays of their supplies in the ports. There had been too little planning, too little understanding of the problems involved, or of Nigerian ’sensibilities. Governments abroad came under heavy pressure to do something for the Biafrans. Some got involved for political reasons of their own, and the assortments of friends

and helpers for one side or the other in the Nigerian civil war were very curiously aligned. Britain found it difficult and embarrassing to maintain the embargo she had first imposed on arms shipments to her strife-torn former colony, especially when the going got tough for the Federal Government. She decided that they should not deny the Federal Army its “traditional supply of arms” without, in effect, choosing sides in the war, and thus spoiling Britain’s neutrality. As aircraft were not part of the “traditional” British supply, the Russians, Czechoslovaks and Egyptians came through with both planes and pilots. Even the Sudanese provided two training aircraft bought from Britain. The United States stood back as best it could, offering relief supplies, relief teams and transport facilities to the Nigerians whenever they chose to ask for them. France and Portugal kept the Biafran military effort alive—not enough to enable the Biafrans to win their war of independence, only enough to create a stand-off of sorts, a crippling one that tore at the fabric of the nation. The Nigerians are exuberant about the outcome of the war. Not only did they win it, they say, but they won it by themselves. It has helped, in some respects, to make them magnanimous. They want to mount the relief programme in Biafra themselves. And if they do not manage it completely, or well, they will certainly con-i trol it. >

They are accepting help

now, although not from everyone, and particularly not from those they think gave too much help to Biafra. The dimensions of the problem are still not known. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are on the roads now, some in desperate need of medical help and special feeding. Many are even more desperately in need of help and are too frightened to come out of their hiding places deep in the bush. It will take time to heal the wounds, but the good will is there, at least on the part of General Gowon. Even without Biafra’s secession, the nation is still split in many ways, and has not been completely welded by the war. But the great confidence that is felt in Nigeria now will make the reunifying process easier. This was the real weight of General Gowon’s broadcast after the Biafrans surrendered.

“The nation will be proud of the fact that the ceremony today at Doddan Barracks, of reunion under the banner of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, was arranged and conducted by Nigerians among ourselves alone,” he said. “No foreign good offices were involved. This is what we always prayed for. We always prayed that we should resolve our problems ourselves free from foreign mentors and go-betweens however well-intentioned. “Thu.',’ F he said. “our nation is come of age.” The cabled photograph shows General Gowon (left) and Colonel Effiong in joyous mood during the formal surrender ceremony.