Ikechukwu Obi
By 1967, the West (USA, Britain etc) and the East (USSR) were locked in a bitter Cold War, an epoch of history where the two ideological divides did everything but go to war directly. Oh, they often fought using proxies but refrained from attacking each other directly. The norm in that era was that wherever one power bloc backed one party to a conflict, the other covertly and sometimes openly fed the other side with weapons etc.
By the time the Biafra War broke out in 1967, East and West were already in bitter armed conflict in Vietnam, had broken Korea into two and were bickering bitterly over Cuba, a tiny communist island on America’s southern toe. Their influences had also turned many South American countries to ‘banana republics’ and created insurgencies in Malaysia and Indonesia.
But spectacularly, it was in Biafra that East and West agreed to support one party to a conflict against the other. It was in Biafra that the Soviet Union quietly joined hands with an ideological foe to achieve dark objectives and then turned round to sweep all the atrocities under the carpet. The UN was nowhere to be seen and the Security Council were more interested in securing their own businesses.
In Biafra, America, the head of the so-called Free World, looked the other way out of respect for the diplomacy of ‘spheres of influence’ I guess, while its closest ally Britain propped up Nigeria. On the other hand, the Soviet Union who would ordinarily be expected to take the opposite side in the tradition of the Cold War (as I stated earlier) or at least, stay away from a conflict Britain was a party to, actively joined on Britain’s side.
Thus, while Britain supplied Gowon with weapons – machine guns, bullets, tanks etc, the Soviet Union actually built full stretch runways at Kaduna and Calabar, donated Ilyushin bombers piloted by its own personnel which dropped napalm bombs on Biafra markets, refugee camps and under-the-woods schools. This unholy collaboration at the height of the Cold War speaks to several questions –
- What did foreigners see of the new country Biafra that so scared them that they had to kill it by all means?
- Yes, it was business, all war is business (Ajaokuta Steel project was later given to the Russians as compensation under a 1968 Soviet-Nigeria Pact; see how they made a mess of it), but who told these Russians that Biafra could not similarly engage them on Biafra projects if they sided with the new country? What factors made them choose the Nigerian side?
- With benefit of hindsight, can we say Nigeria’s present predicament is a direct and desired result of what the world wanted at that time?
- How come the whole world went gaga over American war crimes in Vietnam (particularly the My Lai massacre which occurred in 1968 while the Biafran war was still ongoing) but pretended they didn’t see Col. Murtala Mohammed’s genocide at Asaba a year earlier?
Many Nigerians wonder why Biafra is still a major issue in the minds of Ndi Igbo. There’s no gainsaying that it is because of this foreign aspect of many unanswered puzzles about events in Nigeria’s history between 1967 and 1970. If history is an explanatory or descriptive art, it does nothing to help the Biafra issue. The questions are more than the answers.
