the Biafra Story (1969) (27 page)

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 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.

Chapter 12.

The Peace Conferences.

THE eighteen months of the war between July 1967 and December 1968 were punctuated by three peace conferences, all of them abortive. Their failure surprised no one, least of all those on the Biafran side. The prerequisite of any peace conference, if it is to be successful, is that both parties must ipso facto be persuaded that the conflict in progress is no longer susceptible to a military solution within their grasp, and that a negotiated solution is not only desirable but in the long run inevitable.

Those on the outside of the conflict, wishing to see the conference successful, must if their role is to be anything other than a sophistry, do all in their power to bring both parties to that persuasion. For any power outside the conflict to profess a desire to see a peaceful and negotiated solution on the one hand while providing one of the partners with a reason for failing to come to share that view is hypocrisy.

In the case of the three conferences between Nigerians and Biafrans, Britain and America acted diplomatically, and Britain practically, to keep Nigeria locked in her original conviction, which was that a total military solution was feasible and within her grasp, while a negotiated solution was by no means inevitable in the long. run. As a result the Nigerians showed within a few hours of eich conference opening that the presence of their delegation was solely in order to discuss the terms of the Biafran surrender. Failing acceptance of this basis for negotiation, the war must inevitably go on. Which it did. Part of the responsibility for this must rest with the two Powers, and with the supineness of the African states who allowed themselves to be persuaded into a 'hands-off' policy towards a matter which had already become a slur on the whole continent.

The first conference resulted from some diplomatic activity by the Commonwealth Secretary, Mr. Arnold Smith, an amiable Canadian possessed of much goodwill and little astuteness, After contacting Lagos several times in the early spring of 1968 he finally told the Biafrans that the former were willing to talk peace. As this development had been the Biafran desire for the length of the war, they agreed, and an arrangement was made for preliminary talks at Marlborough House, London, to discuss the formula for the conference.

At the time Nigeria was under pressure. Repeated attempts to take the major Biafran city of Port Harcourt from the seaward side had failed, and the commander of the Third Division had promised he could take the city by the end of May.

While the Third Division continued its cumbersome progress across the marshlands towards Port Harcourt, the situation changed alarmingly on the diplomatic side. On 13 April Tanzania recognized Biafra as a sovereign state. This heartened the Biafrans as much as it demoralized the Nigerians, even down to the level of the infantry. It was at this juncture, with Ivory Coast and Gabon thinking of following Tanzania's example, that the Nigerians intimated to Mr. Smith that they were willing to talk. On the Biafran side it was immediately expected that 'staff' was a more appropriate expression, for the fall of Port Harcourt would probably swing diplomatic tendencies in Africa the other way again. And so it proved.