Remembering Biafra

[Frédéric Mégret is the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, McGill University and the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School]

In times of great pain, remembrance, especially when memory is both complex and selective, is an indispensable resource of contextualization. Between 1967 and 1970, as many as 2 million members of the Igbo group were killed after the Nigerian province of Biafra attempted to secede, most of them civilians and children. Hunger, as it had been in the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward, was a central plank of how civilians were killed, following a ruthless blockade imposed on the secessionist province, compounded by the bombing of farm and agricultural supplies. The blockade was meant to starve the Biafran population into submission, urging the Biafran government to renounce its secession. It succeeded with the collapse of Biafra.

That fact alone and its neglect should be cause for deep introspection. That these millions of deaths are so largely written out of dominant histories of international law or even genocide studies attests to its still largely western-centric narrative, as well as lingering revisionism. Whether it was a genocide or not, it was surely an untold horror and a stain on the conscience of the international community. But the question of whether it was a genocide did and continues to matter, even if it sometimes may seem to matter too much, given the possibility that equally severe war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed. Indeed, already at the time the claim that Biafra was a genocide must be seen as part of the reimagining of relations between the Third World and the West, the crystallization of new humanitarian sensitivity and a contestation of how genocide might be committed.

The Protagonists

From the start, that claim seemed hard to disentangle from the swirling geopolitics of the conflict, in the midst of the Cold War. The Biafran independence movement was certainly keen on enlisting the support of foreign states by portraying killings as genocide and engaged in what might today be described as a form of “lawfare” to that effect. The Nigerian government, by contrast, was adamant that this was a slur but consistently prevented foreign journalists from travelling outside Lagos until Biafra had been reclaimed.

This opposition was replicated internationally with each side enlisting its backers. On one hand, the British supported Nigeria and shipped extensive weaponry to the Nigerian armed forces. France discreetly supported the rebels and led the charge that the situation in Biafra was a genocide, enlisting popular support for Biafran victims of the conflict. The US was broadly pro-Nigerian government, but a significant pro-Biafra lobby emerged, with future President Richard Nixon insisting that “the desire of central government of Nigeria to pursue total and unconditional victory (…) means wholesale atrocities and genocide.”

Interestingly, in Israel, the country born from the trauma of the Holocaust, the question attracted considerable attention, compounded by the metaphorical and sometimes literal identification of Ibos with Jews, and of the comparison between events in Biafra and the Holocaust. The Government emphasized that it very much sympathized with the plight of civilians but could not intervene in a domestic matter and that severing relations with Nigeria, a major partner in Africa, was just not on the table. The Knesset nonetheless organized a public debate on whether genocide was occurring, with many speakers from both the right and the left concluding that it was. Shmuel Tamir insisted that offering aid and food was not sufficient to the task and emphasized that “The children, women, and men of Biafra are becoming skeletons not as a result of natural disasters (…) They, the Biafrans, are being killed by the siege intended to commit the crime of genocide against the civilian population, as defined in international law and Israeli law alike.” A group of Knesset members sought a Security Council meeting and even the creation of an “international relief force to provide urgent assistance to the people of Biafra by air, sea, and land, with or without Nigeria’s consent, (…) and break the siege designed to exterminate the Biafrans.” 

In the broader Jewish diaspora, the American Jewish Congress’s Commission on international affairs also mobilized and wrote a memo pointing to the question of whether there was genocide occurring in Biafra as “one of the most troubling aspects of the conflict,” concluding that “That there has or will be deliberate genocide in the sense of the Federal government attempting to wipe out the Ibo people, is debatable. That there have been large-scale pogroms and indiscriminate killings is irrefutable and widely acknowledged even by Nigerian officials.” Maxwell T. Cohen, the first Jewish Dean of McGill University’s Faculty of Law, emerged as a zealous advisor to the Biafran Government on the Genocide Convention. The US Jewish community was a leading voice in the effort to provide assistance, lobbying the Senate to that effect. 

An attempt was made to provide a more incontrovertible international view by sending a team of international observers from Britain, Canada, Poland, Sweden, the United Nations, and the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The team travelled to Nigeria and issued several reports over a period of 18 months. It was supported by the UK and widely understood to be a ploy to speak against the genocide claim. Its output was indeed most notable for voicing skepticism that genocide had occurred, laconically pointing out in one report that “The observers neither saw nor heard of any evidence of genocide in the newly liberated areas visited.” That statement, however, did not seem backed by any extensive discussion of the components of genocide and the team conspicuously failed to explore areas such as Owerri that had just been overrun by the Nigerian army. As Maxwell Cohen pointed out, “The singular aspect of all these Commissions is the fact that none of them has ever gone into Biafra. Not a single one.” The later judgment of history on the international team has not been generous.

Finally, and perhaps most relevantly, Biafra emerged as a cause célèbre globally. “Biafra committees” were created around the world and the conflict had extraordinary resonance as crystallizing an early humanitarian sensitivity. Maxwell Cohen contrasted the “duplicity of governments” with the fact that “the moral dynamic tone has been set by college students in the United States and all over the world,” and extolled “the magnificent role taken by a youthful generation in appealing to and reflecting the conscience of the world with respect to Biafra.”

The Genocide Question

Whatever interest various parties might have in labelling the events as genocide or not genocide, the question itself would not simply go away. There were declarations by members of the Nigerian armed forces that were particularly alarming. Colonel Benjamin Atakunle was on the record that “I want to see no Red Cross, no Caritas, no World Council of Churches, no Pope, no missionary, and no UN delegation. I want to prevent even one Ibo having even one piece to eat before their capitulation” and that “If the children must die first, then that is too bad, just too bad.” In effect, all international aid was blocked from reaching the territory.

The fact that the Nigerian armed forces had previously massacred as many as 30, 000 Ibos in Northern Nigeria in 1966 also suggested that the threat against them had not started with the war and should be situated in a broader temporal context. There was fear that the collapse of Biafra would, on top of the already existing famine, lead to a final massacre by federal troops. In effect, the numbers were staggering and almost spoke for themselves based on what has since been more explicitly understood as the possibility of inferring intent from a pattern of massacres.

At the same time, the Nigerian government evidently did not make committing genocide its explicit policy, rendering the search for a smoking gun arduous. The International Observer Team noted that surrendering Biafran troops had not been executed; local committees administered abandoned Ibo properties in the hope that their populations would return; there were as many as 30 000 Ibos living in the rest of Nigeria, some holding positions in the Federal Government. The ranking Canadian member of the team of international observers suggested crassly in a press conference that there were considerable supplies in the areas where it was most needed but that “If they are stupid enough to go away from the food, they’re going to get hungry.” And although the Government of Nigeria certainly impeded access to foodstuffs, it was also involved in lengthy negotiations with the ICRC.

One of the central debates at the time was whether the events of Biafra were better described as a war or a genocide, as reflected to this day in the ambiguity with which they are referred to (Nigerian civil war/Biafra genocide). There was little doubt that an armed conflict was going on and that the Nigerian army, whatever other goals it might have pursued, was very intent on defeating Biafran forces. There was also little doubt that the Biafrans fought and fought back for what they understood to be their right to political self-determination, including by seeking at one point to march on Lagos. As Louis Henkin put it, “while genocide is illegal, civil war is not,” and that included the fact that neither secession nor its repression were as such prohibited under international law. How could something that was not in itself fundamentally illegal lapse into the crime of crimes?

Adding to the complexity, the Biafran army committed massacres against other minorities which suggested that it was certainly capable of similar behavior but for the fact that it was on the defensive militarily. It is, of course, unclear what incidence that should have had on whether the government of Nigeria was itself committing genocide. But the agency of the Biafran leadership and its evident military activities complicated attempts to portray the events as unmistakably genocidal. The fact that the Biafra authorities had refused the creation of a corridor to deliver humanitarian supplies also seemed to have cut the chain of causality (although they may have had valid reasons of their own not to take that risk).

The conflict paradigm was particularly apparent in the reports produced by the team of international observers. One Knesset member who was otherwise very willing to condemn the events of Biafra, Abraham Verdiger, noted the difference between the events there and the Holocaust emphasizing the defenselessness of the Jews during the latter, which “was not due to a side-by-side war, nor was it because one side holding weapons prevailed and decided to eliminate its enemy”. In Biafra, he pointed out, there were no concentration camps and gas chambers and what transpired was “a war of one armed side against a less armed side, of army against army, and of suffering on both sides, where the weak suffer more, of course.”

The tendency to pit genocide and war against each other as fully incompatible paradigms has since been criticized as unhelpful generally and against the grain legally, in a context where “the intention to defeat a state militarily can co-exist with an intention to destroy a group’s social power and ability to resist.” Still, the fact that Biafrans fought back with French helicopters did not fit the then at least dominant view that genocide was averred only in the case of perfectly “innocent” victims.

The other issue of great contention was the connection between hunger and genocide. The conflict paradigm made the famine appear as a consequence of war (problematic as it may have been even under a war paradigm) rather than a necessarily or even specifically genocidal endeavor. Maxwell T. Cohen nonetheless ridiculed the fact that the team of international observers did not deal with starvation even as 6 000 to 8 000 people died daily noting that “When you create a condition which impairs the life and the ability to function of people and that condition is part of the National Policy, that condition is a violation of the International Laws against Genocide. When you make it impossible for people to eat, they die.” He notably insisted on the long-term effects of malnutrition on children. At the time, it was not entirely clear to commentators to what extent starvation might be disallowed even as a modality of war, but one author cautioned about a tipping point beyond which it could become genocidal if starvation was no longer directed at obtaining capitulation.

Biafra and Beyond

The legacy of Biafra continues to haunt the history of Nigeria and beyond. It raised questions about global complicity in the face of atrocity, notably as a result of arms transfers. The blockade itself could only endure because most states were satisfied that the Nigerian government could deal with a secessionist movement on its own terms. The Biafran precedent also more broadly problematized the nature of genocide. It solidified an emerging intellectual rift between some genocide scholars and the international law understanding of the crime of genocide in which, somewhat ironically, the former argued for a narrower definition than the latter, taking issue with the possibility of committing genocide by destroying a group merely “in part.”  

There was at any rate a dearth of serious legal analysis of the possibility that genocide had occurred, as if international lawyers had surrendered the issue to the general commentariat. There was also, even more strikingly in retrospect, a complete absence of trials or even discussion of their prospect. The lack of intellectual relays for the claim that a genocide did occur, particularly among international lawyers, has made the case to that effect by Biafrans since somewhat inaudible, a reflection, arguably, of some of the deeper inequities of the universalist gaze. This emphasizes the degree to which any claim about genocide in a given situation is also a claim about what fundamentally ought to constitute genocide. Famine-induced genocide during an armed conflict may at the time have been an awkward fit from the perspective of the Holocaust but, as many leading voices recognized at the time, no two genocides are ever exactly alike.

Photo attribution: “Flag map of Biafra” by Stasyan117 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0