The Indigenous People of Biafra
IPOB, has reacted to the claim by President Muhammadu Buhari where he was
quoted as saying that Nigerian Army was soft on Biafra during the 1966 Civil
War.
President Buhari had during a
meeting with the Red Cross Society at the presidential villa said that the
Nigerian Army was soft on Biafrans during the Civil War.
IPOB said the President’s
statement was not only lies and strange but ”full of contradictions in the face
of quantum evidence to the contrary chronicled by independent observers of the
war time atrocities committed by the Nigerian forces against innocent Biafran
civilians.”
IPOB’s statement was entitled
“Civil War: Why Nigerian Army wasn’t hard on Biafrans. A Rejoinder, by the IPOB
Central Command of the Directorate of States, signed and made available to
reporters on Tuesday by its Media and Publicity Secretary, Comrade Emma
Powerful .
The statement added, “President
Buhari’s comment was not only full of false and strange, but contradictory in
the face of quantum evidence to the contrary, chronicled by independent
observers of the war time atrocities committed by the Nigerian armed forces
against innocent Biafran civilians.
“It is also a self-contradictory
statement from what he had told National Youth Corp members in his house in
Daura, Katsina State.”
According to the pro-Biafra
group, “to better understand the Nigerian Army atrocities during the war
against Biafrans, one needs to trace back to 1945 and then 1953 when the
Hausa-Fulani political leadership in Northern Nigeria planned and executed two
premeditated pogroms on Biafran immigrant populations in Jos and Kano in an
unpatriotic and envy-driven opposition to the leading role Biafrans played in
the struggle for Nigeria’s independence from Britain.”
IPOB recalled that vast numbers
of Easterners, not just Igbos, were murdered on those occasions and their
properties looted or destroyed, adding that neither in Kano nor Jos did the
colonial regime apprehend or prosecute anyone for these massacres and
destruction.
It added that “The perpetrators,
who subsequently seized power in 1966 on the blood of their fellow officers of
Eastern extraction, continued their bloodletting that directly led to the war.
And when the war came, Gowon deceptively labelled it a police action, but what
went on underneath was a genocide of epic proportions.
“There were extensive coverage of
the genocide in the international media throughout its duration. According to
accounts, Buhari committed grave genocidal atrocities of his own in the
theatres where he participated or commanded, namely the battles for Nsukka,
Abagana and Nkpor Junction, where he had held command positions. This is
subject of an ongoing suit filed at the ICC by IPOB.”
IPOB further stated that, “during
the battles for these sectors, Buhari’s officers and men torched entire
villages and massacred the civilians that could not be evacuated before the
enemy arrived. These included children, the sick, infirm and elderly. At the
conclusion of the massacres, the soldiers began their macabre dance of
jubilation and Buhari was said to have told them that ‘Nnewi is next.
Yes-‘next’ -as in the next massacre.
“It was on the heels and ashes of
these genocide that the General Gowon had, during the war, boasted publicly
that his men had killed three million Biafrans.
“But given that the numerical
strength of the entire Biafran armed forces hovered around 50,000 men, one can
only concluded that the three million slaughtered were hapless Biafran
civilians.
“Such atrocities are the reason
why history of the Nigerian Biafra war was hurriedlremoved from school
curriculum. “Apart from Buhari, there were other self-confessed butchers of
Biafrans.
“One is Benjamin Adekunle,
described then as a notoriously gruesome commander of Nigerian forces who had
no qualms in boasting about the goal of his horrendous mission to exterminate
Biafrans.
“He stated during his August 1968
press conference, attended by journalists including those from the
international media that, ‘We shoot at everything that moves, and when our
forces march into the center of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything, even at
things that do not move.
“True to his e and type, Adekunle
duly carried through his threat with clinical precision both on his ‘everything
that moves’- targeting, especially Southern Igboland where his forces
slaughtered hundreds of thousands, and on the ‘things that do not move’-assault
category. Adekunle’s infamous destruction of the famed Biafran economic and
social infrastructure was indescribably barbaric.
“In July 1968, the British
mission in Nigeria estimated that 200-300 Biafrans were dying every day.
However, these estimates were based on numbers reported by the Nigerian
government, as the British did not have access to the Biafran enclaves.
“Two months later, during the
height of the crisis, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which
traversed Biafra during the war estimated 8,000 and 10,000 deaths per day.”
“It obtained these figures based
on random samples of death rates in villages, refugee camps and hospitals
across Biafra, and it cautioned that the estimates were likely to be
conservative.
“According to credible reports,
Nigerian troops entered Asaba and began ransacking houses and killing
civilians, claiming they were Biafran sympathizers. Reports demonstrates and
have it that several hundreds were killed individually and in groups at various
locations in the town.
“Later, community leaders
summoned the townspeople to assemble on the morning of October 7, 1967 hoping
to end the violence through a show of support for ‘One Nigeria.’ Hundreds of
men, women, and children, many wearing the ceremonial Akwa ocha (white cloth)
attire paraded along the main street, singing, dancing, and chanting “One
Nigeria.
“At a junction, men and teenage
boys were separated from women and young children, and gathered in an open
square at Ogbe-Osowa village. Then Nigerian troops, under the command of
Murtala Mohammed and Ibrahim Taiwo, gave orders to machine gun “everybody”.
“It was reliably estimated that
more than 700 men and boys were killed, some as young as 12 years old, in
addition to many more killed in the preceding days.
“Bodies of some victims were retrieved
by family members and buried at home. But most were buried in mass graves
without appropriate ceremony.
“Many extended families lost dozens of men and
boys. Federal troops occupied Asaba for many months, during which most of the
towns were ravaged, many women and girls were raped or forcibly “married,” and
large numbers of citizens fled and never returned until the war ended.”
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