The war was more of an attempt to finish off the pogrom against Ndigbo than keeping Nigeria united.
By Tiko Okoye
The congeniality of the still morning air along the Nsukka-Gakem-Ogoja and Nsukka-Oturkpo bifurcation was shattered by the thudding sound of mortar fire and the cacophony of exiting bullets sounding as if the demons of hell were on a rampage. A lingering bank of smoke, thick and vile-smelling, rolled across the highway. Sleeping birds protested the disturbance by flapping angrily up from the trees and wheeling overhead. The long-anticipated war had commenced in full earnest. Time was exactly 5a.m. on Friday, July 6, 1967.
According to a declassified American diplomatic dispatch, three days after Nigeria’s ‘First Girlfriend,’ Edith Ike had been securely ensconced in West Germany, Gowon addressed the attendees of the July 3, 1967 Supreme Military Council meeting as follows: “Gentlemen, we are going to crush the rebellion.” It was hardly a reconciliatory message, and although he added that “But note that we are going after the rebels, not the Ibos,” those the message was intended for new fully well that the speech had two parts.
The first part was a direct go-and-exterminate-the-Igbo directive because truth be told how could anyone – talk more illiterate soldiers trained to kill – objectively distinguish between a Biafran rebel and a Biafran Igbo? Most of the Nigerian officers clearly understood that the second part of the statement was a politically-correct ploy to placate the international community. And it wasn’t a mere coincidence that the war was primed to start on a Friday, considered a holy day by the Muslim-dominated North. It was an unambiguous signal to the rank and file – dominated by Northern Muslims – that they were embarking on a jihad to exterminate the irksome Igbo infidels.
A certain Mallam Kagu Damboa, described in the dispatch as Regional Editor of the federal government-owned, but now defunct, Morning Post newspaper, “told the American consul in Kaduna: ‘No one should kid himself that this is a fight between the East and the rest of Nigeria. It is a fight between the North and the Ibo,’ adding that ‘the rebels would be flushed out of Enugu within six weeks.’” But Lt. Col. Hassan Katsina, Military Governor of the Northern region prior to the creation of states, wasn’t prepared to be that magnanimous. According to the dispatch, “he bragged that ‘with the level of enthusiasm among soldiers, it would be only hours before Ojukwu and his men are rounded up.’”
The Biafrans conducted daredevilry bombing raids on Makurdi, Kano, Kaduna and Lagos a little after a month that the first shot was fired in the civil war. This provoked an outpouring of consternation and anger. Two days before the air raid on Lagos, two car bombs detonated in quick succession. The first, designed to blow up the Police Headquarters in the Obalende area of Lagos Island made very little impact because the guards refused to open the gate. But that the target was a key national asset only a stone-throw away from the Dodan Barracks where Gowon lived and where all the SMC meetings were taking place dramatically raised the anxiety level.
About two hours later, a second explosion, from explosives in a car parked by a petrol station, set the station on fire and rocked the Yaba area of Lagos. In a diplomatic cable he dispatched to Washington DC 24 hours later, US Ambassador Elbert Matthews remarked that “public reactions could further jeopardise (the) safety of Ibos in Lagos.” And it sure did. According to a follow-up diplomatic cable, “(an unidentified) Lagos resident, who visited the police headquarters after the attack, told the Australian ambassador that ‘Ibos must be killed!’ There was panic all over Lagos. Anti-Igbo riots broke out. Northern soldiers at the 2nd Battalion Barracks in Ikeja used the opportunity to launch a mini-version of the previous year’s torture and massacre of the Igbo in the North.”
Whatever happened in Lagos – and other parts of Nigeria – was nothing compared with the scale of massacres of Ndigbo that took place in Jos and Makurdi – two Christian Northern minorities’ enclaves who didn’t lose one soul in the January 15, 1966 military putsch. It was simply a case of outsiders weeping louder than the bereaved and Christian minorities in the North striving very hard to please their northern slave masters.
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But the bombing raid in Kano had far-reaching consequences. Despite that there were no fatalities, it provoked many more Northern civilians to run to the nearest army depot to enlist to fight. According to the US confidential cable of July 17, 1967, among those who marched angrily to the recruitment offices to be drafted to make up for the unexpectedly high losses the Nigerian army suffered in the early stages of the war were 20,000 veterans who had fought for the British in Burma during WWII. Around 7,000 were accepted. Of these, 5,000 were immediately sent to the front-line.
The secret dossier quoted Damboa of the Morning Post, who “was embedded with some of these veterans under the command of Major Shande, formerly of the 5th Battalion in Kano, which Ojukwu commanded in 1963, as telling a US Consulate Officer named Arp: ‘Federal troops were shooting most Ibo civilians on sight, including women and children except for women with babies in their arms. Initially, they observed the rules laid down by Gowon on the treatment of civilians but since the takeover (of the Midwest), Federal troops have been shooting Ibo civilians on sight.’”
But worse was to come. According to a declassified American diplomatic dispatch, “By 6 October (1967), Federal forces held the road past St. Patrick’s College, Asaba, all the way into the Catholic Mission, two miles deep into Asaba, according to Captain Johnson, who was third in command of the 71st Battalion (or 6th Brigade?). The name of the battalion commander was Maj. Alani Akinrinade. Captain Johnson ordered that some American teachers put in protective custody by the authorities of St. Patrick’s College leave Asaba that same day. The reason given was understood to be that the 71st Battalion was unable to guarantee their safety from the ‘second wave’ of federal soldiers, known as the Sweepers coming behind.
“The Sweepers” were only briefly observed, but they wore long hair, had cross-hatching tribal marks on both cheeks and (were) apparently willing to live up to their reputation as “exterminators.” According to secret cables sent from US embassies in Niger and Chad to the embassy and consulates in Nigeria, thousands of Nigeriens and Chadians had crossed the borders to enlist for the war.” The diplomatic cables further noted that “10 trucks of Nigerien soldiers were seen being transported for service in the Nigerian army from Gusau to Kaduna and over 2,000 with more waiting on the Niger-Nigeria border for transportation to Kaduna.”
The document went further to reveal that “1,000 Chadian soldiers passed through Maiduguri en route Kaduna.” So, that okada rider or voter in the North with a different facial feature or foreign accent you might have been ridiculing might just be a naturalised fourth or fifth generation Nigerian whose forebears “dutifully” served our fatherland as foreign mercenaries in the murderous Sweepers. The captured American teachers told US consular officers that “There were soldiers regarded as fighting soldiers and there were other units that came behind to conduct the more grotesque mopping-up exercise involving mass exterminations.”
According to the document, Maj. Alani Akinrinade should be commended for “trying to get as many civilians as possible into the bush before the arrival of the sweepers… (but) there were too many civilians to be executed that Captain Paul Ogbebor and his men performed lifesaving deceptions by telling civilians they were ordered to massacre in Asaba and Ogwashi-Uku to run into the bush while the soldiers fired harmlessly into the ground to make others believe that they had implemented the orders. Other civilian contingents the sweepers rounded up were shot behind the Catholic Mission and their bodies thrown into the River Niger.
“This incident and many others were reported to Col. Arthur Halligan, the US military attaché in Nigeria at that time,” the document concluded. You can now see why the war was more of an attempt to finish off the pogrom than keeping Nigeria united.
- Next week: Wrong decisions Ojukwu made and golden opportunities he missed that radically changed the course of the war.