EVERY WAR HAS A ‘PERSONALITY’ of its own. It’s mostly idiosyncratic, like the Taliban or a recalcitrant Arab government in Khartoum overseeing developments in Darfur.
One needs to understand the vagaries of combat and the circumstances in which particular wars are fought in order to write about them. That applies as much to Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon, the ongoing insurgency in the Philippines or Israel’s Yom Kippur War as it does to what is going on in Afghanistan today, whether it be along the Tora Bora or in the plains beyond Kandahar.
Likewise, in Somalia in the early 1990s, where the majority of journalists lived in town, I made vigorous efforts to stay on base because I felt more comfortable with good security. Those away from the military were on extra alert when gangs of local youths got busy, especially when stoned on Qat.2
Most had been influenced by Islamic fundamentalists who had been coming across the Red Sea by dhow from Yemen. They have been doing so in increasing numbers and continue to arrive as I write. What we observe going on in that sad country today is nothing short of a totalitarian disaster.
As far as the Jihadis were concerned, the ‘bad guys’ in their sights included us media folk, who were almost exclusively Western anyway. That we had some females in our ranks only accentuated the issue.
Such influences tend to have a profound effect on what some journalists report, especially if they are made aware that they might become a target if they stayed critical of a so-called ‘popular’ cause. We saw that kind of undercurrent taking place in Beirut, especially on the Muslim side of the Green Line.
The same holds for Sudan today. If you highlight government mismanagement in Darfur – and to be fair, it is impossible not to implicate Khartoum in what is going on there – chances are that you’ll find yourself on an aircraft home.
Biafra was different. You simply couldn’t help but relate to the proverbial underdog. In a sense, this was a colonial war. The only difference from other African conflicts (Darfur excepted) was that the ‘imperialists’ involved were black. The devil in disguise there was the Nigerian government itself.
Each one of us was aware that the Ibo leader had tried to break free from Federal Nigeria after tens of thousands of Easterners had been massacred by Muslims. Men, women, the frail, the old, the lame and the halt, as well as children of all ages were targeted. Nothing mattered as long as there were Ibos murdered.
Ultimately, as we have already seen, it was the discovery of oil in the Eastern Region that caused the Biafrans to cut that sacrosanct umbilical cord that incontrovertibly linked their part of the country to Lagos. However, made the break, options were severely limited. It was a decision fraught with imponderables, because self-styled Biafra had neither the men nor the resources to succeed, nor at very least did the rebel state enjoy the support of any of the Great Powers, a sine qua non in this kind of adventure.
Inevitably, in today’s difficult world just about everything hinges on politics. You can get away with most things if you have the clandestine support of Beijing or Moscow (as with Zimbabwe, North Korea and Iran). But if, like Biafra, you have nothing to offer or even something useful like a port, or a strategic asset (Egypt at the head of the Red Sea and Suez, Guinea-Conakry with a major port on Africa’s Atlantic coast and Mozambique, straddling a large swathe on the Indian Ocean), your cause is a non-starter.
The Ibos had oil, granted, but anybody who wanted to get at it would have had to go through Nigeria anyway.
Nigeria was another matter altogether. The Biafran War, for all its disjointed priorities and mismatched participants, was a near-run thing, especially at its start. In the three years that it lasted, there were severe casualties on both sides, with almost a million people dead by the time the guns stopped firing. Tragically, only a tiny proportion of those who did the actual fighting were killed. Most of the casualties were children, the majority of whom starved to death. Biafra was the first of the more recent Third World wars to claim an inordinate number of war victims.