Refugees, Hunger and Help
It was the starvation in Biafra that really woke up the consciousness of the world to what was going on. The general public, not only of Britain, but of all western Europe and America, though usually unable to fathom the political complexities behind the war news, could nevertheless realize the wrong in the picture of a starving child. It was on this image that a press campaign was launched which swept the western world, caused governments to change their policy, and gave Biafra the chance to survive, or at least not to die unchronicled.
But even this issue was fogged by propaganda suggesting that Biafrans themselves were ‘playing up the issue’ and using the hunger of their own people to solicit world sympathy for their political aspirations. There is not one priest, doctor, relief worker or administrator from the dozen European countries who worked in Biafra throughout the last half of 1968 and watched several hundred thousand children die miserably, who could be found to suggest the issue needed any ‘playing up’. The facts were there, the pressmen’s cameras popped and the starvation of the children of Biafra became a world scandal.
The graver charge is that the Biafrans, and notably Colonel Ojukwu, used the situation and even prevented its amelioration in order to curry support and sympathy. It is so serious, and so much of the mud has stuck, that it would not be possible to write the Biafra story without explaining what really happened.
It has been explained elsewhere in this book that the starvation of the Biafrans was not an accident, or a mischance, or even a necessary but regrettable by-product of the war. It was a deliberately executed and integral part of the Nigerian war policy. The Nigerian leaders, with commendably greater frankness than the British ever got from their leaders, made few bones about it.
In view of this the conclusion becomes inevitable that there was no concession Colonel Ojukwu could have made which would have enabled the relief food to come into Biafra faster and in greater quantities than it did, other than those concessions which Nigeria and Britain wanted him to make, which would have entailed the complete demise of his country.
All the ‘offers’ put forward by the Nigerian Government, often after joint consultation with the British High Commission, and usually accepted and welcomed in good faith by the ingenuous British Parliament, press and public, were revealed on examination to contain the largest tactical and strategic perspectives in favour of the Nigerian Army.
All proposals put forward by Colonel Ojukwu and other concerned parties like the International Red Cross, the Roman Catholic Church, and some newspapers, which contained no built-in military advantage to either side, were flatly turned down by the Nigerians with the full blessing of Whitehall.
This then is the story. Biafra is roughly square in shape. Running down the Eastern edge about a third of the way in is the Cross River, with its fertile valleys and meadows. Along the southern edge just above the creeks and marshes runs another strip of land watered by numerous small rivers which rise in the highlands and flow to the sea. The rest of the country, representing the top left-hand corner of the square, is a plateau, which is also the home of the Ibo.
In pre-war days this plateau had the bulk of the population of the Eastern Region, but it was the minority areas to the east and south that grew most of the food. The area as a whole was more or less self-supporting in food, being able to provide all of its carbohydrates and fruit, but importing quantities of meat from the cattle-breeding north of Nigeria, and bringing in by sea dried stockfish from Scandinavia, and salt. The meat and fish represented the protein part of the diet, and although there were goats and chickens inside the country, there were not enough to supply the protein necessary to keep over thirteen million people in good health.
With the blockade and the war the supply of imported protein was cut off. While adults can stay in good health for a long time without adequate protein, children require a constant supply of it.
The Biafrans set up intensive chicken and egg-rearing farms to boost production of the available protein-rich foods. They might have beaten the problem, at least for two years, had it not been compounded by the shrinking of their territorial area, the loss of the food-rich peripheral provinces and the influx of up to five million refugees from those provinces.
By mid-April they had lost the Cross River valley along most of its length and part of the south, the Ibibio homeland in the provinces of Uyo, Annang and Eket, and land containing the richest earth in the country. At about this time reports from the International Red Cross representative in Biafra, Swiss businessman Mr Heinrich Jaggi, from the Catholic Caritas leaders, from the World Council of Churches, the Biafran Red Cross and the doctors of several nationalities who had stayed on, showed that the problem was getting serious. The experts were noticing an increasing incidence of kwashiorkor, a disease which stems from protein deficiency and which mainly affects children. The symptoms are a reddening of the hair, paling of the skin, swelling of the joints and bloating of the flesh as it distends with water. Besides kwashiorkor there was anaemia, pellagra, and just plain starvation, the symptoms of the last named being a wasting away to skin and bone. The effects of kwashiorkor, which was the biggest scourge, are damage to the brain tissue, lethargy, coma and finally death.
At the end of January Mr Jaggi had appealed to the Red Cross in Geneva to seek permission from both sides for a limited international appeal for medicine, food and clothing. The agreement came from Colonel Ojukwu as soon as he was asked, on 10 February, from Lagos at the end of April. In the meantime the refugee problem had been increasing, though it should be said that a refugee problem is the almost inevitable outcome of any hostilities and no blame can necessarily be attached to governments involved, provided they take reasonable measures to alleviate the sufferings of the displaced until the latter feel safe enough to return home.
However, in the case of the Nigerian Government and military authorities, journalists and relief workers operating in areas far behind the fighting line on the Nigerian side later reported that these authorities consistently frustrated the operations mounted on foreign-donated money to alleviate the suffering, hampered the transport of the relief materials, appropriated transport paid for by foreign donation and forbade access to areas where suffering was great and risks minimal. The Commander of the Third Nigerian Division, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, left no doubt in the minds of the many reporters who visited him and listened to his speeches that he had no intention of even letting relief workers operate at all to save lives, let alone assisting them. This attitude, which was noticed and reported at all levels, was all the more odd since from the Nigerian standpoint the suffering civilians were their fellow-Nigerians.
The great majority of the civilian population fled from the fighting zone into rather than out of unoccupied Biafra. By the end of February 1968 there was an estimated one million refugees inside the unoccupied zone. In the main these were not Ibos but minority peoples. The extended family system which had assisted the Easterners to absorb their refugees from the North and East eighteen months previously could not operate, since most of the refugees had no relatives with whom to stay. Most therefore huddled in shelters built in the bush on the outskirts of villages, while the Biafran authorities with the assistance of the Red Cross and the Churches set up a chain of refugee camps where the homeless could at least have a share of a roof and a meal a day. Many of these camps were set up in the empty schools, where most of the housing facilities were already in situ, and later provided targets for the Egyptian pilots of the MiGs and Ilyushins.
By the end of April, for military reasons explained earlier, the refugee wave had increased alarmingly, to an estimated three and a half million.
Caritas and the World Council of Churches, being organizations not operating on the Nigerian side of the fighting line, and not being required by Mr Jaggi’s charter to go through procedural channels before bringing relief, had decided to go it alone. From early in the year onwards they were purchasing abroad various quantities of food and medicines to fly into Biafra. They had no aircraft or pilots, and therefore came to an arrangement with Mr Hank Wharton, an American freelance who flew in Biafra’s arms shipments from Lisbon twice a week, to buy space on his aircraft. But the quantities that could be brought in in this way were tiny.
From 8 April the Red Cross also started to send in small quantities of relief on Wharton’s aircraft and, wishing to ask for or buy their own aircraft and hire their own pilots, sent in repeated appeals from Geneva to the Nigerian Government asking for safe conduct for clearly marked Red Cross aircraft to fly in by day without getting shot down. These appeals were consistently refused.
Attempts were made to overcome the Nigerian fear that Wharton might fly in arms under cover of such daylight flights. First it was proposed that a team of Swiss Red Cross personnel guarantee that Wharton’s plane remained on the ground during daylight hours. No. It was feared the relief aircraft might carry weapons. Then it was suggested that Red Cross staff supervise the loading. No. Then that Nigerian Red Cross staff supervise the loading. No. Ojukwu agreed that Nigerian Red Cross staff should accompany each relief flight into the airport in Biafra. No.
At that time it was still not realized even by the Biafrans that there never was and never would be any intention of letting relief flights in. While all this was going on the Churches just plodded on regardless, sending in what they could whenever there was space available.
Colonel Ojukwu realized when he had studied the joint reports on the protein deficiency situation in mid-April that time was running short if a major disaster was to be avoided. The problem, so the relief agency representatives told him, was not to buy the food (which they felt sure they could do without much trouble) but to get it into Biafra through the blockade. This was obviously a technical rather than a medical problem and Colonel Ojukwu asked a technical committee to report back to him in the shortest possible time on the various ways in which food could be brought in.
Early in May these technicians brought him their findings. There were three ways of getting food into Biafra; air, sea and land. The air bridge, if it were to carry sufficient quantities to cope with the problem, would have to be bigger than Wharton’s three aircraft could manage, and it would be expensive. But it was the quickest by far. The sea route, through Port Harcourt or up the Niger River, would be slower, but once under way would carry more tonnage of food for less money. The land route, bearing in mind the food would have to come into Nigeria by ship in the first place, cross hundreds of miles of Nigeria to get to Nigerian-occupied Biafra, then be carried down roads made unusable by broken bridges and clogged with Nigerian military traffic, would be slow, arduous and expensive. It offered neither the speed advantages of the air bridge nor the cost/efficiency advantages of the sea corridor.
Impressed by the medical men’s cry for urgency, Ojukwu opted for an air bridge as a temporary stopgap, and a sea route if possible later to bring in the bulk supplies. Mr Jaggi and the other relief organization leaders were made aware of the findings of the technical experts and did not demur.
In the middle of May Biafra lost Port Harcourt and another estimated million refugees poured into the heartland, some being indigenes from the city and its environs, others being previous refugees from areas earlier overrun. But the loss of the port did not change the relief options. Uli airport, nicknamed Annabelle, opened up to replace the loss of Port Harcourt airport, and from the sea the access to the Niger River and the port of Oguta was still open, if the Nigerians would agree to order their navy to let Red Cross vessels through.
At the end of May the International Red Cross in Geneva had launched its second appeal, this time specifically for Biafra, since Nigeria would not agree.
But all this time the problem had remained unknown to the world public. The story had still not broken. In the middle of June Mr Leslie Kirkley, Director of Oxfam, visited Biafra for a fifteenday fact-finding tour. What he saw disquieted him badly. Simultaneously Michael Leapman of the Sun and Brian Dixon of the Daily Sketch were reporting from inside Biafra, and it was these two men who, with their cameramen, saw the story for what it was. In the last days of June the first pictures of small children reduced to living skeletons hit the pages of the London newspapers.
Throughout this month the only food that came in from outside was the small amount that could be fitted into the spare space on Wharton’s Super Constellations flying down from Lisbon. But with three organizations now jockeying for space on his aircraft, there was more food to be shipped than aircraft to carry it. In the ensuing weeks all three organizations bought their own planes, but Wharton insisted that he should run them, maintain them, and that his pilots should fly them. During these weeks food started to come by ship to the Portuguese offshore island of São Tomé, which had hitherto only been used as a re-fuelling stop, so that a shorter shuttle service could be set up from the island to Biafra for food, while the arms shipments came the different route from Lisbon to Biafra direct. Thus cargoes of dried milk and bullets once again became separated into different compartments of the Wharton operation.
Before leaving Biafra Mr Kirkley gave a press conference in which he estimated that unless substantially larger quantities of relief food came into Biafra within six weeks, up to 400,000 children would pass into the ‘no-hope’ period and die of kwashiorkor. When asked for a figure of the tonnage required in a hurry to avert this prospect, he named the figure of 300 tons a day (or night).
Back in London this was reported on 2 July in the Evening Standard, but was widely believed to be more ‘Biafran propaganda’ until on 3 July Mr Kirkley himself went on the BBC current affairs television programme ‘Twenty-Four Hours’ and repeated his estimates. Meanwhile public opinion was slowly being awakened by the photographs appearing in the British press. Before leaving Biafra Mr Kirkley had had a joint meeting with Mr Jaggi and Colonel Ojukwu, during which the Biafran leader had offered to put not any one, but his best airfield exclusively at the disposal of the relief organizations. This would separate the arms airlift from the food airlift and enhance the chances of Nigeria granting daylight access for the mercy planes. Mr Jaggi and Mr Kirkley accepted the offer.
On 1 July in London Mr Kirkley met Lord Shepherd, and on 3 July Mr George Thomson. During these meetings he gave both ministers the fullest briefing on the size and scope of the problem, the necessity for urgency, the relative merits of the three possible avenues of transit for relief foods, and the offer of an exclusive airfield. As Mr Kirkley had both landed and taken off at Annabelle airport he was able to inform both ministers that it was capable of taking heavy aircraft like the Super Constellation, and had been doing so for several weeks. Here, observers thought, was an excellent opportunity for Britain to use the influence for good which her arms sales to Lagos had (in the view of the Labour Government) given her in the Nigerian capital. A request was duly sent to General Gowon asking him to permit daylight flights of Red Cross planes into Biafra. His reply, which came on the afternoon of 5 July and was published in the evening newspapers, was brief and to the point. He would order any Red Cross planes flying in to be shot down.
Mr Harold Wilson apparently had his moral sun-ray lamp handy. In a telegram reply to Mr Leslie Kirkley who had headed a delegation to him asking him to use his influence on Lagos, he replied that General Gowon had only meant that he would shoot down unauthorized planes flying into Biafra. As there were no Gowon-authorized planes, the point became academic and has remained so ever since.
The British Government had taken a slap in the face from Nigeria, and something had to be done to restore harmony to the partnership. It was. On 8 July the Nigerian Foreign Minister, Mr Okoi Arikpo, held a press conference in Lagos in which he proposed a land corridor. Food would be brought by ship into Lagos. From there it would be airlifted to Enugu, safely in Nigerian hands, and then convoyed by road to a point south of Awgu, captured the previous month by Federal forces. There the food would be left on the road, in the hopes that the ‘rebels’ would come and take it.
The proposal was hailed by the British Government and Press as a most magnanimous gesture. No one bothered to point out that it was as expensive to bring a ship into Lagos as into São Tomé, or Fernando Poo, or the Niger River; or that an airlift from Lagos to Enugu was as expensive as an airlift from São Tomé to Annabelle; or that the Nigerians had said an airlift could not work due to weather conditions, lack of planes and pilots; or that they did not have the trucks to run a shuttle of 300 tons a day from Enugu to Awgu; or that bitter fighting was still going on around Awgu.
In point of fact, agreement to the idea as elaborated by Mr Arikpo was not necessary, since the cooperation of the Biafrans in the plan was not required. Actually, not one packet of dried milk powder was ever taken to Awgu for use inside unoccupied Biafra, or laid on the road for the rebels to pick up. So far as one can discern this was never even intended.
From the Biafran standpoint it was not in any case any longer simply a technical problem. There was enormous antagonism inside the country, not from Colonel Ojukwu but from the ordinary people, to the idea of taking any food at all by courtesy of the Nigerian Army. Many expressed the wish that they would prefer to do without than take food handouts from their persecutors. Then there was the equation of poison. There had recently been incidents of people dying mysteriously after eating foodstuffs bought across the Niger in the Midwest by bona fide contrabandiers. An analysis of samples made at Ihiala hospital laboratory revealed that white arsenic and other toxic substances had been present in the food.
This was ridiculed abroad, but non-involved foreigners inside Biafra, notably the journalist Mr Anthony Haden-Guest, also investigated and came to the view that the reports were not propaganda.* The damage done in physical terms was small, but in psychological terms enormous. For many people food from Nigeria meant poisoned food, and these people were not all Biafrans. An Irish priest said, I cannot give a cup of milk I know has come from Nigeria to a small baby. However small the chance, it’s too big.’†
The overriding question was the military one. Colonel Ojukwu’s military chiefs reported there was a big build-up of Nigerian military equipment going on from Enugu to Awgu, and for them to lower their defences to let through relief supplies would simply open up a defenceless avenue into the heart of Biafra. Could they trust the Nigerian Army not to use it to run through armoured cars, men and guns? On previous experience the answer was no.
At a press conference at Aba on 17 July Colonel Ojukwu made his position plain. He wanted an airlift in the short term as the quickest means of getting the job done. He proposed either a neutral river route up the Niger, or a demilitarized land corridor from Port Harcourt to the front line, to bring in the bulk supplies. He could not agree to food supplied that passed through Nigerian hands unobserved and unescorted by neutral foreign personnel, nor to a corridor that was uniquely under the control of the Nigerian Army. That night he flew off to Niamey, capital of Niger Republic, at the invitation of the Organization for African Unity’s Committee on Nigeria. Here again he elaborated the choices open, if it was intended to solve the problem rather than play politics.
In Britain the Enugu-Awgu plan was strongly supported by the Government with everything it could muster. Alternative proposals were impatiently brushed away. The Government, increasingly aware of public outcry, offered £250,000 to Nigeria to help with the problem. Although the issues at stake, the options open, and the technical eyewitness evidence were either known or available, the Government decided to send Lord Hunt out to tour Nigeria and Biafra to decide how best the British donation could be administered.
Colonel Ojukwu replied by saying his people did not wish to accept money or aid from Mr Wilson’s Government, alleging that the sum involved was less than one per cent of the sales of the arms which had caused the disaster in the first place, and that so long as arms shipments went on they found donations of milk from the British Government unpalatable. At the same time he made clear that assistance from the British people would be received with genuine gratitude. However, as Lord Hunt’s mission was concerned with the modalities of administering the Government gift, there was no point in his coming to Biafra.
Some observers in Biafra felt this decision was hasty, since Lord Hunt and his companions could have seen, had they visited Biafra, the practicability of an airlift into Annabelle. But Colonel Ojukwu knew that his people were massively against the Hunt visit. He came within a ace of changing his mind, but an injudicious statement by Mr Thomson to the effect that world opinion would condemn him utterly unless he accepted the Awgu corridor made it impossible for Ojukwu to do other than stick by his original decision.
So for two weeks Lord Hunt visited various war-fronts on the Nigerian side of the fighting line, but had no opportunity to hear arguments other than those advocating the Awgu corridor, which the British Government had said during Hunt’s absence it intended to support. The usefulness of Lord Hunt’s subsequent report has yet to be proved. In later weeks and months it became somewhat doubtful if £250,000 worth of food would ever get delivered to the suffering behind the Nigerian lines, let alone through them.
Some in Britain did see the Biafrans’ anxieties. On 22 July in the House of Commons, protesting against the continuing supply of arms, Mr Hugh Fraser said: ‘In the name of humanity it would be foolish to ship instruments of war which would convert corridors of mercy into avenues of massacre.’*
To make the case for the Awgu corridor more plausible it was necessary to deal with the question of an airlift, notably by denigrating the suitability of Annabelle airport, by now being referred to by its real name of Uli. This was duly done. Mr George Thomson referred to Uli as ‘a rough grass strip’, and said it could not take an airlift. There were, apart from Mr Kirkley, at least a score of journalists within a mile of Whitehall who could have testified that it was not a rough grass strip and could take heavy aircraft. Their experience was not sought, and when the precise specifications of Uli were provided to the Commonwealth Office, they were smoothly and hurriedly brushed aside.
The runway of Uli is 6,000 feet long, that is, twice as long as Enugu runway and half as long again as Port Harcourt. It is 75 feet wide, slightly less than a pilot would like, but wide enough for most undercarriages with room to spare, and it has an all-up load capacity of 75 tons. It was built by the same Biafran who before independence was the project engineer for the construction of the main runways at Lagos and Kano international airports in Nigeria.
Nevertheless, the British Government’s campaign stuck, and millions in Britain were duped into thinking that Colonel Ojukwu was refusing a land corridor under any circumstances, and that in this way he was responsible for any deaths that might occur among the Biafran people.
In point of fact, he never received from the Nigerians, directly or indirectly, a formal proposal for the Awgu corridor. After Mr Arikpo’s press conference, the red herring by then swimming nicely, the matter was dropped. It was briefly raised again by the Biafrans when they met the Nigerians at Niamey, but when the respective arguments were examined for the various alternative proposals, the Nigerians realized that on feasibility alone the Biafran proposals were better, and they then backtracked on everything and told the Biafrans they intended to starve them out. This is described more fully in a later chapter.
However, when he left Niamey to return to Lagos the chief negotiator for the Nigerian side, Mr Allison Ayida, was interviewed by the Observer which published on 28 July 1968 the following:
According to Mr Ayida the Biafrans were prepared to accept a land corridor even without winning their own demand for a day-time air corridor into Biafra, provided the land corridor was patrolled by an armed international police force.
After the Nigerian spokesman at Niamey, Mr Allison Ayida, had made the Nigerian intention plain once and for all, any real hope of getting an agreement to fly, drive or ship food into Biafra went out of the window. It is difficult to see why in this case such a fuss was made about negotiating a corridor at all. The only way to get food in was to fly at night and thus technically at any rate break the blockade. Only the churches realized this, and without clamour or publicity quietly flew in as much food as they could. By this time each of the two church bodies had bought planes of their own, but Wharton still controlled them, and the churches wanted to set up their own operations.
The difficulty was the opposition of Wharton himself to the idea of losing his monopoly of flights into and out of the country. The churches could not hire their own pilots and servicing crews and fly in independently because Wharton’s pilots alone knew the vital landing codes by which a friendly aircraft identified itself to the control tower at Uli.
Apart from the churches, even the Biafrans hesitated to affront Wharton by breaking his monopoly; for one thing they depended on him for their arms flights. But at last they decided to give the codes to the Red Cross and the churches. This was not so easy. One Biafran emissary flying to São Tomé was refused access to the aircraft at Uli by a Wharton pilot because the pilot suspected (quite rightly) that he had the codes in his pocket. It was eventually through a delegate of the Biafrans going via Gabon to Addis Ababa for the Peace Conference that the codes were smuggled out, and in the Ethiopian capital that they were handed over to a representative of the Red Cross, who later passed them on to the churches.
Whether this breaking of his monopoly had anything to do with Wharton’s later activities over the non-arrival of Biafran desperately needed ammunition supplies towards the end of August when the Nigerian ‘final offensive’ was on, is something that only Wharton can answer.
On 15 July Nigerian anti-aircraft fire started from flak-ships in the creeks to the south of Biafra, and Wharton’s pilots decided the pace was getting too hot. They quit and for ten days no planes came into Uli. They eventually started again on 25 July after certain reassurances not entirely uninvolved with hard cash.
On 31 July the Red Cross at last started its own operation from Fernando Poo, an island then a Spanish Colony and much nearer to Biafra than São Tomé, being only forty miles off the coast as opposed to the 180 miles to the Portuguese island. But Fernando Poo was due for independence on 12 October, and the mood of the future government of Africans was not known. In the event the party that won the elections was not the expected one and subsequently proved thoroughly unhelpful, a state of affairs for which the constant pressure brought by the Nigerian Consul on the island was largely responsible.
Many criticisms have been levelled at the International Red Cross from both sides, and from journalists. They are accused of not doing enough, of spending more money on administrative gallivanting than on getting the job done, of being too concerned with not treading on political toes and not concerned enough in passing out relief.
But their position has not been easy. By the nature of their charter they have to remain totally neutral. Their neutrality must not only be kept, it must be seen to be kept. They had to operate on both sides of the fighting line. Certainly they could have been more efficient and made fewer mistakes. But it was the first time any operation of this size and scope had ever been undertaken anywhere. There were teams from various nations attached to the International Red Cross, and other teams from the same nations working under the flag of their own national Red Cross. Thus in Biafra there were two French teams, one attached to the IRC, the other sent by the French Red Cross. The effort was often disparate and uncoordinated. It was to bring some order into the state of affairs that Mr August Lindt, Swiss ambassador to Moscow and a former United Nations senior servant in refugee and famine matters, was asked by the IRC to come and head the whole operation.
Of the accusations usually made that the IRC was not tough enough in brushing aside the obstacles, one weary spokesman said: ‘Look, here in Biafra we get all the cooperation we need. But on the other side they’ve made it quite plain they don’t want us. They don’t like what we are doing, which is saving lives a lot of them would privately like to see waste away, they don’t like our presence because it prevents them doing certain things we think they would like to do to the civilian population.
‘If we get too stroppy with them they can just as easily order us to leave. OK, fine, so we get a day in the headlines. But what about the million people our supplies are maintaining in life behind the Nigerian lines? What happens to them?’
But one criticism that can reasonably be made is that the International Red Cross in Geneva took a disastrously long time to wake up and get moving. Although they were kept informed from the very earliest days by Mr Jaggi of the urgency of the situation, and although the money that came in from all sources during July ran into millions of dollars, it was not until the last day of the month that the first all-Red Cross plane flew into Uli. Even throughout the month of August, with their own air operation, the Red Cross only brought in 219 tons of food, while the churches with less money and still relying on Wharton for transport shifted over 1,000 tons. But as the generally accepted required tonnage of 300 tons a night would have meant that this combined quantity should have come in every four days, Mr Kirkley’s gloomy prediction came true.
It is not the intent of this chapter to paint gaudy pictures of human suffering; it is rather a chronicle of events to explain to the puzzled reader what really happened. Besides, the pictures have been seen, in newspapers and on television, and highly emotional world-portraits have been painted by scores of journalists and writers about what they saw. A brief résumé will suffice.
By July, 650 refugee camps had been set up and they contained about 700,000 haggard bundles of human flotsam waiting hopelessly for a meal. Outside the camps, squatting in the bush, was the remainder of an estimated four and a half to five million displaced persons. As the price of the available foodstuffs went up, not only the refugees but also those indigenous to the unoccupied zone suffered.
Wildly varying figures have been hazarded to describe the death toll. The author has tried to achieve a consensus of estimates from the best-informed sources within the International Red Cross, the World Council of Churches, the Caritas International and the orders of nuns and priests who did much of the field work of food distribution in the bush villages.
Throughout July and August the politicians postured and the diplomats prevaricated. A land corridor, even if it had been set up at that period, could not conceivably have been in operation in time. The donations from British and West European private citizens were pouring in; several Governments, notably in Scandinavia, indicated privately that they would not be unsympathetic to a request from the Red Cross for the loan of a freighter and aircrew, if asked. The Red Cross in Geneva preferred to negotiate with a private firm whose pilots said they would only fly into Biafra if Nigeria accorded them a safeconduct guarantee; and to ask Lagos for that guarantee. As ever it was refused.
The death-toll spiralled as predicted. Starting at an estimated 400 a day, by its peak it had reached what the four main foreignstaffed bodies of relief workers in Biafra reckoned to be 10,000 a day. The food imports throughout July and August were pitifully small. While some of the deaths occurred in the camps, and could be noted, far more occurred in the villages where no relief percolated at all. As so often, the most heart-breaking tasks and the dirtiest work were undertaken by the Roman Catholics.
There are no words to express nor phrases in this language to convey the heroism of the priests of the Order of the Holy Ghost and the nuns of the Order of the Holy Rosary, both from Ireland. To have to see twenty tiny children brought in in a state of advanced kwashiorkor, to know that you have enough relief food to give ten a chance of living while the others are completely beyond hope; to have to face this sort of thing day in and day out; to age ten years in as many months under the strain; to be bombed and strafed, dirty, tired and hungry and to keep on working, requires the kind of courage that is not given to most men who wear a chestful of war ribbons.
By the end of 1968 the consensus estimate of deaths within unoccupied Biafra was three-quarters of a million, and the most conservative estimate to be found was half a million. The Red Cross, whose colleagues were working on the other side of the fighting line, reported an estimated half a million dead in the Nigerian-occupied area.
It must be stated that much of the food bought with the money donated by the people of Britain, Western Europe and North America that did not go to Biafra direct did not reach the hungry at all. While reporters like Mr Stanford and Mr Noyes Thomas of the News of the World were reporting in June and July the scenes of human degradation they witnessed at Ikot Ekpene, an Ibibio town which Lagos had quite correctly been claiming for twelve weeks to be firmly in their hands, other journalists in Lagos were uncomfortably reporting that piles of donated food were rotting on the docks. Red Cross workers there were complaining of being deliberately frustrated at all official levels.
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 São Tomé. 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 São Tomé 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 food-porters were killed and another score injured.
On 1 September 1968 the first token flight into the new airport was made from Fernando Poo. 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 Poo and São Tomé 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 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 of 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 flights 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 Poo, 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 Uli 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 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 kwashiorkor 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 being 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 nights 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 save two or three hundred thousand children’s lives was in the first fifty days after 1 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 façade 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 Major 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 Department 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.
The narrative of what befell the emergency relief operation to the hungry children of Biafra in the latter half of 1969 provides a classic object lesson of what a hectoring, bullying dictatorship can get away with when confronted only by a civilized world unprepared to stand up for itself or for those standards of conduct which it has decreed to be inviolable.
From January until the end of May the relief flights of both Joint Church Aid (an amalgam of Caritas, World Council of Churches and Nord Church Aid) and the International Red Cross proceeded without incident. With the addition of eight extra planes sold for a peppercorn figure by the United States Government to Joint Church Aid and the Red Cross, tonnages of relief food were steadily increased.
During the peak months of March and April the combined tonnage entering Biafra by night came to a climax of nearly 400 tons per night, substantially more than the 300 tons estimated by the relief experts to be the minimum needed to halt kwashiorkor and undernourishment. With these tonnages, not only was this task achieved, but the spectre of famine and its attendant scourges began to recede.
The major part of the IRC operation was by this time flying out of Cotonou, the capital of Dahomey, Nigeria’s western neighbour, while a few IRC aircraft had restarted operations from Fernando Poo with the personal permission of President Enrico Macias who had intervened to settle the earlier unpleasantness. The JCA operation still flew out of São Tomé, which it had to itself.
Inside Biafra the prospect occasioned by the increase in relief foods was a heartening one. Over two million children and half a million adults were getting regular access to the protein-rich food they needed. Where a few months earlier travellers through the landscape had beheld silent, deserted compounds whose inhabitants lay exhausted and dying inside their huts, there were now to be seen groups of children playing in the sun, running to the roadside to yell and wave at a passing car. The sight of endless rows of rough cots in hundreds of sickbays up and down the country, crammed with the skeletal forms of dying children, became rarer, and even those children lining up in long queues at the three thousand feeding centre administered by the two relief organizations could be seen to be on the mend. Had nothing intervened, the prospects of May 1969 were that, whatever the military outcome of the struggle, millions of children would still be alive to have a chance at whatever life had in store for them; without the relief operation they would undoubtedly have died.
Despite allegations that this relief food was going to the Biafran soldiery, the administrational chiefs of both distribution organizations, who kept a close check on all tonnages entering the country and being distributed, were satisfied that only an ‘acceptable’ proportion, about five per cent, of the tonnage was being lost or purloined in transit. In view of the remarkable circumstances of the airlift, the complete lack of mechanized cargo-handling devices at Uli, the fact that all was unloaded in darkness, etc., this figure was as low as human endeavour could bring it.
The Red Cross organizers, who were the only one of the two groups running a large operation among the hungry on the Nigerian side of the firing line, estimated that the loss-and-misappropriation figure was higher in Nigeria than in Biafra. This was partly due to the efficiency of the handling and distribution system in Biafra, partly because the supply lines between the point of entry and the point of consumption were so much shorter.
The JCA operation had the advantage of a comprehensive infrastructure of European missionaries already on the spot – eighty Irish priests and fifty Irish nuns working for Caritas, and twenty-seven missionaries and twenty imported volunteers working for the World Council of Churches. These Europeans, most of whom had an intimate knowledge of the country and the people, were able to provide personal supervision at every level and prevent all but the most occasional misappropriation. The Red Cross, although it had to build its own distributing organization, also imported enough volunteers to provide intensive supervision. Nord Church Aid, the third of the consortium that composed JCA, having no distributing structure on the ground, wisely did not try to compete with the Catholic and Protestant churches in setting up their own network inside Biafra, but instead ran the airlift, and did it with brilliant efficiency.
Throughout these five months the only thing to mar the importation of food was the nightly activities of a Nigerian Dakota freighter, converted into a bomber and flown by a South African mercenary. This bomber regularly overflew Uli in the hours of darkness, dropping bombs at random, while its pilot baited the relief crews over the R/T, nicknaming himself ‘Genocide’ and threatening them with what would befall them if they tried to land.
His bombs, however, never hit a relief plane or any of the aircrew while they were on the ground, and he had only nuisance value. As Uli was still being used as the airport by which arms were imported into Biafra, no one could fairly say that it was not a military target, and the relief agencies never claimed this.
In late May Count Von Rosen’s Minicons went into operation and, in four successive raids on the Federal-held airports of Enugu, Benin, Calabar and Port Harcourt, destroyed most of the operational MiGs and Ilyushins of the Nigerian Air Force. The bomber of Mr Genocide was also destroyed on the ground. The response by Russia was rapid.
On Monday 2 June, while landing at Uli, Australian relief pilot Captain Vernon Polley, working for JCA, was strafed by two MiGs flying in close formation. They came out of the night sky ahead of him while the airport lights were on, and each let rip a short burst of cannon fire. The next second they were gone, screaming over the tail of the freighter and off into the darkness. Captain Polley’s DC-6 was riddled from stem to stern, although luckily no one was hurt.
A repair crew was flown out from São Tomé the same night, and through the next day they worked on the freighter under camouflage to get it back into flying condition. On Tuesday night Captain Polley, flying alone, brought the limping DC-6 back to São Tomé. The lesson of Monday night was not slow in coming home to the relief pilots. To strafe an illuminated target while flying out of darkness does not require a fully equipped night fighter, but it does require piloting of considerable skill.
Flying a day fighter at night is standard practice, since all fighters are equipped with night-flying instruments and homing devices. But the skill of the gunnery indicated that the pilots concerned were a far cry from the useless Egyptian pilots who had flown for the Nigerians up till then, but who had never done a night mission.
When diving at night towards an illuminated target, the fighter pilot will temporarily lose some of his night vision, even with a tinted eyeshade, as he gazes into the illuminated area. To dive to within eighty feet of the ground and fire with pinpoint accuracy, to do so in tight formation with another fighter flying alongside at over 500 m.p.h., to risk having to pull out blind at a split second’s notice if the lights should go out – all these require pilots of considerable skill, with an intimate knowledge of their aircraft and their squadron colleague on the wingtip. Such expertise is not learned in a few hours, nor possessed by the Egyptians. Therefore somebody new was flying for the Nigerians.
The Sunday Telegraph broke the story on 22 June; the new pilots were half a dozen East Germans sent down at the behest of the Russians. Ten days later the West German Government’s deputy spokesman, Herr Konrad Ahlers, said that West German intelligence had confirmed that there were East Germans flying for Nigeria. Yet the fact that the so-called ‘Federal Air Force’ was in fact an amalgam of Russians, East Germans, Egyptians and mercenaries elicited little interest from the governments of the West and continued to be referred to as ‘the Nigerian Air Force’.
Before this, the planes themselves, flying by day, had been identified in the skies over Biafra. They were MiG 19s, considerably more modern than the previous MiG 15s and 17s hitherto flown by the Egyptians.
Despite the increasing risk of being hit on the ground, the pilots of both the International Red Cross and JCA elected to continue flying in the relief food. They stipulated that the lights of Uli should only be switched on for landing at the very last second, to shorten the time the airstrip would be illuminated, and switched off on command from the landing pilot when his speed along the runway was slow enough to enable him to come to a halt in darkness without mishap. Take-offs from then on were by aircraft headlights only.
The idea worked. Although the MiG 19s continued to strafe the airport whenever they could find it in the darkness, they never hit another relief plane. Listeners on the ground waited until the whine of the jets was heard far away, then bade the pilot begin coming down the approach glide path. At the last second the lights flashed on; high above, the jets wheeled and dived, but before they could get into range the lights went off and they were forced to pull out in raking climbs to avoid a smash into the ground. They continued to spray the area where they thought the aircraft was with cannon and rocket fire, but were usually wild.
On Thursday 5 June the Federal Air Force really excelled itself. A MiG 17 shot down in broad daylight a clearly marked Red Cross relief plane in cold blood. In terms both of the written laws of the Geneva Convention on War and the unwritten laws of the world of flying, this act was just about as far as an Air Force can go. The pilot of the Red Cross DC-6 was an American veteran of the Second World War and Korea, Captain David Brown.
Almost incredibly, some British journalists sought to justify or mitigate the act. One, writing in a Sunday newspaper some days later, reported that the fighter pilot in a long R/T conversation with Captain Brown had repeatedly told him to land at a Nigerian airfield and only shot him down when he persistently refused to do so. This was arrant nonsense, for three reasons:
1. A MiG 17 fighter communicates with its own ground base or other fighters in the air on a series of fixed-crystal wavelengths available to its own channel selector. It cannot ‘sweep the bands’ as can the radio operator of a freighter aircraft who has at his disposal a more versatile radio set. It was the habit of the pilots of the Red Cross, and those of the JCA, to keep changing their operating wavelengths on a daily basis, agreed beforehand with their own control tower. On not one recorded occasion did the relief pilots ever find themselves on the same channel as the Nigerian fighter pilots. There is moreover no known system of hand signals by which a pilot flying on the wingtip of another aircraft may instruct the pilot of the intercepted plane to change over to his own channel so that voice communication can take place. Even had there been such a system of hand signals, it would be extremely doubtful whether the freighter’s radio operator could have found the MiG’s wavelength.
2. There does exist an internationally known system of hand signals by which a pilot may signal across the intervening air to another pilot that he has been intercepted and should do what he is told. This system is occasionally used when an aircraft is sent aloft to ‘shepherd’ to safety a plane which has lost its radio. The system has also been used by fighters to require an intercepted transport aircraft to land at a designated airfield of the fighter pilot’s choice – for example in the case of airliners that have strayed out of the Berlin air corridors and been intercepted by Soviet MiGs. A freighter who, having been intercepted and signalled to divert to another airfield, refuses to do so, particularly when his interceptor is an armed fighter, would have to be a lunatic or a suicide case. Captain Brown was neither. There is an adage in flying: ‘There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.’ Captain Brown was an old pilot with a quarter of a century of flying behind him. He knew the procedures and he knew the drill. Had he landed as instructed at Port Harcourt, for example, his cargo would have been proved to be a harmless ten tons of milk powder and stockfish, and after a period of detention his own government or the International Red Cross would have secured his release. He knew this.
3. It is inconceivable that a pilot of his experience should have been intercepted, and ordered to land at an airfield designated by the fighter pilot, without breathing a word of what happened to his own control tower. To a pilot it is as clear as day that if such an interception took place, the first action would be to inform one’s own control tower what had happened, and what action one was taking. So far as the listeners at Fernando Poo were concerned, Captain Brown never left his own frequency linking him with Fernando Poo control tower.
What really happened was this. At 5.38 p.m. on that Thursday evening Captain Brown took off from Fernando Poo with his cargo. Accompanying him was his crew of two Swedes, co-pilot and flight engineer, and a Norwegian loadmaster in the back. His aircraft was a DC-6 painted white from stem to stern. On the upper and lower surfaces of each wing were painted two large red crosses, each eight feet across. Other red crosses adorned each side of the fuselage at the mid-section, and each side of the tail fin. It would have been almost impossible to mark an aircraft more distinctively.
If he made any mistake it was in leaving too early for Biafra. The sky was a brilliant blue, without a cloud, and the sun was still well above the horizon. It was habitual for planes leaving São Tomé to depart at this hour, for with the longer journey they only came over the Biafran coast after 7 p.m., that is, after dark. Dusk is very short in Africa. The light starts fading in June around 6.30 and by 7 p.m. it is dark. But with the much shorter journey (only sixty miles) from Fernando Poo to the coast, he came over the coast about 6 o’clock in brilliant daylight.
It was an error, although it is easy to be wise after the event. His concern, like that of all pilots, was to get as many shuttles as possible to and from Uli into one night. Three other Fernando Poo relief planes were aloft at the same time.
At 6.03 p.m. his voice was heard in the Fernando Poo control tower, and by other Red Cross pilots on the same run. He gave no call-sign, and the voice was high-pitched with alarm. He said: ‘I’m being attacked … I’m being attacked.’ His switch went dead, there was a moment’s silence, then a babble on the ether, with Fernando Poo asking for the identification of the caller. Thirty seconds later the voice came back on the air ‘My engine’s on fire … I’m going down …’. Then there was silence. Nothing was ever heard from Captain Brown again.
His plane crashed in flames in the marshes outside Opobo on the coast. At first it was said that three of the four men were alive, then that they were dead. The United States Government and the Swedish Government protested about the incident and asked for the bodies of their nationals back. The matter was not pressed, neither were the protests.
To every pilot along the coast one thing was patently clear, and their own quiet investigations confirmed it: the American, the two Swedes and the Norwegian had been murdered. The next question became that of finding the identity of the man who did it. At first it was thought it might be an East German, then rumour circulated that it was a Nigerian who had flown the MiG.
The world of flying is strange. It has its own laws, its own code and its own information network. There exists a kind of brotherhood between pilots, as between seamen. Pilots who have fought against each other can sit down years later and talk over old times without animus, in a manner unlikely in any other branch of fighting. It would be perfectly possible today for the relief pilots to have a beer at the bar with the mercenary pilot who flew the Nigerian night bomber over Uli; he was doing his job and they theirs. That is all there is to it. On the fringes of the air charter world, inhabited by men who have flown many strange cargoes and passengers into bizarre airfields for the right price, there is little animus over bygone ‘jobs’ when they may have been competing with each other. There is also little that is unknown. It is rare to stand in a group of such pilots and mention the name of another veteran of fly-for-hire without one of the company knowing the man.
Within a fortnight the Red Cross and JCA pilots had the name of the man who shot down Captain Brown. He was an Australian mercenary, and several of Brown’s colleagues swore that one day, somewhere, they would ‘get’ him. For the Australian had broken the last rule in a remarkably tolerant brotherhood. He had shot down a fellow pilot without giving him a chance, and that was unpardonable.
All this, of course, was going on inside the closed club of the fliers. In the outside world, observers watched and waited to see what would be the reaction to this last remarkable piece of brutality by the already heavily blood-stained Nigerian Air Force. Would the United States protest that this had gone too far, and further interference produce an American offer to give protective cover to the relief planes? This was not to be. Would the Swedes protest in similar terms? It was seriously mooted in Sweden, but the government in Stockholm was content to protest formally and let the matter drop.
None watched the world’s reaction more closely than the Nigerian Government. Like all bullies, they were trying something on to see how far they could go. They are Africans and the African, like many others, will watch with great interest to see how far a ‘tough guy’ can go. If he can get away with what he tries, there will be no demur. If, on the other hand, someone stands up to the tough guy and, being in a position of strength, makes it quite clear that so far as he is concerned a particular course of action has gone far enough, he will usually win his point. At that stage the African will come to respect the newcomer and repudiate the bully. In short, this is human reaction the world over, as the years 1935–39 in Europe so poignantly showed.
General Charles de Gaulle understood this, which was why he got on extremely well with Africans and was much respected by them. The British and American governments do not understand this, and that is why both are regarded with contempt throughout Africa. No amount of dollar or sterling aid will ever win the respect that the African will accord freely to a man who stands up for his own irreducible standards.
Within six days it became clear to the Nigerian Government that they had got away with the outrage of 5 June scot-free and would continue to do so. Thus emboldened, they proceeded to humiliate the International Red Cross and destroy its operation. In this they were assisted by the American Embassy in Lagos.
The day after the shooting down, the IRC, on orders from the Committee in Switzerland, suspended its operations, at least temporarily. What followed was a classic example of a psychological campaign intended to undermine the morale of a group of men trying to achieve a course of action. It succeeded perfectly.
In the aftermath of the shooting incident, the Red Cross in Geneva expected, and thought they had the right to expect, the moral support of the governments of the Western world. They got none. Down in Cotonou the co-ordinator of the Red Cross operation, Dr Lindt, urged that the airlift should start again. He pointed out that there was no need to fly in daylight as Captain Brown had done, that flights in darkness could continue just as before, and that Joint Church Aid was continuing its flights.
In fact JCA had restricted its flights to three or four a night in the aftermath of 5 June and its pilots were getting restive, not because of the shooting down of Captain Brown but because of the continuing activity of the MiGs in strafing Uli at night. What won the battle of indecision for Joint Church Aid was the iron will of Pastor Vigo Mollerup, the Danish pastor of a slum parish in Copenhagen who headed the Nord Church Aid scheme, which was responsible for the actual air bridge out of São Tomé, and the remarkable personality of Danish Air Force Colonel Denis Wiechmann, the operations chief of São Tomé. Pastor Mollerup, commuting between his own people in Copenhagen and his colleagues of Caritas and the World Council of Churches in Geneva, urged and wrangled that their air bridge should not be dismantled because of this one incident: in the pilots’ crew room at São Tomé, Colonel Wiechmann cajoled the pilots back into the air. By 10 June they were struggling back to their usual complement of two shuttles of eight or ten aircraft a night.
On 10 June Dr Lindt went back to Moscow, where he had formerly been Swiss ambassador, to pick up his effects and furniture which had lain there for eleven months, since his hasty departure to answer the call of the Red Cross the previous July. Behind him he left instructions with the Cotonou operations chief, Nils Wachtmeister, that after a series of proving flights by one or two aircraft, the Red Cross air bridge should be steadily built up again. He made several provisos: take-off times should be strictly after dark, even if that meant cutting out one of the shuttles, and the utmost precautions should be taken on landing and take-off from Uli to keep the lit-up period to a minimum.
On 10 June the Icelandic pilot flying for the Red Cross from Cotonou in his own aircraft, Captain Lofto Johanssen, flew two missions into Uli in one night and returned safely from both. He had two more proving flights scheduled for the 12th, after which full flights would be resumed.
On the evening of 12 June a mysterious telephone message reached the chiefs of Joint Church Aid who were conferring in Lucerne, Switzerland. It came from the American Embassy in Geneva (a check-back call was made to make quite sure the message was no hoax) urging JCA with the utmost show of concern to call off all their flights for that night. The reason for this advice, said the message, was extremely serious but could not be revealed.
After a hasty consultation the four JCA chiefs in conference agreed to send a message to São Tomé cancelling all that night’s flights, but they also insisted on knowing from the Americans, within twelve hours, their reasons for this demand.
Nord Church Aid got off a top-priority telex through the International Aviation Control Tower Service. Inevitably, when Colonel Wiechmann got it, it looked like a panic call. Seven aircraft were in the air and a recall message was sent out from São Tomé to all of them. One had already landed at Uli, two others were overhead and decided it was too late to pull back, so they went in and landed. The other four turned back for base, and the second shuttle was abandoned. Few events more likely to shatter the already strained morale of the pilots could be imagined.
When the next morning the Americans vouchsafed an explanation of the previous evening’s panic, it was that ‘there was some political trouble in Cotonou’. Pastor Mollerup replied with some asperity that that had nothing to do with the JCA air bridge out of São Tomé.
Once again Colonel Wiechmann got the airlift re-started. Meanwhile, exactly the same panic message had been passed on the evening of 12 June by the US Embassy in Geneva to the Red Cross. They too ordered their flights for that night to be cancelled and Lofto Johanssen remained on the ground. The Red Cross never flew again, apart from a few planeloads of medicaments several months later.
In Geneva, in the wake of 12 June, more deliberations took place as to whether to restart the airlift or not. In later weeks, intrigued by the events of 12 June, both relief organizations made their own inquiries to ascertain where the phony messages of unspecified dangers for them if they continued to fly in relief had originated. Independently they tracked the messages down to the same source – the American embassy in Lagos.
Meanwhile the Red Cross had been hit by another blow. Returning to West Africa on 14 June to try and put back together the bits of the operation he had so sedulously built up over the preceding months, Dr Lindt was arrested at Lagos airport for allegedly flying into the airport in his private Beechcraft without the proper authorization. (In fact, his papers were perfectly in order.) After being held for several hours he was expelled and declared persona non grata.
It was the final humiliation, and it broke Geneva’s will to continue. From then on they decided to try to negotiate their way back into the relief operation, a futile exercise as any who knew the situation could have told them. Speaking to the author months later, one of the senior Red Cross men involved throughout said, ‘There is not a vestige of doubt in my mind that we were the butt of a deliberate conspiracy, hatched in Lagos between the Nigerians and the American embassy, and it worked perfectly.’
The same source added, however, that, even without the shooting down of the Red Cross plane on 5 June, the departure of Dr Lindt alone would have seen an end to the Red Cross operation in Nigeria–Biafra. This remarkable man had built it up, nursed it, argued and cajoled it though many troubles. His stern appearance and brusque manner concealed a deep and sincere concern for the suffering he witnessed on both sides of the firing line, and despite his late middle age he put in more energy than most younger men could have mustered. He also made bitter enemies in Nigeria. Refusing to tolerate the misappropriation of relief stores by private racketeers, the commandeering of relief transport of all kinds for military use, Dr Lindt cut out the rakeoff specialists and the bribery boys, ensuring that the absolute maximum of relief food got through to the hungry children and refugees on the Nigerian side of the line.
What is not so certain is that the Nigerian régime would have dared to humiliate and expel the International Red Cross chief and order the IRC to hand over the whole relief operation to their own corruption-riddled appointees, if they had not been able to get away with the shooting down of Captain Brown.
It has been said since that in packing up in Nigerian and Biafra the International Red Cross betrayed the two parties towards whom its true responsibility lay – the suffering on both sides, and the donors of the money who had hoped to see their donations help save lives rather than rotting in a warehouse. But it should be stressed that in its hour of need the International Red Cross was itself betrayed by the two Western governments from whom it had every reason to expect unswerving support as the world’s foremost and wholly neutral charitable organization – the British and American Governments.
Throughout the episode not a word of support for the IRC mission in Nigeria–Biafra emerged from Whitehall or Washington. Indeed, the British Government, which had not lifted a finger to secure the release from detention in Biafra of Miss Sally Goatcher (her release was obtained by the Churches and Red Cross), made vague and unspecified threats as to what might befall if anything should happen to her in Biafra, but was not able to issue one word of condemnation of the murder of Captain Brown and his three crewmen.
Perhaps the climax in tastelessness was left to the Daily Telegraph. On 8 July part of the editorial read: ‘The increasingly effective Federal Air Force, trying to stop arms flights, shot down what turned out to be a relief aircraft, a misfortune which Biafran propaganda duly exploited.’ One was left wondering who were the more unfortunate, the four airmen lying in their graves in the marshes or the mercenary who killed them.
On 17 June one last effort to halt the JCA air bridge was made. A very strong rumour reached Geneva from American sources that Nigeria had imported two Sukhoi-7 night fighters, fully equipped with radar, whose job was to intercept the relief planes in the darkness and shoot them down. This rumour was also widely reported in the Press. A quick check from JCA head-quarters in Geneva revealed that this titbit, also, was from the American embassy in Lagos. By this time Vigo Mollerup had had enough of American rumours and told Colonel Wiechmann to go right ahead. The rumour turned out to be false. There never were any Sukhoi night fighters in Nigeria, a fact of which the American embassy, with its enormous CIA operation in Nigeria, was certainly aware.
Inside Biafra the effect of the suspension of the airlift was quick and disastrous. The two main relief agencies had between them supplies for about ten days. They provided aid in one form or another to close on three million souls per day. At one stroke this had been cut by half with the Red Cross ceasing operations, and further reduced by the cut-back in JCA flights.
Most of the children being daily supported by relief food were already at the minimal level of subsistence, devoid of any physical reserves with which to sustain another prolonged period of starvation or protein-defìciency. Within a week the death toll started to creep back up again.
For the second time the missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, were faced with the agonizing choice: does one cut off from relief aid those children so badly diseased and debilitated that their chances of survival are remote, in order to make sure of saving the not-so-bad, or does one give first to the neediest in the knowledge that the others will soon have reached that stage as well? Both Church groups came to the same view – the food should be used curatively first, preventively second. The effect, with stocks running low and little more coming in, was to spread the available food so thin on the ground that a general and very widespread debilitation of the junior population soon set in.
From this point there was already virtually no distinction between refugees and non-refugees, such as could still be discerned during the autumn of 1968. By August 1969 almost all the children in the country were suffering from malnutrition in one form or another, and most of the adults as well. The lethargy and listlessness that accompany hunger and anaemia reappeared on a wide scale. The death toll started to climb again and by late July was estimated at over 1,000 per day. By the end of the year the resumed air bridge by JCA had helped to stem the tide again, although consensus estimates even by November put the death toll at a fairly steady 500 to 700 per day.
Slowly, it seemed, from 20 June onwards the JCA air bridge crept back to what it had been in May, although this time it was done without any publicity at all. Tonnages were never mentioned by the JCA authorities for fear of provoking yet more reprisals from the Lagos Government. It was not until October that the steady importations began to exceed in nightly total what the JCA had been bringing in during May. Compared with the combined JCA-Red Cross total, even this was just over half what the two organizations together had brought in, and well below the estimated minimum required.
Two factors, apart from Vigo Mollerup and Colonel Wiechmann, were instrumental in getting the demoralized pilots and crews flying again. One was the example set by the pilots of Africa Concern and the French Red Cross flying to Uli out of Libreville. Africa Concern, a private company founded in 1968 by Father Raymond Kennedy and based in Dublin, represented the Irish people’s contribution to Biafran aid and it flew its own lone operation with a DC-6 from the Gabonese capital. So did the French Red Cross which, although it had had a team attached to the International Red Cross, also ran its own one-plane shuttle from Libreville. Both the Belgian crew flying for Africa Concern and Commandant Morencey for the French Red Cross kept flying unperturbed throughout the whole crisis. Seeing they were continuing, the reaction of the pilots at São Tomé was. ‘If they can do it, why not we?’
The other factor was perhaps the same one that gave the Frenchman his confidence. Sitting out in the Bight of Biafra, just off the coast, were five Soviet ‘trawlers’, or spy-ships, blossoming radio aerials and radar scanners. It was possibly one of these that had reported the incoming flight of Captain Brown two weeks earlier in time for the MiG to ‘scramble’ to intercept. As the São Tomé pilots overflew this flotilla in the dusk, they observed sitting in the midst of it a French aircraft carrier with a deck-full of jet fighters.
The carrier had been on a routine courtesy call to Libreville when the trouble started. Without a word it quietly sailed from Libreville and anchored for two weeks between São Tomé and Biafra. The sight of it sitting there waiting (for what?) was immensely comforting for the relief pilots. Then on 20 June the MiGs suddenly stopped flying at night and strafing the airport. They never flew again against the JCA air bridge.
While this work of life-saving was quietly being done by the Churches, the headlines had switched to the problems of the International Red Cross. Having won hands down against the Red Cross, the Nigerian régime was in a position to dictate terms, which it did. These included the handing-over of the whole relief operation in Nigeria to the Nigerian Rehabilitation Commission. There were by this time 1,400 foreign workers under the sign of the Red Cross working among the war-stricken on the Nigerian side of the line.
The Red Cross, devoid of support from Britain or America, was forced to yield. Subsequently donations from outside for the relief work under Nigerian auspices predictably plummeted. Meanwhile the Red Cross timidly tried to negotiate for a resumption of their air bridge with Federal permission.
On Wednesday 25 June Chief Awolowo commented that starvation was a legitimate weapon and that he was opposed to the shipment of relief supplies to the secessionists.* The next day the Chief of Staff of the Army, Brigadier Hassan Usman Katsina, was reported as saying, ‘Personally I would not feed somebody I am fighting.’†
It was significant that the remarks of these two men, the latter of whom particularly had more power to influence events in Nigerian than twenty General Gowons, went completely unremarked by the British Government and largely by the Press. On 6 July, after a meeting in the Foreign Office in London between Mr Maurice Foley, Minister of State for the Commonwealth, Mr Okoi Arikpo, Nigerian Foreign Affairs Commissioner, and Professor Jacques Freymond, acting President of the ICRC, the Foreign Office issued a statement claiming that ‘complete agreement’ had been reached between the three for a new Red Cross airlift by day of relief food to Biafra. The plan involved Red Cross planes flying from Lagos, to which all relief foods would be imported.
It was a particularly silly piece of mischief. Professor Freymond had flown home on the evening of 6 July and the first he learned of it was from the headlines in the British Press the next day, which reached Geneva about 9 a.m. There had been no joint communiqué the previous evening and the Foreign Office had acted entirely on its own. From Geneva the ICRC issued a vehement denial that there had been agreement between the three of them.
What there had been in fact was an Anglo–Nigerian plan which the Red Cross had agreed to transmit to General Ojukwu and the Biafran Government. The claim that without any consultation with the Biafrans the Red Cross had agreed to it severely compromised the Red Cross in its pending negotiations with the Biafrans.
This did not stop Mr Michael Stewart, speaking on 7 July in the House, putting the whole onus of whether or not the Biafran children got fed onto General Ojukwu, a ploy which by this time had become standard practice. In fact, the Biafrans, after considering the plan transmitted to them by the Red Cross, rejected it. The plan would have put the whole relief operation under Lagos’ sole control, without any proscription against taking advantage of the opening of Uli during daylight hours to mount an attack against this prime target under cover of the relief flights.
The Red Cross went back to square one and started on its own. On 19 June Dr Lindt had formally resigned in order to give the Red Cross negotiations a better chance of success.
On 1 July the new President of the International Committee of the Red Cross took office. He was M. Marcel Naville, a banker who had been on the Committee for several years, had been elected President some months previously, but could only be inaugurated on 1 July. That day in Geneva he gave a remarkably passionate and forthright press conference. He criticized the Nigerian régime as ‘insolent… showing a humanitarian the door like an unfaithful servant’. He lambasted the gun-merchants whose supplies of weapons had kept the war going, and without naming names suggested there was not enough oil in all Nigeria to make the detergent needed to cleanse the hands of the men responsible. Observers felt he was either a very rash man, or had foreknowledge of some powerful diplomatic backing that would enable him to win a showdown with the Lagos junta once and for all.
In the event the first judgement was the correct one and, unfortunately, besides his rashness, M. Naville showed he had little strength of character. In subsequent debate inside the committee, the more timid spirits won the day. The result was a communiqué stating that the ICRC would pursue the path of ‘strict legality’, which in the circumstances meant complete inertia.
A series of protracted and laborious negotiations began, while east of the Niger the children continued to die. On 8 July M. Naville himself headed the ICRC negotiating team to Lagos, pointedly cancelling a trip to London en route. He was soon back with nothing achieved, and the talks passed into the hands of M. Enrico Beniami, the senior ICRC delegate in Lagos. For weeks the talks got nowhere.
On 4 August the Red Cross did what it should have done at the outset. It produced its own compromise plan. This plan provided for Red Cross planes to take off from Cotonou in Dahomey, overfly Nigeria down a specific air corridor, deposit the relief food at Uli and return to Cotonou over Nigeria down another air corridor. Flights would be between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. and would be protected. Cargo content would be verified during loading and just before take-off by a mixed commission including Nigerian staff, who might if they wished even accompany each flight to ensure there were not diversions.
This business of Nigerian representatives accompanying each flight to prove there was nothing of any remote military significance on board (ostensibly the Nigerians’ main complaint) was what Ojukwu had proposed in July 1968.
The plan was put to Ojukwu first. For him it contained certain risks, as his security advisers were quick to point out. Firstly, with daylight flights operating, the pressure on JCA to discontinue its ‘illegal’ night flights would be immense. If the night air bridge was dismantled and JCA joined in the daylight run, what would happen if the Lagos Government then unilaterally rescinded the agreement? Relief would be wholly cut off. Secondly, although the agreement specified that the flights and the airstrip should be inviolable between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., would anybody guarantee that no attack would be made by the Federal Air Force in contravention of the agreement? Such an attack, if made from a freighter with an especially heavy bomb, could wreck the airfield. Significantly no power, least of all those who screamed loudest about the integrity of the Federal regime, was prepared to consider such a guarantee.
Nevertheless, and despite opposition from within his own cabinet, Ojukwu decided to take a risk. On 29 August Biafra finally agreed to the plan. Delighted, the Red Cross took the plan to Lagos. At this point a bit of international backing for the Red Cross could have swung the issue in favour of their own compromise plan. None was forthcoming. The Federal régime objected to the plan unless certain changes were made. This was where the Red Cross made another of its major mistakes. It should have insisted the plan remain unchanged by either party. On 5 September Lagos agreed to the plan ‘in principle’ providing a few technical details could be worked out. On 14 September Lagos signed the agreement, with its own changes included in the text. The agreement was then shunted back to Ojukwu.
Any consumer organization will stress to its customers the importance of the small print on a legal document. The new agreement on daylight flights contained five extra paragraphs of small print, which substantially changed the spirit and letter of the original. Three may be mentioned.
One cut the flying time back to 5 p.m., cutting the possible flights per plane per day from two to one. Another specified that Lagos control tower could at any time call down any relief plane flying over Nigerian territory for supplementary inspection, after which the plane would have to go back to Cotonou still laden. The third specified that the agreement ‘should in no way prejudice military operations’ against Uli.
The last two conditions virtually undid the original agreement. The first left the day-to-day continuance of the relief operation to the sole discretion of the Federal government; the second exempted the actual airfield of Uli from inviolability from attack during relief flying hours. How the relief aircraft were supposed to land with Uli under jet attack was anybody’s guess.
On 11 September, however, another and more sinister document came into the hands of the ICRC in Geneva. It was a photostat copy of an order from the Commander of the Federal Air Force, Colonel Shittu Alao, instructing his base commanders at Enugu, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Benin to have their MiGs ‘patrol’ Uli during daylight hours, and if they were fired upon to go into the attack. This sent a shiver down the Committee’s collective spine.
It needed little imagination to foresee that patrolling jets overhead were bound to be fired at by some nervous gunner. What would they see on the ground? Long, inviting columns of Red Cross trucks lined up waiting for relief supplies, parked airplanes on the aprons, scores of European Red Cross staff. One of the advisers with experience of Biafra pointed out that not only would a MiG attack on such a target in broad daylight result in a bloodbath involving European personnel, but that the enraged Biafrans could turn on the Red Cross staff and vent their bitterness on them. In that event, the adviser told the Committee, the responsibility would devolve on Geneva.
It was almost with a sigh of relief that the Committee learned in late September that, thanks to the extra clauses, the Biafrans had refused the amended draft. There the matter rested until the end of 1969. The Churches continued flights by night, and, by the end of 1969, with a steadily expanded airlift and more planes expected, had brought their tonnage up from an original 150 tons a night in July to nearly 200 tons in December.
In essence the whole daylight flight plan, its success or its abysmal and possibly bloody failure, depended not on assurances from Lagos but on the honourableness of the Federal Air Force. This was the same air force that for two years had shocked and angered the world by the brutality of its raids on markets, hospitals, clinics, refugee camps and townships; that had repeatedly broken truces called by General Gowon himself; and had finally excelled itself by shooting down an unarmed Red Cross freighter in cold blood.
General Ojukwu was once again accused of playing politics with his people’s lives, a hoary chestnut but still usable in Whitehall and Washington. The accusation hardly stands up. On refusing the daylight airlift scheme General Ojukwu in person was once again the butt of bad publicity. A man concerned with playing politics would have acted in precisely the opposite way, seeking the world’s favour rather than its odium. For him there were not one but two considerations that had to be borne in mind. One was Biafra’s security, which was for the Biafrans primordial, and of which Uli airport was the cornerstone. Relief came second to security, and the bulk of the Biafrans agreed with this order of priorities.
The tragedy of the Red Cross during 1969 was that it failed to understand the two immutables of the Nigerian–Biafra situation. One was that Ojukwu could not compromise the national security even for relief aid; the other was that the Nigerian armed forces chiefs, who stood looking over the shoulder of the government, would never permit the transmission of relief aid to Biafra other than in conditions that offered themselves a substantial military advantage.
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION
It would be difficult if not impossible to imagine a more generous hearted or compassionate people than those of the United States of America. Thus it was no coincidence that when the plight of the suffering children on both sides of the Nigeria–Biafra war came to the notice through the American Press of the people of the United States, their contribution exceeded that of all other countries even on a pro rata basis of population.
And yet the Government of the United States, guided by the dead hand of the State Department, remained steadfast in its support of Nigeria regardless of the cost in lives involved in the war. The reason for this strange dichotomy lies in one simple fact: almost every dime and cent brought forth by the American Government to aid the suffering on both sides had to be almost literally ground out of the authorities by public pressure.
By the time it ceased operations the International Red Cross had received cash and gift contributions of over 19 million dollars from Washington. By the end of 1969 the Joint Churches had received in the same form about 60 million dollars’ worth of aid. The total contribution by the United States to relief was just over half the global total.
Much of the aid was in kind; enormous donations of Corn-Soya-Milk, known as CSM or Formula Two, a newly devised relief food in light powder form, of which the US Government is the sole producer, were sent. Shipping costs across the Atlantic were paid in cash. Four C-97 Stratofreighters (they were originally announced as Globemasters, which proved too heavy) were sold to the ICRC and the Churches for a nominal 3,800 dollars each. Air shipment and running costs for these planes were also paid in dollars, and later air bridge costs for US cargoes in non-US planes were also reimbursed by America.
To watch this effort going on was extremely heartening to those who knew that each sack and each dollar meant another bunch of children with a chance of life who would otherwise have died. Yet throughout the operation the State Department itself dragged its feet in almost every conceivable manner.
What was sent was never on the basis of the need involved, or the size of the emergency, but simply on the basis of what would be enough to satisfy American internal domestic pressure while not going so far as to upset the régime in Lagos. Just why the immensely powerful State Department felt obliged to exert itself not to upset these tiny demagogues will presumably always remain a mystery.
Despite his brave words of September 1968, President Richard Nixon, after coming to power, was personally responsible for the square root of nothing being sent to Nigeria–Biafra. The donations resulted from pressure from Press, Congressmen and Senators, and many others in public life who were in a position to exert influence. Even the sale of the eight freighters was one of the last decrees of the outgoing Johnson administration.
Early in 1969 Dr Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Professor of Law at Rutger’s University, and a Negro, was named as Special Coordinator of Nigeria Relief. For the rest of that year he and his team by and large wasted their own and everyone else’s time, and got remarkably little done. Just after the shooting down of Captain Brown on 5 June, when an expansion of the JCA airlift (which, although not perfect, was at least getting the job done) was vital, Dr Ferguson chose to downplay the airlift. He spent his energies trying to push through his own pet project for running two landing craft laden with relief supplies up the Cross River into Biafra.
Technically the plan could have worked, and two such landing craft, the Donna Mercedes and the Donna Maria, were sent across the Atlantic to Lagos. As General Ojukwu had agreed to the plan, the Nigerians vetoed it, using as trouble-shooters the puppet government they had installed at Calabar on the south of the Cross River. The landing craft ended up on unspecified duties in Nigerian-occupied Port Harcourt. For the rest, Dr Ferguson pottered round West Africa, shuttled between Nigeria and Biafra, flew to Europe and Washington, and back again. On one occasion he tried to put through his own plan for daylight flights, but omitted to warn the Red Cross who were already negotiating this idea.
The people who really did do something were the Americans of Joint Church Aid (USA). The American government aid was sent through three main agencies: USAID of the State Department, UNICEF of the United Nations, and JCA/USA. The last-named procured and transmitted the great bulk of the aid.
Those in this organization who had to liaise with the State Department over the allocations left no doubt in the minds of inquirers later that in their view the Department, if left alone, would have been happy to stop the lot. Fortunately they were not allowed to. It has been necessary earlier to deal harshly with certain servants of the American people for the things they got up to in Lagos and Geneva. There is not a shadow of doubt that these ignoble antics were not know to the American people and would not have received their support had they been known.
In the State Department itself there were eventually three separate offices dealing with the Nigeria–Biafra situation. One was the Nigeria Desk, an offshoot of the West Africa Desk, but heavily staffed with the former colleagues of ex-Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Mr Joseph Palmer. Mr Palmer, a former ambassador to Nigeria, had long been a firm supporter of Nigeria, regardless of the fact that since his day that country had deteriorated into just another dictatorship. Not surprisingly the Nigeria Desk, even in Mr Palmer’s absence (he was sent off as ambassador to Libya during 1969), was strongly pro-Nigerian and anti-Biafran. This was fully in harmony with the reports flowing back from Mr Elbert Matthews, the American ambassador in Lagos, who was relieved only at the end of 1969. Down the corridor was the AID office and further on was Dr Ferguson’s office. To the surprise of the JCA/USA staff who had to deal with all three, none of them seemed to know what the other was up to or what it was saying as its official ‘line’. The result was a fair degree of confusion.
The brunt of the work therefore fell on JCA/USA. This was mainly composed of Catholic Relief Services, the giant relief organization that is the largest United States exporter after the US Government and annually ships up to a million tons of supplies yearly to 72 countries; Church World Service, representing 30 US Protestant denominations and bringing relief to 42 countries in the world; and the American Jewish Committee, representing 22 Jewish organizations. These were supported by a plethora of other and smaller bodies.
Constantly agitating, pushing, yelling, shoving, the chiefs of those organizations bullied the State Department into producing the cash and kind needed to keep the relief operation going to the children on both sides. These men included Bishop Swanstrom and Ed Kinney of CRS; James McCracken and Jan von Hoostraten of CWS; and Rabbi James Rudin and Marcus H. Tannenbaum of the AJC.
Alone they might not have been able to pull it off. But also backing them were numerous men in public life who spoke out and kept speaking out until something was done. The spectrum of support that this humanitarian cause received from pressure groups in the States was as wide as life in America is varied. Pressure came from the extreme Right, and from the Left; the liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, Labour unions and corporate management, and from all the fifty widely varying states of the Union. It also came from the American Press, which never let the issue die, the surest way to kill any idea in the modern world.
One of those who did as much if not more than anyone in using his power to get relief food on its way was Senator Edward Kennedy. As chairman of the Senate Sub-Committee on Refugees, Senator Kennedy could and did call hearings at which embarrassed and sheepish officials were forced to appear and explain why more was not being done. By this means the Senator’s committee kept an unwilling State Department on the hop.
In terms of America’s wealth the sums involved were not huge – about three days of the cost of taking lives in Vietnam covered the cost of eighteen months of saving them in Biafra; it was also equivalent to about twenty minutes of the Apollo Eleven flight. But its effect was to give a chance of life to millions on the verge of extinction.
The real hero of the American contribution was not even among the public figures or church leaders at the forefront of the struggle. He was the ordinary American citizen, the millions of John Does scattered throughout the fifty States whom the professional manipulators of power in government would so dearly love to be able to forget. They refused to be forgotten. On one day the State Department received 25,000 letters about Biafra and the officials were worried sick. It is to these millions of unnamed Americans who kept yelling when their masters wished they would shut up, along with others in Germany, Holland, Norway, Britain, Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, Denmark and Ireland, that the credit must go for the biggest humanitarian relief operation in modern history.
* Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1968.
† Father Kevin Doheny, of the Order of the Holy Ghost, at Okpuala Mission, August 1968, to the author.
* Hansard, 22 July 1968, col. 68.
* Statement to Mr Peter Gatacre, quoted by Mr Gatacre in a letter to The Times, 2 December 1968.
* The Times, editorial, 28 June 1969.
† ibid.