–A Review By Chuks Iloegbunam
Authors: S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli.
Publishers: Cambridge
University
--------------------------------------------
We find this introduction
in the book:
“In October 1967, early in the Nigerian Civil War,
government troops entered Asaba in pursuit of the retreating Biafran army,
slaughtering thousands of civilians and leaving the town in ruins. News of the
atrocity was suppressed by the Nigerian government, with the complicity of Britain
Having read the book,
I attest to the veracity of the above claim. The credibility of the publication
is grounded in the impeccable academic credentials of the authors. Bird is
Professor of Anthropology at the University
of South Florida
Ottaneli, her
co-author, also of the University
of South Florida
Yet, credibility often rides on more than the currency of
academic triumph. On Africa , for instance,
notable literary voices like Chinua Achebe and Ngügï wa Thiong’o have argued
that the continent’s stories are better rendered by Africans and in their own
tongues. But their standpoint does not invalidate the benefit of detachment
often achieved by non-partisan non-Africans. This point profits from the
consideration that, through half a century, Nigerians have failed to agree on
what actually happened in Asaba on October 7, 1967.
The authors are mindful of the fact that they are liable
to the charge of appropriating and running with a story not their own, a charge
that, of course, pays scant attention to the reconstruction of today’s world as
a Global Village in which what happens in Alaska is much the business of its
denizens as it is the concern of the inhabitants of Sarawak. Thus, they take
the pains to state that funding for their book did not come from Africa , while the story they have told is the result of
extensive research, and the aggregation of the voices of massacre survivors,
the relations of the victims and other assorted quarters. All told, 77 people
were interviewed. The result is a 239-page book of six chapters:
1. The Road to War and Massacre.
2.
What Happened at Asaba?
3.
Causes and Consequences.
4.
Surviving the Occupation.
5.
Reclaiming Memory in an Age of New Media.
6.
Trauma, Identity, Memorialization, and Justice.
What emerged, therefore, is a particularly sad story whose
continued denial can only be by bigots. The book also strikes a blow for hope,
for justice and for renewal. The sequences of the sorry events of October 7,
1967 and the nonchalance with which they have been responded to in some
quarters induces consternation and depression, in that in 1967, officers and
men of the Nigerian Army lined up thousands of unarmed civilians, their fellow
citizens, and mowed them down by machine gun fire. It represented impunity and
callousness. But, the atrocity is not novel in contemporary history.
 |
| *Chuks Iloegbunam |
A few examples are apposite.
The My Lai Massacre.
On
March 16, 1968, U.S. Army soldiers of the C Company, 1st Battalion,
20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (America ) Infantry Division massacred some 504 unarmed civilians in My Lai , South Vietnam
The
Rwandan Genocide.
This was the genocidal slaughter of ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda
The
Khmer Rouge Killing Fields.
These refer to sites in Cambodia
The
Holocaust.
The Holocaust was the Nazi programme of exterminating Jews under
Adolf Hitler that cost the lives of six million Jews, and others during World
War ll.
In
all, one ominous string ties massacres everywhere in the world, irrespective of
their scale. And that is the string of evil. But that, precisely, is where the
similarity ends with the evil of massacres in Nigeria Nigeria are rarely acknowledged in official
quarters and never punished in Nigeria My Lai . But soldiers, who objected to the massacre, a
determined American press, and an outraged public refused.
Twenty-six soldiers eventually faced trial
for criminal offences, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader
in C Company, was convicted for the killing of 22 villagers. Handed a life
sentence, he ended up serving only three and a half years under house arrest.
Minimal as the sanction was, and despite its exposition of American
establishment’s reluctance to conclusively pursue the cause of justice, the
trials served one big purpose. It demonstrated in America ,
in Vietnam
In 1997, 12 years after the toppling of the
Khmer Rouge junta, the Cambodian government, with the UN's assistance, set up a
genocide Tribunal. Nine years later, the Tribunal started sentencing the
convicted. Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior
surviving member, was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was
given a life sentence in August 2014. In
July 2010, Kang Kek Iew (aka Comrade Duch), director of the S-21 prison camp,
was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 35 years'
imprisonment, later extended to life. Many others were similarly sentenced.
Some of the most celebrated trials for war crimes and crimes
against humanity have to do with the Holocaust. At the end of World War ll,
international and domestic courts conducted trials of accused war criminals.
This followed the 1942 declaration by the United
States , Great Britain ,
and the Soviet Union that officially noted the
mass murder of European Jews, and resolved to prosecute those culpable. The
trials of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal
took place in Nuremberg , Germany
Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death, among them
Reich Marshall Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg and Julius
Streicher. Three of them got life, while four others received long stretches
behind bars that ranged from 10 to 20 years. Hundreds of other war criminals
were tried in what was called Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. About half of
these were convicted. About the most famous of the trials of German war crime
perpetrators was held in Jerusalem
The trial of Rwandan perpetrators of genocide was particularly
daunting. The judicial system was in shambles after the genocide; of 750 judges,
506 did not remain after the genocide – many were murdered and most of the
survivors fled Rwanda Rwanda
Twenty-two individuals were publicly executed by firing squad in
April, 1997. Meanwhile, the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda , based in Arusha , Tanzania
Despite these examples of the trials and conviction of
perpetrators of genocide and war crimes, Nigeria
(A) 2001 news account quoted Haruna’s testimony to the Nigerian
Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (HRVIC), the “Oputa Panel,”
which was formed in 2000):
“As the commanding officer and leader of the troops that massacred
500 men in Asaba, I have no apology . . . I acted as a soldier maintaining the
peace and unity of Nigeria
This quote has been widely circulated online, and Haruna has often been named as the perpetrator of
the massacre. However, Haruna was nowhere near Asaba at the time and could not
have been involved. In 2016, Haruna wrote to us that his words were taken out
of context and used to bolster the Igbo case for genocide. Furthermore, in
spite of all evidence to the contrary, he maintained his position that there
never was a massacre: “The so-called Asaba massacre is a figment of
propaganda!” Essentially,
Haruna’s statements on Asaba are contradictory and self-serving, and are not
useful in establishing what happened.
Yet, Haruna’s words
are poignant. Because the man is not only an Army General but also a trained
lawyer, his viewpoint properly situates wantonness in Nigeria 500”
human beings indexed as unworthy of remorse and apology. People could ask what
iron would do if gold rusted. They cannot fail to see the corollary between
Haruna’s Nigerian template and Soviet ideologue Georgy Plekhanov’s observation
that, “the dominant ideology in any society is that of the ruling class.” This,
then, is the score: the all-powerful sit pretty at a pinnacle high above all
laws, national and international. From this Olympian height, they could own up
to serial atrocities and yet remain legally unscathed; they could brazenly deny
even the self-evident and dare the nonplussed to self-destruct. It all explains
why an argument with a uniformed and armed Nigerian could force from his mouth
the ominous warning that, “If I kill you, you die for nothing.” That is also
why cadres of the country’s Police Mobile Force are known as “Kill and Go”
free.
This Kill and Go Free
mentality was clearly at play in Asaba on October 7, 1967:
“Twenty of our men were selected and lined up in front of us and
told as follows, ‘Today, I be your God. Me first, God second. God give you
life, me I go takem. Two minute time you go die.’ ... Two minutes afterwards
these 20 men were shot. Another 20 were picked up and the same ritual
followed.”
Apparently tiring of killing individuals with rifles, the soldiers
then readied machine guns, both mounted on trucks and freestanding, and mass
shooting began. Fifteen-year-old Ify Uraih had joined the parade with his
father and three older brothers, Paul, Emmanuel (Emma), and Medua; he described
what happened:
“Some people broke loose and tried to
run away. My brother was holding me by the hand; he released me and pushed me
further into the crowd . . . They shot my brother in the back, he fell down,
and I saw blood coming out of his body. And then the rest of us … just fell
down on top of each other. And they continued shooting, and shooting, and
shooting ... I lost count of time, I don’t know how long it took … After some
time there was silence. I stood up … my body was covered in blood, but I knew
that I was safe. My father was lying not far away; his eyes were open but he
was dead.”
Exactly how many died in this single incident is unclear; around
700–800 seems likely, in addition to many who had died in the previous days. Sporadic
shooting continued for hours until darkness caused the soldiers to disperse…
“My cousin said we should wait till it was dark so that we could
go together, and I agreed. You could hear the sound of the injured crying. One
man, who heard us talking, he was as old as my father. He had his hand almost
severed from the rest of his body. And he told me that he had a knife, that I
should please help him amputate the hand ... I told him I could not do it. He
died later. I knew his children.”
Ify Uraih and his cousin ran to their grandmother’s house, where
they found his sisters and three younger brothers. He told them their father
and three older brothers were dead; later he learned that Medua had survived,
gravely wounded, and had been carried to the bush by his friend. Community
elders Michael Ugoh and Leo Okogwu were among large numbers of the leading age
grades to die. With all the men in hiding, it was left to women and children to
attempt to retrieve the bodies of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and other
relatives and then drag them back to their compounds for burial. Joseph
Nwajei, the boy who had returned with family from Ibadan 17, in the mass shooting:
“Mum told me that in the evening hours of the 7th, she had
to go and look for their corpses at the mass place where they were shot . . .
Mum, in the evening, was able to identify their corpses, took them in a
wheelbarrow, pushed them to the family house, where they were buried. So, I
never saw their corpses, I never saw their bodies.”
“Most victims, however, were dumped in mass graves or
thrown into the Niger 1977, a Mrs. Mordi reported
that “for nearly two days . . . the soldiers wouldn’t let us come near . . .
without opening fire. It was only when the stench of decaying corpses was all
over the place that the soldiers relented . . . ” She retrieved her husband’s body, but
not that of a Catholic lay brother, Ignatius Barmah, who had died beside him.
She was able to put tinyele’a, a
white cloth, over him – an important ceremonial act usually done by close
relatives. Esther Nwanze recalled how wives went searching for their husbands,
dragging them home if they could find them: “Some dragged two days before they
reached home.” Pp47-49.
Fifty years after the mass sacrifice at
the Altar of Moloch, Asaba remains. Resilient. Resourceful. Thriving. Hopeful.
Peaceful. Thanks are due to the authors for recognizing the laudable role of
Asaba women who, when their menfolk were wiped out, moved in and held up the
Asaba family. But the extremely sad memories of five decades linger. The people
wait for closure. The authors mention and discuss “transitional justice.” That
has its place, of course. But can it really happen in the absence of official
acknowledgement of the evil done? Can it proceed without official apology?
While this is
pondered, there are a number of assumptions and conclusions by the authors that
lend themselves to interrogation. This may sound mundane but they describe the
people of Asaba as Asabans. No. They are Ndi
Asaba or Ndi Ahaba. More
seriously, their narrative on the Aburi talks is astonishing.
“In early January 1967, at a two-day summit in Aburi ,
Ghana , between federal
authorities and the country’s regional governors, Gowon and Ojukwu were unable
to reach a compromise over whether Nigeria
This account is
unfortunate, to say the least. Gowon and Ojukwu did reach an agreement at
Aburi. The records of meeting termed the Aburi Accord are public property, even
available on the Internet. They show unequivocally that it was Gowon who
reneged on the Accord, the last straw whose snapping inevitably led to the
shooting war and the avoidable wastage of millions of precious lives. This
embarrassing misrepresentation of a crucial piece of Nigerian history ought to
be corrected in the next edition of the book.
The authors are spot
on in concluding that the Asaba massacre and the shielding of the terrible
development from public knowledge by Lagos and London Britain
and elsewhere could have forced Whitehall into
reconsidering their unconditional supply of weaponry to the Federal side,
thereby making Lagos
The anti-Igbo pogrom
of 1966, a
prelude to the war, had claimed an estimated 50,000 Igbo lives, according to the Massacre of Ndigbo in 1966: Report of the
Justice G. C. M. Onyiuke Tribunal. That’s one.
Two, the Gowon regime blockaded Biafra on the
strength of a policy that proclaimed starvation a legitimate instrument of
warfare. This cost kwashiorkor-induced deaths, mostly of children, by the tens
of thousands. Three, throughout the war itself, the bombing and strafing of
Biafran churches, hospitals, markets and refugee camps by Nigerian
fighter-bombers were incessant, remorseless and systematic, leading to the deaths
of thousands which never elicited official condemnation from a Britain solely interested in Nigeria
"... Harold Wilson is totally unfazed as he informs Clyde
Ferguson, the United States state department special coordinator for relief to
Biafra, that he, Harold Wilson, 'would accept a half million dead Biafrans if
that was what it took' Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide
..." (Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger
and American Foreign Policy, London & New York: Quartet
Books, 1977, p. 122) – quoted from Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe,
"Igbo genocide, Britian and the United States", re-thinkingafrica,
4 October 2015, http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/herbert-ekwe-ekwe-conquerors-concord-in.html
Asaba remains to this
day, it must be reiterated. But, to fully understand the Massacre of October 7,
1967, it must be seen as an integral part of the overall plan for and course of
Nigeria
Yes, let’s
go, let’s march
Let’s go
chase them from their homes
Kill them,
plunder their homesteads
Ravage their
wives
And abandon
them in futile wailing.
The entire experience
of the Asaba Masaccre and the Nigerian Civil War itself is so bleak that
recourse to a specific pattern of Igbo prayer is apposite here. Ozoemena (May it NOT happen again); Ozoemezina (May it NEVER happen again.)
It is a fervent prayer indexed on hope. But it is also a prayer against the
grain of the Nigerian condition, a country in which red-hot pepper has
invariably been administered as the cure for conjunctivitis. The problems that
landed Nigeria Nigeria
It is at this point
that the somber parable of the Porter’s Predicament must come in. He has quit
moaning about the long decades it has been his unenviable lot to bear an
oppressive burden; his worry now is tied to not knowing for how much longer he
will be forced to groan under its dead weight.
*This review was read
at the 50th Anniversary of the Asaba Massacre in Asaba, Delta State , Nigeria
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