Genocide is the NameBy Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
It is now a fortnight since the Nigerian military and police embarked on their “shoot at sight”/search-and-destroy operation in Onicha and neighbouring towns and villages in the Anambra region of Igboland. The rest of Igboland (particularly the central regions that cover the Aba, Umuahia, Owere triangle) is, for all intents and purposes, encircled by these forces with devastating consequences. President Obasanjo, without any approval or oversight by the legislature, has essentially placed Igboland under martial law and it appears that this declaration is for an indefinite duration.
Igbo men and women, especially the youth, are being shot dead with unrelenting ferocity by troops who have orders to murder the Igbo as indiscriminately as their commanders deem fit. Scores of Igbo women and girls have been raped and gang-raped by the troops, several in the presence of their families and friends. Millions of dollars worth of personal and corporate property have been destroyed by the military during the period. Convoys of military truck carting away looted goods from the Onicha market and elsewhere in the Igbo country have been reported heading to west and north Nigeria, from where most of the troops currently on this rampage are based. A vandal army is ruthlessly on the loose.
Genocide, of catastrophic proportions, has been unleashed in Igboland in these past two weeks. It is a continuation of the Igbo genocide that started in the sabon gari residential districts of Hausa-Fulani/north Nigeria in May 1966 which cost 100,000 Igbo lives during the course of five horrific months, followed by the extended second phase of gruesome ordeal that lasted from July 1967-January 1970 when 3 million Igbo people were murdered.
This current phase has been ordered by Obasanjo, the most viciously insensate of the genocidist officers of the Awolowoist-Yoruba wing of the Nigerian military establishment. Obasanjo has insisted, all along (since January 1970), that the pan-Nigerian genocide against the Igbo, supported by Britain and the moribund Soviet Union, failed to accomplish its desired objective: the destruction of the Igbo as a viable nation. As a result, Obasanjo has given his commanders the orders this time round to accomplish his envisaged goal, which he boasts will be his “legacy”, as he supposedly plans to leave office next May.
No time limit for its accomplishment was set by the Obasanjo “kitchen cabinet” when the plan to “attack and destroy the Igbo youth and degrade the Igbo economy” or “bomb the Igbo”, to quote another phrase that was used liberally during the deliberation, was formulated in March 2006. The meeting came in the wake of the boycott of the Nigerian census, held earlier on in that month, by an overwhelming majority of the 50 million-strong Igbo population. Obasanjo blamed the disciplined and dedicated campaign of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) for the success of the Igbo boycott and concluded that the movement must be “destroyed”.
Obasanjo is convinced that MASSOB has effectively dislodged the string of anti-Igbo obusonjoist regimes and the pathetically servile Abuja-based Igbo careerists that he imposed on Igboland (since 1999) from the ambience of dominant Igbo popular political opinion. In addition, most Igbo endorse MASSOB’s politics of the reestablishment of Biafran independence by peaceful means. It was within this context of the regime’s appreciation of MASSOB’s popularity in Igbo consciousness that Kayode Are, the commander of the notorious state security service, stated (in an Abuja press briefing soon after the March 2006 “kitchen cabinet” to “bomb the Igbo”) that there “are 2 million members of MASSOB in the registers that I have seen.” Of course, no such registers exist. Are’s was the most insidious comment ever, emanating from an operative who serves one of the world’s most inefficiently-run states. Nigeria does not know how much oil it pumps out of its oil fields daily, despite being dependent on this commodity for most of its income, does not know the population of the peoples that make up the country, does not know the number of doctors in the country, does not know the levels of its infant mortality, does not know the levels of its maternal mortality, does not know the levels of male/female life expectancy, does not know the number of people in its population affected by the HIV/AIDS virus … If this state has no ready, verifiable answers to these easily, quantifiable constructs, it is highly unlikely that it can exercise the competence to inform on the real membership profile of a movement such as MASSOB, whose site of activity is pitched centrally at the realm of conscientisation.
Instead, Are was telling the world in that March press meeting that the envisaged campaign to “bomb the Igbo” (which started ultimately in June 2006, three months later), would be protracted, as every Igbo in Igboland, particularly the youth, belonged to (the innumerable) MASSOB … In the degenerative minds of Obasanjo, Are and the rest of the genocidist cabal in Abuja, MASSOB and Igbo youth are interchangeable constructs that have a death stamp on their heads. It is also important to note that the Igbo victim of this genocide, this time round, is no longer the “nyamiri”, the “damned Igbo” in the north region, but has now been clinically deracialised and criminalised: he or she is a “miscreant” or “hoodlum,” as many reports from the Nigerian media on the unfolding savagery proclaim with uncritical zeal and breathtaking insensitivity.
What is happening in Igboland currently is genocide. The following steps should now be taken to terminate it:
1. All Nigerian military and police forces must be withdrawn from Igboland immediately.
2. The UN Security Council should meet in emergency session and order the deployment of UN forces to Igboland to provide security to Igbo people.
3. The UN Security Council should send the UN special rapporteur on human rights to Igboland to investigate the current genocide.
4. The UN Security Council should declare a comprehensive ban on all arms sales and transfers to Nigeria. Nigeria does not have any legitimate external threats. All weapons currently sent to the country are used directly by the country’s military (army, air force, navy) and police or indirectly sublet to state-procured death squads to terrorise peoples particularly in Igboland/Niger Delta.
5. The UN Security Council should order international travel restrictions on President Obasanjo and his wives, children, and his extended family, and on Nigeria’s military, state security service, police chiefs and other senior members of his regime. It is outrageous for Obasanjo to be received henceforth by world leaders and international statespersons after resuming Nigeria’s war of genocide on the Igbo people, who had already lost 3.1 million children, women and men during the 1966-1970 phase of this holocaust.
6. All assets abroad (particularly in South Africa, Western Europe, the Americas and elsewhere) belonging to President Obasanjo and his wives, children and extended family, and those of all the members of his “kitchen cabinet”, the Nigerian military, state security service, police chiefs and other senior members of his regime (and their families) should be sequestrated immediately.
The usually fissiparous Nigerian state, with its infamous religio-regional warring factions have, once again as the history of Nigeria since 1945 has shown, just one seminal subject, the rallying point, to agree over: the decimation of the Igbo. It is therefore instructive that there has been no dissention, no discord whatsoever from any of these constituent sectors over the “shoot at sight” policy by the military on defenceless citizens in Igboland. Not even from the offices of the human rights “community” that saturate Lagos … But doesn’t history already point to a record of such silence? Didn’t Yoruba obas travel across north Nigeria in 1966, following Igbo genocide phase I, “thanking” the Hausa-Fulani emirs, part-perpetrators of the genocide, for “protecting” the Yoruba population domiciled in the region as the Igbo were being slaughtered? In part gratitude, the Yoruba readily joined phase II of the genocide in Igboland as from July 1967 and perpetrated some of the worst crimes against humanity on record in recent African history.
If the silence from Nigeria over the ongoing genocide in Igboland is “understandable”, this cannot be said of the reaction from Igboland itself nor from the Igbo diaspora including the World Igbo Congress, and Igbo intellectuals, who have some of the world’s best minds. Here, the silence has been sickeningly deafening, callously inexplicable.. Igbo leaders have been silent for 15 days as hundreds of their innocent and defenceless young men and women are shot and raped and robbed and caged by the Nigerian military forces. Supposedly, this silence is keyed into the unedifying logic of “not be seen” by the cantankerous Nigerian establishment to be “sympathetic to MASSOB and Biafra,” as this would “upset” current Igbo leadership “aspiration” to “produce” a Nigerian president of Igbo national origin ...
The point, though, is that on the crucial subject of offering security and safeguarding the lives and property of Igbo people from the ravages of the Nigerian genocide state, a future president who is Igbo is hardly in the position to fulfil such a task. As the evidence shows since 1945, Nigeria murders the Igbo. And it murders them most brutally. The levers to activate these murderous escapades are very much decentralised in the Nigerian state – away from the central corridors of presidential or executive power. We shouldn’t forget that an Igbo was head of state in 1966 when the Hausa-Fulani launched the first phase of the ongoing genocide. Nothing stops these decentred sites of power to murder the Igbo at will even if an Okonkwo or Okafo or Okonta is president in Abuja from May 2007. In fact, given the inexorable logic of this enterprise, an Okonkwo or Okafo or Okonta in the Abuja villa could “readily order” the ransacking of an Igbo town or village if the only other alternative choice available to the president from the requesting genocidist general staff is a coup d’état against the regime! It is therefore an unviable strategic goal for any Igbo to waste the enormous resources entailed, pursuing the goal of wishing to lead an already failed state whose only existentialist function, presently, is its ability to murder and desecrate.
Collective Igbo aspiration remains that of self-determination: the restoration of Biafran independence. This is an unstoppable, inalienable right to Igbo freedom. Presently, the opportunities for the Igbo quest for the restoration of its independence have never been more evident. The Igbo must now expand, most comprehensively, the range of its non-violent campaign against the Nigerian genocide state, already begun by MASSOB with astonishing success since 1999. Each and every Igbo person, whether they live at home or abroad, must now cease to be a participant in their individual or collective enslavement/disempowerment of the nation by the Nigerian state. All Igbo members of the Obasanjo regime especially Soludo (central bank), Okonjo-Iweala (external affairs), Asika (advisor), Uba (death-squad operative), Ezekwesali (education), and Akunyili (drugs enforcement), all of whose hometowns are within a 50-mile arc of the epicentre of the ongoing genocide, must now resign their positions which are now untenable. They must distance themselves from this outrage or risk being potential defendants in future indictments at the International Criminal Court at The Hague for “crimes against humanity”. Other Igbo members of the regime such as Maduekwe (advisor), Ugochukwu (advisor), Iwuanyanwu (confidant) and Nzeribe (confidant) must also quit at once to ensure that they are not in complicity with these murders of innocents. All the Igbo regional governors implicated in this carnage – Obi, Kalu, Egwu, Nnamani, Udenwa – must also resign immediately.
The Igbo should withdraw support from the existing regimes enforced on them by Obasanjo, in the wake of his 2003 rigged elections across Igboland, in the following administrative regions: Edo, Delta, Rivers, Abia, Ebonyi, Imo, Enugwu, Benue and Kogi. They should stop paying taxes and rates to regimes that do not serve their interests but have instead rendered their cities such as Onicha, Ugwuocha/Port Harcourt (the well-known “garden city” prior to the occupation), Aba, Umuahia, Abakaliki and Owere into pyramids of garbage. As MASSOB has demonstrated, the Igbo have the human and material resources to embark on the reestablishment of the Biafran state forthwith. Nothing can stop this historic project. Now is the time.
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