| Chapter : | Introduction |
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The Biafran War and Discourse on Genocide
Did the massacre of the Igbo people before and during the war constitute genocide? Perhaps the most appropriate way to engage this issue is to consider genocide according to the United Nations definition. The United Nations adopted an agreement to prevent and punish the crime of genocide in 1948. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, defined genocide an attempt to destroy a nation or ethnic group through a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” 11 According to the United Nations Organization’s Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the word refers to any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Such acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.12
Whether the systematic massacre of Igbo in the North constituted genocide was already an issue of debate before the war. The eastern region’s document Nigerian Pogrom: The Organized Massacre of Eastern Nigerians provided a chilling account of the organized massacre of the Igbo people in northern Nigeria as early as the 1950s but increasing in intensity after 1966. Following a complaint by the Biafran government accusing federal Nigeria of genocide, the International Committee on the Investigation of Crimes of Genocide submitted a report that found evidence of genocide and of intent by northern Nigerians to commit genocide against the Igbo. The committee, led by the Ghanaian Dr. Mensah, travelled to Biafra in December 1968; its members met a wide range of people there, including refugees from northern Nigeria who had fled during the 1966 pogrom, refugees from midwestern Nigeria, Biafran government officials, and private individuals. Dr. Mensah also met with Nigerian officials in