| Chapter : | Introduction |
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Our way home was littered with corpses of people who had been shot and we saw women and children carrying the corpses of their husbands and relations from the dancing ground to their homes for burial. Some corpses that had nobody to identify them were buried in mass graves at Ogbe Osowe where the ghastly incident took place. I lost 11 people in my family during that incident. Rev. Fr. P. Ugnoko lost not less than sixty of his closest relations. There was hardly any family in Asaba that was not touched.37
In Benin, the federal capital of the midwestern region, evidence indicates that Biafran residents of the town were called out into the open, where they were exterminated. Conor Cruise O’Brian reported the barbarity of this incident.38 It appears that this type of mass extermination of Biafrans started in the midwestern region, and the process became widespread in the other regions, as well. At Sapele, for instance, Biafran residents of the town were assembled in a school three miles from the town, where they were executed with machine guns fired by federal soldiers. Witnesses reported two thousand as the number of Biafrans exterminated in this incident. Similar methods were used in Warri and Koko, where over 2,500 Biafrans were executed.39 It was reported that in Ogwasi-Ukwu about two hundred Biafrans, mostly teachers and civil servants, were shot in the month of May 1968. The explanation that the federal military authority gave was that the victims were guilty of having consorted with the enemy.40 According to Ifeanyi Ezeonu, the massive killing of civilian populations as the federal troops moved through southern Nigeria “reflects the historical conflagration of human bestiality and resonate [sic] the Nazi trivialization of Jewish personhood—in shape, though not in magnitude.”41
International Politics and Internationalizing the War
The Nigeria-Biafra War drew considerable international attention for two important reasons. First was the increasing involvement of Western