The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory By C ...

the visit of the British high commissioner Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce to ABU in May 1966.

Conditions in Biafra during the war leave no doubt that there was a well-organized and systematic attempt to starve the Igbo population to extinction. In September 1968 the International Committee of the Red Cross reported that eight to ten thousand people were starving to death each day as a result of the Biafran war of independence.³⁰ The following month, the New York Times quoted a relief worker for the World Council of Churches as stating that twenty-five people would die each day if the war continued for another month.³¹ These reports were not exaggerations; this is what befell the Igbo and others in Biafra as the situation continued to deteriorate. Other reports painted a picture of unimaginable human suffering on a scale never before experienced in Africa. In this volume Paul Bartrop addresses the appropriateness of employing the terms genocide to describe what happened in Biafra. Though he accepts the calamitous conditions faced by the Igbo during the pogroms and the war, Bartrop suggests a measured application of the language of genocide to describe what the Biafran experience. Surely a determination of whether genocide occurred in Biafra depends on the question of the Nigerian authorities’ intent to destroy the Igbo people as an ethnic group. As Bartrop explains, those who have argued that there was no such intent rely on the premise that no wholesale slaughter of Igbo occurred in the aftermath of the war. However, he questions how one should characterize the massive death toll among the civilian population if no genocidal intent existed on the part of federal Nigeria. Whereas it is plausible to argue that no complete annihilation of the Igbo took place when they lost the war, the actions and behavior of the federal Nigerians during the war did not exclude such genocidal intent. Speeches by northern leaders called for ethnic cleansing of the Igbo people, eliminating them from the North. Pogroms and mass killings of the Igbo population dating a decade earlier leave no doubt that the war offered an opportunity to finally eliminate what was perceived as an Igbo problem. According to the Investigators Report, the hostilities between federal Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra that began in July 1967 represented