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

papers, the French objective “appears to be the break-up of Nigeria, which threatens, by its size and potential, to overshadow France’s client Francophone states in West Africa.”⁴⁶ Though France’s interest was not made explicit, some have speculated that the European country was interested in limiting British influence in the region, as well as in establishing a foothold in the oil-rich lands of East Africa. Others have pointed to de Gaulle’s ideology of supporting smaller nations—rather than large federations—in West Africa.⁴⁷ China’s verbal support for Biafra was perhaps part of a larger struggle for influence in Africa in the face of both Soviet and American support for Nigeria. As Mary-Noelle Ethel Ezeh argues in this volume, the Biafran war was “one of the rare conflicts in which two ideological opponents, Britain and Russia, worked together to defend a common political objective against the humanitarian tragedy of Igbo genocide. France, in contrast, leaned on the ideology of a people’s right to self-determination to support Biafra.”⁴⁸

The conflict exposed the ambivalent position of the United States of America, which supported the sovereignty of the state and thus the Nigerian federal government, to the detriment of Biafra. However, dissenting voices in Congress supported the rights of Biafrans to self-determination and protested federal Nigeria’s gross violations of Biafrans’ human rights. As the American Jewish Congress noted, the United States “maintained official neutrality, but in practice … tacitly supported the [Nigerian] Federal Government.” Though the western power contributed a reported $17 million to the relief efforts of various private organizations, the official position of the United States as announced by President Johnson in July1968 was that “the U.S. had no intention of interfering in Nigeria’s ‘internal affairs.’”⁴⁹

As horrific as the killing was in Biafra, the role in the Nigeria-Biafra War of international governments, including Britain, the United States, France, and Russia, was influenced by strategic economic and political calculations. Major western powers were not sure whether their interests would be affected if Biafra survived. The scope of the suffering and the