Word: biafra
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Outside the White House last week, a group that called itself Concerned Citizens of Rochester marched with a 7-ft. poster bearing the words: Biafra Postcard. Staring out from the poster with baleful, bulgmg eyes was a starving child, his ribs protruding and his limbs shriveled. On the reverse side was a message urging President Nixon - who was not at the White House but in California - to act on the concern he voiced during last year's presidential campaign for the Biafrans' plight...
Though other crises in other trouble spots have diverted attention from the war between Nigeria and its breakaway eastern region, that plight remains desperate. In England a conference of the World Council of Churches voted to collect $5 million from member churches to aid the people of warring Biafra and Nigeria. The churchmen also called on Nigerian leaders to end an air blockade that has kept many of Biafra's 7,000,000 people on diets that are hovering barely above the starvation level...
Kwashiorlcor Again. Cut off from all supplies except by air, Biafra needs 500 tons of food by air each day to supplement its crops. Since the recent downing of a Red Cross food plane by Nigerian MIGs (see color opposite), relief planes paid for by Catholic and Protestant charities have been able to bring in less than 100 tons weekly. As a result, an often-fatal protein-deficiency disease called kwashiorkor has broken out again, mostly among children...
With conditions worsening, Biafra's Chief of State, General Odumegwu Ojukwu, last week sought to break a deadlock with Nigeria over the Red Cross flights. The Nigerians, who shot down the Red Cross plane in retaliation for raids on their territory by Biafran light planes flown by Swedish pilots, have agreed to resumption of the flights -but only if Biafra agrees to meet two stiff conditions. Food planes must fly during daylight to distinguish them from gunrunners who often head at night for Uli, Biafra's principal airstrip, and have proved difficult to distinguish from mercy flights. They...
...rollicking cheer of his welcome, the Pope was in Africa on serious business. His uppermost concern, he declared even before leaving Rome, was the bitter, two-year civil war between Nigeria and Biafra, but the trip had first been planned around the Pope's dedication of a shrine to 22 African martyrs.* He also consecrated twelve new African bishops and offered a thoughtful analysis of the African Church's spiritual role before a pan-African conference of Catholic prelates that had been meeting all week. Above all, the visit reaffirmed the Pope's concern for the future...