Word: biafra
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...arms supplier, and the Soviet Union is India's). In Africa, where France supplies 13 of its 15 former colonies, as well as several other states, the duration of the Nigerian civil war can probably be attributed as much to the steady flow of French weaponry to breakaway Biafra as to the fighting spirit of the Ibos. In Latin America, France has sold arms to nine nations (including 106 Mirage 5s to Argentina and 111 Mirage mcs to Brazil). Currently it is offering its Exocet antiship missile to both the left-wing military dictatorship of Peru and the right...
...Nigerian civil war four years ago this week, the Ibo people of rebellious Biafra feared that defeat would bring genocidal vengeance from the victorious Nigerian army. Instead, the Ibos are prospering as citizens of a federated Nigeria. The credit goes in large part to the young head of state, Major General Yakubu Gowon, who decreed a policy of "no victor and no vanquished" after the savage civil war that took at least 1,000,000 lives...
...Jack" Gowon, 39, turned his 250,000-man army into a well-disciplined reconstruction corps and put it to work helping the Ibos bounce back. To set an example, he hired Ibos who had fought for Biafra and made them his personal pilots and bodyguards. He gave Ibos federal jobs and saw to it that they got their fair share of senior positions, including posts as army officers. "He won the peace," says a British diplomat in Lagos, "by not acting...
...Ibos have used their resources to rebuild their war-torn region instead of carrying on a vendetta. When the war ended, the defeated Biafran leader, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu,* bitterly boasted that the Ibos would rebel again. He turned out to be wrong. Ibos these days rarely speak of Biafra or of secession. "We tried and lost," says an Ibo businessman in Ibadan. "That finishes it. From now on, we are all Nigerians...
Bangladesh, Botswana and Qatar. There was another country, too, called Biafra. Like those radioactive elements produced in a laboratory, it was destined for a brief, intense half-life before it vanished forever. But the eyes of its starving children still stare from old magazines-and in the memory...