Word: biafras
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Below his face is a couplet: "To keep Nigeria one is the cause that must be won." The rhyme is meant to encourage Nigerians in their war with break away Biafra, but the poster paper has begun to tatter. The war, which Gow on originally predicted would be "a surgical police action," next week enters its third bloody year...
...based, perhaps falsely, on Nigeria's new tactics in the air. Since 1967, landlocked Biafra has received guns, food and medicine by air chiefly through a section of highway at Uli that has been converted into a landing strip. Except for spasmodic harassment, Nigeria did little to stem the nightly flow of planes. As Biafra's General Odumegwu Ojukwu, 35, continued to hold out and at times take the offensive, Gowon and his aides became convinced that the Red Cross and church relief groups were supplying guns to him as well as proteins.* When Sweden's Count...
...voice of General Odumegwu Ojukwu, carried by Radio Biafra, vibrated between impassioned outrage and constrained eloquence. The 18 men that Biafra's boss referred to-14 Italians, three West Germans and a Lebanese -were employees of the Italian government's oil combine, ENI. They were captured last month by Biafran troops in the Okpai oilfields near Port Harcourt in an encounter in which eleven other oil workers (ten Italians and a Jordanian) were killed. Later a five-man Biafran tribunal that sits for security cases condemned the 18 prisoners to death by firing squad for helping Nigeria wage...
...however. Three lawyers defended them at their trial, they received food forwarded by the Vatican and were visited by the Rt. Rev. Godfrey Okoye, Roman Catholic bishop of Port Harcourt. Ojukwu, however, refused to discuss their plight with ENI but insisted that the Italian government -which does not recognize Biafra -speak in their behalf. He got his way when Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs Mario Pedini flew into Owerri to negotiate, thus giving Biafra at least temporary de facto recognition that irritated opposing Nigeria...
...storm of clemency petitions, Ojukwu announced that the sentences of the 18 "nonindigenous collaborators" were being commuted and they were allowed to leave the country. Ojukwu, a Catholic himself, had been moved by Pope Paul's pleas for mercy, according to the Biafran government. But what obviously moved Biafra's leader most of all was the fact that three of the most earnest pleaders-Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Portugal-provide the staging areas from which arms or food supplies reach Biafra...