Word: biafras
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...them in closer contact with labor and student groups. Meanwhile, Nigeria's British backers have been acutely embarrassed by Nigerian air attacks on undefended Biafran towns and hospitals. Britons who have protested bombing of civilians in Viet Nam now find their own nation indirectly supporting similar action in Biafra. The uproar has touched off a parliamentary debate, and last week led the Times of London to complain that Britain's Nigerian policy is a failure. Between that and Anguilla, suggested the Times, "there is a serious loss of touch in the conduct of British foreign policy...
...intervals, the cargo planes lumber down the runway, turn northward toward the Nigerian coast. Late afternoon sunlight splashes on little blue and gold fish, the fuselage emblems of the interfaith airlift organized by the World Council of Churches and the Catholic relief organization Caritas to shuttle food to starving Biafra...
Since Uli airport, 90 minutes' flying time from Sāo Tomé, is shrunken Biafra's lone remaining link with the world, the night shuttle frequently hauls passengers as well. A visitor has to be nerveless to endure the trip. Approaching the coast at dusk, the planes are occasionally shot at by Nigerian antiaircraft batteries. When they reach Uli, homing in on the airfield's radio beacon, they face worse harassment from a twin-engine Nigerian Ilyushin the pilots call "the Intruder." The Ilyushin hovers over blacked-out Uli every night for four hours, drops...
...earshot, they talk of bombing Lagos or heroically knocking down the Intruder by maneuvering a wingtip under his wingtip in the darkness and "flipping his ass to kingdom come." They joke grimly over the fact that their nightly flights mean only a trickle of food for Biafra's famished population. Then, as day begins to vanish over Sāo Tomé, dinner is served, the cargo trucks depart, the ancient aircraft cough into life, and the shuttle resumes...
What original sin comes down to, suggests Vanderbilt Theologian Ray Hart, "is that you can count on man to be a bastard." In a century that has so far produced Hiroshima, Buchenwald and Biafra, this is an insight that is hard to ignore. Søren Kierkegaard described original sin as a sense of dread; for most of mankind, it is still an uncomfortably familiar feeling...