Word: biafras
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This was a year that disproved the truism that scenes of tragedy all blur together, that photographs of famine in Biafra and Ethiopia, Sudan and then Somalia just pile on in layers, forming a callous around the conscience. Brought face to face one more time with starvation, the world did not just shrug. And pictures gave other conflicts their own unforgettable faces. Some of the video-game visuals from last year's fighting in the Persian Gulf were strangely antiseptic, an invitation to forget that war is the mass production of individual suffering. The photographs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where...
James Wilde's presence in revolutionary Rumania last week surprised none of us: after all, the foreign correspondent is hardly a stranger to bloodshed and chaos. In 30 years with TIME, Wilde has reported on wars from Viet Nam, Africa and the Middle East. During the war in Biafra in the late 1960s, when the eastern part of Nigeria tried to secede, Wilde not only came under frequent ground fire but was strafed by Nigerian jet fighters as well...
...media coverage. But typically this is because American corporate or other interests are directly involved -- as when Union Carbide's poison gas cloud killed 2,233 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984 -- or because humanitarian groups arouse American donors and volunteers, as happened with famines in Ethiopia and Biafra. In general, however, the scales are so tilted that Hurricane Hugo, which killed 51 people, got about as much coverage across the U.S. as the 1985 Mexico City earthquake that claimed 20,000 lives...
Some of the events of the year -- the starvation in Biafra, for example, or the seizure of the American intelligence ship Pueblo -- might have occurred in some other year. The events were significant, but not central to the drama. For the essential 1968 was mythic. It proceeded chaotically, and yet finally had the coherence and force of tragedy. And if it was the end of some things (of the civil rights movement, of Lyndon Johnson's generous social vision, of the liberals' hope to keep government on its trajectory), it prepared the way for other beginnings: the women's movement...
...horror of events in Biafra unfolded, Kouchner became convinced that Recamier was right. When Nigerian forces closed in on the hospital where Kouchner was working, the doctors asked to evacuate their patients. The Red Cross ordered them to stay on the grounds that they would be safer in a hospital under the Geneva Conventions. As the troops drew near, many patients bolted into the forest. "It was unbelievable," recalls Kouchner, who is now France's Secretary of State for Humanitarian Action. "Some of them were | carrying their own plasma bags. Others had been operated on, and their intestines were hanging...