Word: ibos
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...flight to Enugu, former capital of the Eastern Region, for an eyewitness report of relief operations. also had valuable background files from TIME'S Nairobi Bureau Chief Edwin Reingold and Ottawa Bureau Chief Alan Grossman. During two years in West Africa, Grossman covered the Ibo massacres that led to the present civil war. Among his more vivid memories, Grossman recalled walking along the platform at the Kano railroad station, "a handkerchief clasped to my nose to dull the lingering stench of more than a hundred Ibo corpses." For him, too, it was all a depressing experience...
...modern weapons from Britain, Russia and much of Europe, is the federal government of Nigeria. It is determined to crush a rebellion that it feels will destroy its republic. On the other side, armed chiefly with determination, stands the secessionist state of Biafra, the home of Nigeria's Ibo tribe. The Ibos are convinced that they are fighting not only for independence but for their survival as a people...
...planes can run the gauntlet of federal radar-controlled antiaircraft fire. But they are not only losing the war: slowly but surely, eight million Biafrans are starving to death. Gradually, the image of Biafra's human agony has unsettled the conscience of the world. That image is of Ibo infants and children with anguished, vacant eyes, distended bellies, shriveled chests and matchstick limbs crippled from edema. The world has protested in the form of silent marches of New Yorkers outside the United Nations building, impassioned debates in Britain's Parliament and West Germany's Bundestag, shillings and sixpences collected...
...time being, such questions pale before the immediate human one: What is to be the Biafrans' fate? Gowon himself does not want the "final solution" that the Ibos so deeply fear. But he does not speak for all Nigeria, nor can he control all his military commanders. Each day that passes, the matter becomes more and more irrelevant to many Ibos. Even should massive food supplies suddenly arrive, thousands of undernourished Biafrans would die with the first bellyful of protein food that they took. It would simply prove too much for their debilitated systems to handle. Already, famine must have...
...children of Biafra, like children in all wars, are the victims of a struggle beyond their control. Their parents, rightly or wrongly, believe that the Ibos must follow their own destiny and carve out their own mini-nation. The federal Nigerians believe in the vision of a united, pluralist Nigerian nation. The cruel dilemma has been eloquently summed up by Yoruba Playwright Wole Soyinka. "Every Ibo man, woman and child believes today that he is fighting a last-ditch battle for his home and his dignity," he says. "What that means in practical terms to the nation is that...