Word: ibos
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...Biafrans. For transport they commandeered everything available; groundnut wagons rolled toward the front behind big red-and-silver municipal passenger buses. But hard as the federal troops hit back, the rebels continued to hold Ore. And since the rebel forces of Oxford-educated Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu are largely Ibo tribesmen, Nigerians behind the front in Lagos retaliated by beating and killing any Ibos who were still living in their capital. "The short, surgical police action" with which Gowon promised to put down the revolt, said Nigeria's leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, "is being conducted with blunt and unsterile...
Rush to Rally. But the rout soon stopped. Major Chukwama Nzeogwu, 30, a hero of the 1966 coup that toppled Nigeria's civilian government and briefly installed Ibos in power (before a second revolt by Gowon's supporters that fueled the slaughter of Ibos), rushed to the front. "This is a war we must fight to win," he told the Biafran soldiers. "Anyone who runs away will be shot. You are better than the Northerners, all of you." To aid the Ibo regulars, more than 50,000 of the civil defense volunteers poured in from all over Biafra...
Teen-age girls and Teddy boys in tight pants, neatly dressed middle-class merchants and shoeless old men in tattered togas last week formed civil defense groups in besieged Biafra, the secessionist Nigerian state that is under attack from federal forces. Largely Ibo tribesmen, they joined together to resist an invading army that was made up mainly of the rival Hausa tribe, whose members last year slaughtered thousands of Ibos in Northern Nigeria. The Biafran volunteers searched automobiles at roadblocks, practiced grenade throwing and ambushing. At a Port Harcourt automotive assembly plant, Biafran engineers rolled out their first homemade tanks...
...Enugu and the provincial centers of Nsukka and Ogoja. Large numbers of federal troops, which the government said were "moving cross-country on their flat feet," reportedly overran an Eastern military camp and captured 500 recruits. Determined Biafrans, whose army of about 7,000 is largely composed of Ibo tribesmen, claimed to have thrown Gowon's men back into their own territory at one border point. Colonel Ojukwu called on the Biafrans to kill ten federal soldiers for every one of their Ibo tribesmen slaughtered last year in riots in the predominantly Moslem North. It was the massacres...
...Enthusiasm. An Oxford graduate and the son of a millionaire Ibo financier, Lieut. Colonel Ojukwu is more than a match for Gowon, who grew up in the more provincial Middle Belt region and learned most of his lessons in the army. For months, Ojukwu has been gradually removing the last traces of federal influence in the East. Gowon made concessions, but he insisted on the principle of a strong central government. Then last week Gowon forced Ojukwu over the brink by announcing a plan to divide Nigeria's regions into twelve states, three of them to be carved...