Word: nigerias
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...Nigeria had been independent for six years, but "a nation in name only." Tension among the Yoruba, Ibo, and some two hundred other tribes came to a head when an aborted coup led by lbo army officers resulted in the death of a Moslem leader. The call reverberated throughout Nigeria: "One million Ibos must die to avenge the death of the Saudana." In October, 1966, the Federal Military Government of Nigeria began a blockade of the Eastern Region--seven months before Biafra would secede...
Relying on the principle of national sovereignty, Nigeria argued that no relief could be provided to the secessionist territories without Nigerian consent. The rest of the world could only respond, in the words of one senior officer, "If children must die first, then that is too bad, just...
...Secretary General U Thant feared that befriending the Biafrans would undermine his status with Nigeria and other member nations that felt threatened by tribal secession. Great Britain had extensive economic ties to her former colony and envisioned huge profits for British petroleum interests from the oil deposits recently discovered under Nigeria's Eastern Region--Biafra. Small wonder, then, that Prime Minister Harold Wilson "remarked that if a million lbos had to die to preserve the unity of Nigeria, well, that was not too high a price...
Although the Nigerian leaders' fervent anti-communism hardly made credible a close alliance between Nigeria and the Soviet Union, the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations was sufficient to cause one State Department official to threaten: "the United States government will do everything in its power to block" private citizens from organizing a relief effort...
...sure, the Nigerian Civil War was not the first instance that implacable fear and hatred of the Soviets outweighed all other concerns--moral and otherwise--in the making of U.S. foreign policy. And as the current fiasco in Nigeria illustrates, nor was it the last...