Generation Genocide
Tags: Nigeria, Buhari, Armenia, Genocide, Jewish

The Igbos of Nigeria.

How Did We Get Here?

In 1966 a series of massacres were carried out against Igbos in Nigeria. By 1969 a civil war had broken out, and it was reported that 1000 Igbo children were dying a day due to starvation. This is the story of how we got there.

The anti-Igbo pogroms are often framed as a retaliation for the murder of Northern military and political leaders by Igbo army officers. The Igbos “drew first blood” when they murdered the Sardauna and gloated about it in marketplaces all over the Northern Nigeria. Another Igbo, Aguiyi Ironsi had seized power and refused to punish the coup plotters. So aggrieved Northerners decided to take matters into their own hands and get “justice.” This sort of flawed thinking, that Igbos provoked their own near annihilation, has become foundational to our modern understanding of the Biafran genocide.

Let us start at the beginning. The idea that the Igbos were trying to steal Nigeria from under the feet of every other ethnic group didn’t start with the Nzeogwu coup. For years, even before Nigeria’s independence, the narrative of the crafty, greedy Igbo coming to infiltrate the North and seize its economic activity had been brewing. Ahmadu Bello even went as far as likening the Igbos to “colonizers.” The fear that Igbos and Southerners would dominate Nigeria and the North by extension was very real for Northen elite.

Kaduna Nzeogwu: A Man You’ve Definitely Heard Of.

So when 6 majors, 5 of whom were Igbo, led a bloody coup against the Nigerian government headed by Tafawa Balewa, it confirmed a lot of the North’s long held preexisting biases. It didn’t matter that the junior officers involved in the coup were from all over Nigeria, or that the coup plotters were in no way flag-bearers of any larger Igbo interest. The January ‘66 Nzeogwu coup was the North’s Kristallnacht moment. It was finally time to put the Igbos in “their place.”

A group of young military officers of Northern extraction would lead a counter coup in July of that same year. The “July rematch” would see Igbo military officers murdered en masse. Outside the barracks Northern civilians would massacre their Igbo neighbors for months on end. These events would later culminate in the civil war where between 1–3 million more Igbos would be systematically wiped out.

Often times the actions of Major Kaduna Nzeogwu and co are used to “contextualize” the pogroms that Igbos were met with. That the murders of Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa were so grave a sin that the slaughter of 30,000 innocent Igbos in retaliation was understandable, if not justifiable. What this deeply immoral position misses is that neither the massacres nor the anti-Igbo sentiments were new in the North. In 1953, a whole 13 years before the Sardauna was killed, Igbos were attacked and killed by irate Northern youth because the Sardauna and his Northern delegates were insulted in Lagos. The pogroms simply followed an already established pattern of behavior in the North. One that, judging by the riots over cartoons drawn in Holland, still exists today.

How Did We Get Here?

So it is little wonder that Muhammadu Buhari, one of the architects of the 1966 counter coup can threaten the South East with the memories of the civil war today. He built his military and political career on murdering Igbos in the military, along with Murtala Mohammed, TY Danjuma, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha and Shehu Yar’Adua.

There is a distinct lack of shame in how these events are discussed. None of these men ever faced any consequences for their ethnic cleansing in the military, in fact Murtala, Buhari, IBB and Abacha would go on to force their way into power one after the other. Shehu Yar’Adua may have died in prison, but at his baby brother would die in the presidency some decade later. TY Danjuma would become one of Nigeria’s richest men. A whole generation of vampiric oligarchs were born out of that one bloody night.

The Need For A Moral Reckoning Is Urgent.

No. They Didn’t Bring This On Themselves.

Nobody remembers the name of the teenager who assassinated vom Rath. In fact, I’m certain you’ve never heard of this event until today. Nobody remembers which Armenian splinter group fought on the side of Russia. Nobody debates if the Tutsis really shot down a Hutu President’s plane in Rwanda. With regards to every other genocide we remember the victims, and condemn in the strongest terms, the abominable actions of the perpetrators. So why then is the story of the Biafran genocide constantly tainted with this “Igbo coup” nonsense?

One may say they are simply “contextualizing” the pogroms, ethnic cleansing and genocide. This is a particularly irresponsible argument. The consensus across large swarths of Nigeria is that the Igbos deserved the pogroms, so one man’s “context” is another man’s justification.

To anyone who still can’t see the problem with Muhammadu Buhari’s comments, I will make one last attempt to educate you. The civil war was not a surgical strike targeting Biafran combatants, it was a total warfare, humanitarian crisis that left 1–3 million civilians dead. The Nigerian government was willing to turn millions of innocent little children into statistics and collateral damage. It is a stain on our history, not some display of “toughness” with which anyone, least of all a sitting President, should use as bragging rights. You cannot reference a time when you murdered innocent children and claim your message is targeted at “Unknown Gunmen.” Bullshit.

So let us not be shocked at Mr President’s casual use of genocidal rhetoric. Had the Nazis been rewarded for the Holocaust, Hitler would have done the same. This is the country we created.