Cripes - 3 million people died the last time the Ibo tried to gain independence!

Posted by: wallyUK at July 12, 2006 11:27 AM

A re-posting from December 14, 2005 --

Fitzgerald: Remember Biafra!

"During the Biafra War of 1967-1969, which was triggered by a massacre by Muslims of Christians, the entire Western world stood by and allowed the Muslims of the North to slaughter the Christian, mainly Ibo, south. These Muslims were aided by outside Muslims, including Egyptian pilots who strafed and bombed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands -- without any opposition, anti-aircraft fire, anything.

The war was brought on by the Jihad against the Christian Ibo and other Christian peoples of southern Nigeria by the Hausa and Fulani Muslims of the north (Islam itself was spread most recently in the 1804 Jihad declared by Othman Dan Fodio), and by the desperate attempt of the Ibo (Igbo) people to free themselves from Muslim aggression. Tens of thousands of civilians were murdered --- by the Egyptian pilots who repeatedly bombed and strafed them.

Great Britain, France, the United States, all of Europe, did nothing to help the Christians. Col. Ojukwu, in his Ahiara Declaration (for the full text, google "Jihad Watch" and "Posted by Hugh" and "Ahiara Declaration"), said that the Biafrans were fighting off a "Jihad" that was being waged against them -- and the word was not being used figuratively.

Only two states recognized Biafra: Ghana and Israel. The rest of the Infidel world turned its back, pretending to believe that it was more important to "keep the largest black African country whole" even if this meant the appropriation of southern oil wealth by the Muslims who controlled the army and repeated aggression against the Christians of Nigeria -- an aggression that continues to this day, in the steady spread of sharia, in the attacks on Christian peoples. Usually the press only reports the Christian attempts at retaliation, not all that goes before -- and furthermore, describes this as "communal violence" rather than Muslim aggression which the Christians must ward off.

There may yet be another Christian uprising. All the oil is in the south. The Muslims have been applying Sharia to Muslim and non-Muslim alike in several of the Nigerian states. They forced a Christian journalist, making an innocently joking remark about how "Muhamamd would have appreciated the girls in the Miss World Contest" (which contest was closed after violent Muslim protests), to flee for her life to England. The suppression, almost entirely unreported in the Western world, of the Christians in the south, many of their population centers still occupied by the Muslim-dominated army, continues.

One way to embolden the Nigerian Christians is to rediscover, and talk about, the Biafra War, and how terrible the behavior of the Muslims -- the Egyptians in particular -- was during that war, and how pusillanimously the entire Christian or post-Christian world behaved. And make sure the Biafrans, that is those Christians who long to rebel, know that this time they will be given arms and other kinds of support and will not be abandoned.

And what would do the most good is not in Nigeria itself, but if the American government, instead of wasting resources on the ungrateful, and largely non-existent "Iraqi" people, were with a few thousand soldiers to seize the southern Sudan and Darfur, and while tens of thousands of grateful black Africans demonstrate their joy and gratitude (so different from the whining, demanding, sullen, and essentially hostile even if occasionally feignedly-friendly-in-order-to-obtain-more-handouts-and-more-American-goodies behavior of the "Iraqis"), who will dare, at the U.N. or the E.U., to deplore such obviously humanitarian intervention? And it will be a signal, a three-way signal:

1. To the Arab League, and to Muslims, and especially to Egypt: your plans in East Africa to extend the Dar al-Islam all the way through Ethiopia will not be permitted. This is the end of this little game of mass murder that has gone on too long. And Ethiopia will not be subject to threats from Egypt about diverting some of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation projects.

2. To the Chinese, signing oil deals with the Sudan -- sorry, no can do. We are more interested in the wellbeing of the black Africans whose country this once was (a hundred years ago, 80% of the country was non-Muslim and non-Arab) than you communists-turned-ruthless-capitalists-and-exploiters have shown yourselves to be. Well, too bad.

3. To the black Africans of southern Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, and everywhere that local Muslims are becoming more aggressive, especially where Saudi money is transforming mosques into something less syncretistic and easygoing than had heretofore been the case: this is what we, the Western world, can do. Sursum corda. We won't make the mistake made in the First Biafra War again. We now understand Islam, and your plight, better. So keep at it.

[Posted December 14, 2005 08:03 A.M.]

Posted by: Hugh at July 12, 2006 11:32 AM

At least that's the estimate given in wikipedia.

Posted by: wallyUK at July 12, 2006 11:32 AM

One million seems to be the lowest estimate for the number of dead (including disease and starvation) during Nigerian Civil War. I've seen at least two sources with an upper estimate of 3 million.

Posted by: wallyUK at July 12, 2006 11:43 AM

Sadly the West (and now the OAU) does everything it can to suppress any potential changes in Africa's colonial era borders. This goes all the way back to the 1960s when UN troops suppressed the independence of Katanga. Biafra is the just the most extreme example.

South Sudan and Somaliland should also have their independence recognized but no outside country would dare do so. With the exception of Namibia which is a wholly different case, the only country in Africa to successfully gain recognized soveriegnty from another African country is Eritrea, and thier independence was won on the battlefield over a bloodthirsty communist regime.

Biafra, like Assyria, Darfur, Kabylie, Sarawak, and many other nations, deserves its independence. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is both blind and deaf to these injustices.

Posted by: Provoslavni at July 12, 2006 12:25 PM

Between China's support for North Korea, the murderous regimes in Sudan and Iran, selling contraband to Saddam, etc., and its notorious human rights record at home isn't it about time we started boycotting goods produced in China and see if that doesn't take some of the wind out of their economy?

Posted by: waterdragon52 at July 12, 2006 12:35 PM

"isn't it about time we started boycotting goods produced in China and see if that doesn't take some of the wind out of their economy?"
-- from a posting above

Yes.

And time as well to question the elevation of Homo Economicus by fundamentlast free-marketeers (rhymes with "Mouseketeers" and therefore with "Eisner" and therefore with the salary that he extorted from Disney, he and all the other fantastically greedy CEOs). If the Chinese will not pressure North Korea, then we need not continue to make its economy such a success. And for other reasons, the cheerleaders of globalization -- which included the Clinton Administration -- should curb their enthusiasm, and begin to look around at the hollowing-out of this country's economy, and stop pretending that their vulgarization of Adam Smith, and their shallow appeals to comparative advantage, in an age when capital is mobile, and labor is stable, and American labor costs far more than labor in China (why, even the factories in Costa Rica and in Mexico, the ones that moved down from the United States, are closing and their operations being moved to China).

An entirely new way of looking at things, beginning with the recognition of reality rather than adherence to business-school abstractions, is required.

Posted by: Hugh at July 12, 2006 1:31 PM

Usually the press only reports the Christian attempts at retaliation, not all that goes before -- and furthermore, describes this as "communal violence" rather than Muslim aggression which the Christians must ward off.

This sounds like the same tactics that are used for disguising what has gone on, and still is going on, in India. Indian posters here have repeatedly said that "communalism" is a favourite word over there among naively appeasement-minded politicians.

I'm sure that as a child I had a vague idea that there were different groups of Indians who, so to speak, occasionally attacked each other, and I thought that that was obviously what Indians did and it was kind of an odd thing to do. I'd have known Biafrans were starving, although I wouldn't have had a clue why. Of course, Israel sometimes had problems with Arab countries attacking it, which seemed a little mean of them. But only connect and all these are aspects of the same phenomenon - Islam and the jihad it preaches.

Posted by: Yojimbo at July 12, 2006 3:35 PM