A plea to Mr. Michael Stewart

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

Mr du Cann could scarcely have picked a more explosive moment to throw his custard pie at Mr Heath's leadership. Garden fêtes at Curry Rivel, a tiny Somerset hamlet just off the great Taunton Road from Wincanton, have always been noted for the recklessness of their opening speeches, but on this occasion my spies report that villagers reeled away clutching their pots of home-made gooseberry jam, leav- spies report that villagers reeled away clutching their pots of home-made gooseberry jam, leav- ing the main tombola prizes unclaimed. Great

things are happening in the Conservative party. This is what politics is about in our decent little old island. What first attracted your politi- cal correspondent to the political arena was a little notice in the -newspaper about eighteen

months ago which said that a million children in

England were officially living beneath the poverty line. This statement was produced by the Ministry of Social Security in its pamphlet Con- ditions of Families and it was backed by a team

of social scientists from London University, writing in Medical Office?, who said that 630,000 children in England were not getting enough to eat.

It seemed to me at the time that if people were prepared to believe such stupendous lies as this, they must be prepared to believe any- thing; plainly, one was wasting one's time trying to think up ingenious plots for novels which practically nobody would ever read. And it was one of the pleasantest things about poli- ticians, I discovered—and about Labour ones in particular—that they seemed to mind so much about everyone being well-fed.

The same concern was apparent in Mr Michael Stewart last June. Here he was, some-

how bringing it up during the debate on Nigeria: `If we make the supposition that it were the intention of the Federal government . . . to proceed without mercy . with . .. the starva- tion of the Ibo people . . . then the arguments which justify the policy we have so far pursued would fall, and we would have to reconsider, and more than reconsider, the action we have so far taken.'

Since then, Biafran children have been dying from starvation at the rate of between three and five thousand a day. Our English minds, attuned to the more relevant dramas of the garden fête at Curry Rive!, instantly recoil from these figures, imagining that they must be the work of some teenage propagandist. In fact, they come from the International Red Cross. But whatever the truth, and even if one divides it by ten, or twenty, or by a hun- dred to arrive at a figure which accords with one's own emotional preference, it still raises the question of bow many children must starve to death before Mr Stewart decides that an element of mercilessness is involved.

Perhaps he would argue that these children are not starving as a result of deliberate Nigerian.policy. If so, he will have to explain these words from Lord Hunt, the Government's special emissarY: 'What are the facts which have continued to block the way to relief operations in Nigeria?

. The first is the fact of a state of siege. . . . The siege has continued for several months, with the Ibos completely surrounded and cut off by land and by water. . . . Brutal and in- human though it is, the very essence of siege tactics is to reduce the defenders to physical conditions which they can no longer endure.'

In other words, starvation is deliberate policy—a policy which Mr Stewart seemed prepared to approve—at any rate in preference to Nigel Fisher's 'quick kill'—when he sug- gested, in the debate last June, that General Gowon's delay should put the Federal govern- ment in a more favourable light.

Now, of course, everything has changed and we are embarked on the quick kill: four weeks, we are assured, and the agony will be over.

A consistent feature of this Government has been its optimism over timing. Everyone re- members Mr Wilson's famous 'weeks not months,' but one has to be a political corre- spondent to remember all the lunatic opti- mism which has poured out week by week on the subject of the economy. Mr Jenkins was an honourable exception to this, and I always thought that Mr Stewart was another. He had never seemed to me to suffer from his leader's extraordinary ability to seize upon one parti- cular item of news which is convenient, to the exclusion of all others.

Can Mr Stewart really believe that a military solution will be found in four weeks,

or ten, or twenty? I have always thought—

and still think—that he is a man of integrity and courage. Can't he imagine that when the Nigerian forces capture Imuahia and Owerri, Biafra's agony will only just be start- ing? Even with the best will in the world on the part of the Nigerian forces (and I don't think that Mr Stewart can, in honesty, attribute quite that degree of good will to them) it would simply not be within the bounds of human capability to distinguish, in a bitterly fought guerrilla war, between those Biafrans in the bush who were merely refugees, and as such proper recipients of international Red Cross aid, and those who were Biafran soldiers (or terrorists, as they will shortly be known in the English newspapers) and as such proper targets for ethical modern warfare. In this context, the remarks of Colonel Adekunle, Commander in Chief of the Nigerian forces in control of Aba and Port Harcourt, make sound military sense: Q. What will your soldiers do on entering a village where most of the farmers are not lbo?

Adekunle: We will shoot anything that moves.

Q. What will your forces do in the lb° heartland? Adekunle: Shoot everything, even if it 'doesn't move.

—although he was probably exceeding his military judgment in the answer to the last question, put to him by the Telegraaf (Nether- lands).

Q. Do I understand that the food now in Lagos will never reach the refugee camps in your sector?

Adekunle: Your understanding is correct.

All this is dismissed by Mr Thomson as a bit of schoolboy fun (his office blames Radio Bia- fran propaganda for spreading alarm among the Biafrans) because, as we all know, the Nigerians aren't like that. Yet in the same breath he says that he can't change his arms policy, because 'we have had to bear in mind the livelihood and safety of many thousands of British Nationals working in Federal Nigeria.' In other words, if we don't give the Nigerians guns to kill the Biafrans, they might kill the English, which goes to prove how moderate and reliable they really are. But it is hard to attach much importance to anything that Mr Thomson says after his extraordinary performance in the emergency debate, denying that the Federal push into the lbo heartland had started when General Gowon had twice announced that it had started. If it was always hard to attach much importance to anything which Lord Shep- herd said, it is quite impossible now, after his gratuitous smears in the House of Lords about the role of Markpress, suggesting among other things that it had held Katanga's account in the Congo upheavals. Anyone within five miles of Fleet Street could have put him right.

So I do not address any of this to Mr Thom- son or Lord Shepherd. As events have shown, they appear to have been guided by the simple proposition that anything which comes from the High Commission in Lagos is true, while anything from any other source is Biafran pro- paganda. Their resignations, when the truth of what is happening in Biafra is eventually known, will be one of the smaller tragedies in- volved. But Mr Stewart is another matter. He, presumably, is allowed to read the foreign newspapers. He must know something of the odium in which Britain is held as a result of our role in the affair. He has received repre- sentations from the Scandinavian ambassadors and also from the foreign minister of Holland. He knows that there have been demonstrations outside the British embassy in Bonn. He knows of the incident in Holland last month, when all television stations voluntarily closed down for a quarter of an hour while post offices opened at 9.15 in the evening to collect money for Biafra, which amounted to more than 2s per head of the population. He knows of the stand France is taking in the affair. He might even have heard the statement of Mr H. J. Neuman, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of K ye, the ruling Dutch party:

'If the British government and people are in- deed prepared to tolerate a quick kill for Biafra, Britain cannot expect any continuation of enthusiasm for her entry into the Common Market.'

Can Mr Stewart honestly believe that all this is the result of clever Biafran propaganda? Are foreign journalists really so much more gullible than their English counterparts, sitting on the Commonwealth desks and nursing their 'con- tacts' in the CRO. Incidentally, I wish people would stop quoting the journalist David Wil- liams, of West Africa, as if he were totally impartial. He is editorial adviser to a Lagos newspaper, and has consistently—and very competently—presented the Nigerian point of view. Of course, it will probably not achieve any- thing to stop arms supplies at this late stage, although Mr Stewart should not accept the Hunt-Thomson line that it will stiffen Biafran resistance, since any idiot can see that the Bia- frans intend to fight to the finish. The days are long since past when people supposed that British foreign policy in any field could actually achieve anything. But there was a time when Labour leaders used to talk about our moral influence; and it is hard to see how this is improved by our complicity in one of the most horrible events of modern history.