. . . and a tragedy
The World and Nigeria Suzanne Cronje (Sidgwick and Jackson £5.95) Mrs Cronje's is the third lengthy tome on the Nigerian Civil war to appear since Biafra's collapse in January 1970. If I say that it seems quite easily the best this is not only because Mrs Cronje happens to share my moral and historical perspective of the episode. It is also because her book, by tying up nearly all the historical loose ends, leaves readers free to ask themselves the real questions. These do not concern the background to the war, or even exactly what happened during it, Although it is useful to have a clear perspective of the rights and wrongs at issue this is by no means essential, and in the enormous smokescreen produced by argument and counter-argument those who are by natural inclination only slightly interested in West African politics can easily lose their way. The main question is surely not whether the British Government was right to support the Federal side at the outset of the civil war; it is why the Government persisted in this support through two and a half years, helping to starve to death between a million and a half and two million civilians, mostly children and old people, in somebody else's civil war. The second question is why the Government was allowed to get away with it.
That any British government could have persisted in supporting such a blockade through two and a half years, in the full knowledge of the effect it was having, seems to me self-evidently wicked. Others may disagree. There are further smokescreens to be released about the exact number of casualties involved and the extent to which Nigerian and British government offers of relief were genuine or whether the conditions attached were tantamount to surrender terms. In the first matter, one can only rely upon figures produced by Red Cross and Joint Church Aid organisations in the field; in the second, the eloquent protestations of Mr Michael Stewart and the FCO must be measured against the terms which were offered; and the Government's awareness of these terms should be judged by Mr George Thomson's rebuke to MPs (Hansard, December 9, 1969) who favoured Biafra's right to secession, that they "must choose whether they are in favour of Biafran resistance or Biafran Relief."
There can be no doubt that the British Government knew exactly what it was doing, and was determined to go on doing it. Its reason for persisting in the operation may partly be that there was no effective parliamentary opposition to it — in fact Mr Wilson's appalling policy had the enthusiastic support of Sir Alec DouglasHome — but this is only a reason for not discounting it. The real answer surely lies deep in political psychology, something which one might call the leadership urge or the schoolteacher syndrome, but as Mrs Cronje does not discuss this aspect of the matter, however much her book may raise the question, I feel we should leave it to the end.
Within the limitations she has set herself, Mrs Cronje does an admirable job. Her account of how one of the independent independent observers — on whose evidence Mr Stewart relied again and again to discredit atrocity stories — was briefed by a junior Foreign Office Minister (Maurice Foley) and a senior Foreign Office diplomat (Ronald Burroughs — now ambassador in Algiers) to assist the Nigerian army makes the best possible reading. Her tabulation of arms sales to Nigeria and listing of the innumerable occasions on which Mr Stewart lied to the House is admirable. Within, as I say, the limitations she has set herself, after five and a half years of painstaking research she has got the affair pretty well sewn up. My only criticism is that in her splendid concentration on the matter at hand — analysing the motives and procedures which in this particular case, happened to result in the deliberate starvation to death of one or two million children — she ignores the wider implications which an evil of this magnitude must surely encompass.
First let us examine the role of the press. In a free country, of course, there is bound to be diversity of opinion. One would even have been a little disappointed if the Observer, for instance, in its gruesome and half-witted way, had not got hold of the wrong end of every available stick and come down firmly on the side of disaster. Equally, one can point out that the Mirror group had business interests in Lagos, that the Daily Telegraph's coverage of foreign and diplomatic affairs has never pretended to go beyond an earnest effort to understand and transcribe Foreign Office briefings; that the Mail's opinions are worthless in any case, and that the Express has never been given to moral crusades on behalf of black people. One can say all this and add that the corps of Commonwealth correspondents who advised editors in the early stages of the war is not conspicuous for intellectual eminence. It is also true that by the end of the war, the Times, the Guardian, the Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard had grave doubts about Britain's role. Yet the fact remains that a million or so children died by slow starvation over a period of two and a half years in the full glare of publicity with the vociferous approval of all the newspapers in the earlier list as well as that of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times.
The tiny handful of journalists, MPs and others who had visited Biafra went on screaming to no avail until the matter was brought to a successful conclusion. Reflecting over the five Biafra debates, the wonder is not that Mr Stewart should have lied repeatedly to the House of Commons, but that he should have bothered to do so. In fact he was flattering the House by lying to it.
The true lesson surely concerns the correct attitude for us to adopt towards those who seek public office and political power. Mr Stewart does not think of himself as a callous or wicked person, nor does Mr Wilson nor Sir Alec Douglas Home, nor any of the 256 MPs who voted for Britain's continued involvement in Nigeria's civil war on December 9, 1969.
Yet what these people were effectively saying was that the Ibos must submit to the political arrangements which these people had approved for them or t'hese people were going to assist in starving them to death, bombing and shooting them until they agreed. The only lesson to be learned from this uniquely unimportant political event is that politicians will shrink from nothing to exercise their selfimportance and see that their opinions prevail if they think they can get away with it, and that at any rate a significant proportion of Fleet Street editors identify themselves more with Government than they do with journalism.
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