Starving Biafran Refugee


Les Archer, a British construction worker, holds the hand of a starving Biafran refugee child, one of an estimated 600 Igbo children at the tiny Niger Maternity Home in Port Harcourt January 22, 1970. Photograph by Dennis Lee Royle

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BIAFRA: The Fall of Aba

Time Friday, September 13, 1968 Like most other stages of the Nigerian civil war, the federal forces' much heralded "final offensive" against the breakaway territory of Biafra has proceeded more slowly and tortuously than scheduled. Despite the superiority in numbers and firepower of the advancing Nigerian armies, Lieut. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu's Biafran army has replied to every federal gain with commando raids, often forcing the Nigerians to move half a step backward for each one forward. But last week, after holding out for twelve days against withering artillery fire, the Biafrans were driven out of Aba, their administrative capital and largest remaining city. Together with other losses, the fall of Aba reduced Biafra's territory to approximately 5,000 square miles, or one-sixth of the secessionist state's original size. Reinforced Belief. The city's 100,000 residents fled in terror when federal troops started shelling the capital from all ...
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Evidence Of Anti-Igbo Pogrom And Eye Witness Accounts: Essays

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AUTHORS: PHILIP GOUREVITCH; JOHN BARTH, LUIGI BIANCHI, ET AL; AUBERON WAUGH; BRUCE FEIGN; OKEY NDIBE; RON DORON; HERBERT EKWE-EKWE; EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO; MARK CURTIS AND ZACH DUNDASS COMPILED AND EDITED BY AMBROSE EHIRIM Alms Dealers: Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid Without Facilitating Conflicts? By Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker October 11, 2010 In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pict...
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Benjamin Adekunle Shooting at Everything

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"I want see no Red Cross, no caritas, no World Council of Churches, no pope, no missionaey and no United Nations delegation. I want to prevent even one Igbo from having even one piece to eat before their capitulation. We shoot at everything that moves and when our troops march into the center of Igbo territory, we shoot at everything even at things that don't move" -----Benjamin Adekunle If the above comment is not bigotry and hatred, what else is?
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Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra

Fleas versus Falcons over Biafra Short history and assessment of the MFI-9B "MiniCOIN" in Biafran air force service Part I ©Kristjan Runarsson 2002 1 - Synopsis This is a condensed overview of MFI-9B operations and not an attempt at producing a definitive account of these operations. The main motivation for creating it was the fact that the only really detailed account of MFI-9B operations in Biafra is Gunnar Haglunds book "Gerillapilot i Biafra" which, as the name suggests, is written in Swedish and has to the best of my knowledge not been translated into English. I hope this short account will give English speaking readers some insight into these operations which left an air force well stocked with "serious military hardware" more of less impotent to react to attacks by a handful of piston engined, rocket equipped, primary trainers. 2 - MiniCOIN an eccentric idea becomes reality Carl Gustav von Rosen can with some justification be said to be one of the 2...
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