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By Prof. MarkAnthony Nze
Today, May 30, is more than a memorial. It is a solemn reckoning. A day set aside by the Igbo people and all lovers of justice to honor the over 3 million Biafran men, women, and children who were not just casualties of war, but victims of a calculated, state-sponsored genocide between 1967 and 1970.
The Nigerian-Biafran War was not merely a civil conflict. It was an unambiguous violation of international humanitarian law, a brutal campaign that flagrantly defied the Geneva Conventions, and a tragedy made possible through the silence—and support—of global powers, chief among them, Britain.
When the Igbo people declared the Republic of Biafra in 1967, it was not out of rebellion but survival. Following the 1966 pogroms that saw over 50,000 Ndigbo massacred in Northern Nigeria, the Nigerian state failed to protect its own citizens. Entire families were butchered, women raped, and children burned alive in railway compounds and police barracks while the federal government looked the other way. Biafra was born as a last resort.
But the Nigerian government responded to Biafra’s cry for self-preservation with genocidal fury.
From the very onset of the war, Nigeria, under General Yakubu Gowon, enacted a scorched-earth policy aimed at annihilating the Biafran population. The blockade of food, medicine, and humanitarian aid into Biafra was not a wartime necessity—it was a deliberate strategy of extermination. The infamous words, “Hunger is a legitimate weapon of war,” echoed from Nigerian officials and were implemented with clinical precision.
Starvation became Nigeria’s most powerful weapon. Over two million Biafran children died from kwashiorkor and other starvation-related illnesses. Villages were bombed indiscriminately. Markets, schools, and refugee camps were targeted with aerial assaults in direct violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, which explicitly protects civilians and prohibits starvation as a method of warfare. These were not accidents—they were war crimes.
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And Britain, the colonial overlord of Nigeria, was not just complicit—it was a co-architect. Driven by the desire to protect its oil interests in the Niger Delta, the British government, under Harold Wilson, supplied the Nigerian military with arms, aircraft, and intelligence. They watched the genocide unfold—armed it, financed it, and diplomatically shielded it. Even as global media broadcast images of skeletal Biafran children with hollow eyes and distended stomachs, Britain remained unmoved.
The Nigerian government’s war crimes were not limited to mass starvation. Biafran prisoners of war were executed. Civilians were massacred in occupied towns. Relief flights from organizations like the Red Cross and World Council of Churches were fired upon in clear violation of international law.
Despite this, the post-war narrative was one of “No victor, no vanquished”—a hollow slogan meant to mask injustice with a coat of false reconciliation. In reality, Biafran professionals were blacklisted, businesses collapsed, and Igbo civil servants were either dismissed or demoted beneath their former juniors. Notably, only £20 was given to returning Igbo businessmen, regardless of their bank balances before the war—a policy of economic strangulation disguised as magnanimity.
Those who led Biafra’s heroic defense were persecuted. Lt. Col. Ogbugo Kalu, trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and former commander of the Nigerian Military Training College in Kaduna, was dismissed and imprisoned rather than reintegrated. Even Col. E.A. Etuk, a non-Igbo southerner who led Nigeria’s 16th Division with distinction, was sidelined and forced into early retirement—proof that this was not just an anti-Biafra agenda, but a systemic erasure of southern excellence.
Fifty-five years later, the same injustices remain. Marginalization. Ethnic profiling. State violence. Economic exclusion. Political suppression. Everything that led to Biafra’s declaration is still embedded in the false architecture of “One Nigeria.”
Today, as we sit at home in remembrance, we are not mourning defeat. We are honoring courage, resilience, and the eternal quest for justice. We remember not just the fallen, but the truth they died defending.
Biafra was not a rebellion. It was a resistance against extermination.
To the world that turned its back, to a nation that still denies its crimes, and to generations that must never forget—this is our truth. Biafra lives.
