STATEMENT ON THE PURPORTED APOLOGY BY ABIA STATE GOVERNOR ORJI UZOR KALU

STATEMENT ON THE PURPORTED APOLOGY BY ABIA STATE GOVERNOR ORJI UZOR KALU

TO NIGERIA OVER THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR

WORLD IGBO CONGRESS, INC.

The Secretariat, World Igbo Congress, Inc.

1107 Drew Street, Houston, Texas 77004

The World Igbo Congress (WIC) is dismayed and deeply regrets statements attributed to Abia State Governor Orji Uzor Kalu in which he reportedly suggests that it was a mistake on the part of the Igbo to have fought the 1967-1970 civil war and appealed to Nigerians to forgive Ndi-Igbo for same. WIC hereby condemns and dissociates itself from this statement as disturbing and inimical to the best interest of Ndi-Igbo and Nigerians in general. We urge Nigerians everywhere to disregard said statement.

We do not fault Governor Kalu for his youthfulness that may have hindered his understanding of the causes or reasons for the war. However, being a responsible adult in a highly visible position of leadership and authority in our land, he cannot escape his personal imperative to understand the facts and circumstances of that painful history and the duty he bears to assure against its distortion.

Biafrans did not provoke the aggression of federal Nigeria, but merely defended the lives and property of its people against such aggression. This, we conclude, does not warrant an apology and none can or should be offered.

Without equivocation, the Governor’s statement manifests a clear absence of understanding of the causes and circumstances of the Nigeria-Biafra war or deliberately seeks to distort the same.

We believe that the statement dishonors the more than 2 million Biafrans who perished in that war of genocide, disregards their supreme sacrifice for our survival as a people, and is tantamount to killing them over again. As such, Governor Kalu’s words are uncaring and border on the sacrilegious. We call on the Governor to atone for this wrong.

Governor Kalu’s utterances underscore the disturbing reality that a sizeable portion of our country’s elite (Igbo and others) either do not know or have been misled into accepting deliberate distortions of the fundamental truths about the Nigeria-Biafra war, often referred to as the civil war. WIC feels a particular duty to reject every attempt to substitute distortion for fact regarding that conflict. We therefore take this opportunity to solemnly restate the following truths about the 1967-1970 war between Nigeria and Biafra:

Biafra did not declare war on Nigeria; Nigeria declared war on Biafra. Biafra did not unleash pogrom on Nigerians; Nigeria did on Biafrans. The Gowon-led federal government failed to protect the lives and property of Eastern Nigerians, but indeed facilitated the orgy of killings in a pogrom against Nigerians of Eastern origin and thereby made all of Nigeria unsafe for them, save for their homeland in the East.

In the wake of the killings, Easterners massively escaped to the East from the North, West and Lagos after tens of thousands of their kin were massacred in waves of brutal killings, thousands more were maimed, their property looted or destroyed, and headless and mutilated bodies of these Easterners were shipped in train loads to the east. This transformed millions of Eastern Nigerians previously domiciled in other parts of Nigeria into refugees in their own country.

After the leaders of the first military coup in 1966 appointed Major-General Aguiyi Ironsi to head Nigeria’s first military government, soldiers of Northern origin engaged in a series of counter-coups on May 29^th, July 29^th and September 29^th 1966 by which General Ironsi himself and thousands of Igbo and other officers and men of Eastern origin in the military were butchered.

On January 4 and 5, 1967, Nigeria’s leaders, hosted by Ghana’s General Ankra, convened in Aburi and reached vital agreements on decentralization and regional autonomy. Upon returning to Nigeria, Gowon reneged on those agreements, which would have avoided war and restored Nigeria to the path of peace.

Rather than rehabilitate or restore normalcy for these refugees, the federal government of Nigeria sent its troops to finish off the killings and destroy the government of then Eastern Group of Provinces, led by Lt. Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, that provided shelter, food and protection to the defenseless Easterners.

To achieve maximum casualty, Nigeria sealed off all borders to the East, imposed air, land and sea blockade, and bombed and shelled schools, hospitals, markets and residences of private civilians. Better than 80% of Biafra’s deaths during the war resulted from starvation and disease rather than from the shooting.

These, in a nutshell, are the fundamental truths of Nigeria’s war against Biafra. We harbor no doubt that a people visited with pogrom and genocide has a right to self-defense, to seek survival. This is all that Biafrans did. Based on these facts, there can be no denying:

That Biafra was not a question of choice but a matter of survival in the face of pogrom and genocide in the hands of fellow Nigerians on the so-called notion of "one Nigeria,"

That the war of 1967-70 was a war of genocide from the Nigerian side against the Biafran Nation and a war of survival for Biafra who had to survive that onslaught;

That the fact that Biafrans survived and remain alive today is proof that we did not lose the war, but indeed succeeded in our struggle to survive genocide;

Upon these grounds, WIC finds neither reason nor grounds for apology from the former Biafrans, Ndi-Igbo in particular, to anyone. If anything, we are convinced it is the federal government of Nigeria and all those who collaborated and rallied to its call to arms against our people that owe us apology. We thus reject any attempt to justify or excuse the pogrom and genocide that were visited upon our people. We much more deeply resent any trivialization of the consequent waste of precious Biafran lives.

Governor Kalu is reported to have made his statement to visiting Chief Jerry Waya, PDP official and emissary of Vice President Atiku Abubakar. Significantly, Chief Waya’s message among other things, seems to have acknowledged the complaints of marginalization in the south-east zone as well as the fact that Ndi-Igbo still remain outside the political mainstream, despite our unmatched contributions to building the Nigerian nation. We admonish Governor Kalu to try and understand why this anomaly persists nearly 4 decades after the war.

In the absence of such understanding, it is our considered belief that Governor Kalu lacks the necessary foundation to speak for himself regarding this matter much less for Ndi-Igbo.

May the blood of our victims spilled not be in vain as WIC continues to strive for a Nigeria that is fair, just and equitable to all of its peoples.

Kalu K. Diogu, Ph.D.

Chairman, World Igbo Congress

Austin, Texas September 8, 2003

September 2003