Biafran War
| date | July 6, 1967 - January 15, 1970 |
|---|---|
| place | Nigeria |
| output | Nigerian victory |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Commander | |
|
Yakubu Gowon |
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu |
| losses | |
|
200,000 victims |
1,000,000 victims |
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The Biafra War was a Nigerian civil war from 1967 to 1970 with the aim of securing the Nigerian area of Biafra with the capital Enugu in the south-east of the state of the Federal Republic of Nigeria .
causes
Nigeria is a multi-ethnic state with two main religions, Christianity in the south of Nigeria and Islam in the north. Since Nigeria's independence from Great Britain in 1960, some peoples of Nigeria have struggled for supremacy in the state. Above all, the Christian Igbo from the Biafra province felt they were at a disadvantage compared to the Muslim Hausa and Fulani of the north.
The conflict was exacerbated by the discovery of crude oil near the Igbo settlement area in the Niger Delta , which soon became an important economic pillar of Nigeria.
On January 15, 1966, Igbo officers led a coup around Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu to gain power. The Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was killed. General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi took over state power from the Igbo officers . Parts of the Nigerian population feared that they would be oppressed by the Igbos in the future.
In July 1966, a counter-coup restored northern dominance. After the January 15 coup and the counter-coup, a pogrom broke out against the Igbo, in which tens of thousands of Igbo died.
War and Consequences
At the end of May 1967, the Nigerian central government passed a territorial reform, as a result of which Nigeria was divided into twelve states . The administrative boundaries were set in such a way that the oil areas were outside Igbo's access. The military governor of the south-east region Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu from the Igbo people proclaimed the independence of the Biafra region on May 30, 1967. Previously, tens of thousands of inner Nigerian migrants (tens of thousands of south-east Nigerians who lived in the north-west of the country, including many Igbo) had been murdered or forced to flee to their region of origin, Biafra.
The war began in the early hours of July 6, 1967, when Nigerian troops crossed the Biafras border. Despite bitter resistance, the war that followed soon showed Biafra's military inferiority. Above all, the former colonial power Great Britain supported the central government; other arms suppliers to Nigeria were the USA, the Soviet Union, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and the Netherlands, with the last three states citing their deliveries in the course of 1968.
Half of the weapons available to the Republic of Biafra came from its own production and half from the People's Republic of China; other suppliers were Portugal, France and Switzerland ( 20 mm Oerlikon cannon ). However, Biafra was not diplomatically recognized by any of these states. Biafra also hired a number of mercenaries ; the best-known among them were the German Rolf Steiner and the pilots Carl Gustaf von Rosen and Jean Zumbach . The mercenaries in the land forces did not meet the expectations placed on them. Unlike in the Congo before , they were by no means superior to the African troops.
Especially bombardments by the Nigerian Air Force with the Soviet Union and Egypt -based Ilyushin Il-28 , which also Napalm was used had nothing to oppose the Biafran military. They were also defenseless against the MiG-17 , some of which were controlled by South African and British mercenaries ; all aid flights had to take place at night. The blockade of the port of Port Harcourt by a Nigerian destroyer could not be prevented by Biafra due to the lack of suitable aircraft. The air forces of Biafra existed at the beginning of the war mainly of two old bombers of types B-25 and B-26 , which quickly crashed or were unable to fly. The Swedish humanitarian activist and mercenary Carl Gustaf von Rosen first organized aid deliveries and intervened in the fighting towards the end of the war by forming two squadrons of light ground attack aircraft of the type MFI-9B , which under the name Biafra Babies daredevil combat missions against Nigerian airfields, Troops and oil production facilities flew. On June 5, 1969, a Nigerian MiG-17 shot down a Douglas DC-7 chartered by the Red Cross . Attempts at mediation by third parties, such as the General Secretaries of the Commonwealth and the UN , failed because of the tough stance of the Nigerian military dictator Yakubu Gowon .
On May 18, 1968, the Nigerian troops captured the important port city of Port Harcourt . Biafra lost access to the sea and the free supply from outside. About two thirds of the biafras were occupied; the remaining territory could essentially only be supplied with supplies by air. An increasingly important role was played by the humanitarian aid flights that began in 1968 and mainly headed for Biafra from the islands of São Tomé and Fernando Póo during the dark. Since it no longer had an airport after the loss of the most important cities, an improvised runway near Uli-Ihiala in today's state of Anambra became the main hub for aid supplies and arms deliveries. When the ICRC stopped aid flights in June 1969 after one of its planes was shot down, the supply situation deteriorated further.
Harald Steiner wrote in an article in the Wiener Zeitung on February 28, 1992 (“Genocide with Aid”) that Nigeria then resorted to “ genocide ” by imposing a hunger blockade in order to defeat the rest of Biafra. According to him, 2 million people, most of them children, perished; another 750,000 people, most of them Igbo, are believed to have been killed in combat or by massacres by Nigerian troops. Steiner says: "Genocide is the most suitable expression for it". However, other authors consider the number of deaths in the millions to be unlikely and more likely to assume a few hundred thousand dead. In addition, it is assumed that Biafra deliberately used the subjects of “genocide” and “hunger” for propaganda purposes and, above all, exerted an influence on public opinion in Western Europe through the Markpress agency .
After it looked like a military stalemate for about a year from the autumn of 1968 onwards, since the Nigerian army could not finally subjugate the remaining Igbo core area, while the secessionists always got it through successes in smaller counter-offensives and through guerrilla activities behind the front The increasingly weakened Biafra was no longer able to cope with the final offensive launched by Gowon's troops in December 1969 and finally had to capitulate on January 15, 1970. Biafra was reintegrated into the Nigerian state, while the Igbo received no significant posts in the military or administration for decades.
Biafra's economy was shattered and took several years to return to normal. Ojukwu, the leader of the Republic of Biafra, fled to Ivory Coast a few days before the end of the war and did not return until 1982 as part of a general amnesty . He ran in the presidential election on April 19, 2003 and received 3.29 percent of the vote.
On October 28, 2005, the separatist leader Ralph Uwazuruike was arrested, who had again publicly called for a state of Biafra.
The internal political unrest around the Niger Delta , part of the Biafra region, persists. There are also allegations that the revenues from oil production only benefit the oil companies and corrupt central rulers, while the local population in the Niger Delta is left alone with the consequences of environmental pollution from oil production and their local infrastructure is not improved. As a result, acts of violence often occur locally, from the illegal tapping of the oil pipelines and the resulting fires to the kidnapping and murder of employees of the oil companies in order to achieve the emancipation of the Niger Delta .
Reception in popular culture and literature
Wole Soyinka , the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote Season of anomy in 1973 , a novel set in the chaos of the pre-war Biafra, and The Plague of the Rabid Dogs .
In the novel The Dogs of War , Frederick Forsyth processed his own impressions from the Biafra War. Some of the characters in the novel are drawn after mercenaries fighting there. Others like Rolf Steiner are integrated into the fictional plot.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of the Sun describes the life of twin sisters from the better society of Lagos, from the euphoria of independence to their impoverishment during the war.
The musician Jello Biafra , former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys , wants to use his stage name to illustrate the connection that exists between consumer-oriented capitalism and violence in third world countries.
In 2015, Chinelo Okparanta wrote the Bildungsroman Unter den Udala Trees about a Christian girl who fell in love with a Hausa during the war.
Others
The now internationally active human rights organization Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) emerged from spontaneously founded aid groups for the starving population in Biafra .
Because of the positioning of the supporting parties, this war was atypical of the proxy wars during the Cold War, with the UK and Soviet Union supporting the government and France, Portugal and Israel supporting the rebels.
A number of French doctors, including Bernard Kouchner , volunteered with the French Red Cross to work in hospitals and food supply centers in besieged Biafra. This led to the establishment of the organization Doctors Without Borders .
See also
literature
- Michael I. Draper: Shadows. Airlift and airwar in Biafra and Nigeria, 1967-1970 . Hikoki Publications, Aldershot 1999, ISBN 1-902109-63-5 .
- Frederick Forsyth : Biafra Story, report on an African tragedy. Piper Verlag, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-492-02244-8 .
- Rolf Hanisch : Civil War in Africa? Biafra and the internal conflicts of a continent. Colloquium-Verlag, Berlin 1970 (on politics and contemporary history, vol. 41).
- Axel Harneit-Sievers: Nigeria: the war of secession for Biafra. No winners, no defeated - an African success story? . In: Rolf Hofmeier / Volker Matthies (eds.) Forgotten wars in Africa , Lamuv, Göttingen 1992, ISBN 3-88977-286-2 , pp. 277-317.
- Lasse Heerten: A for Auschwitz, B for Biafra. The civil war in Nigeria (1967–1970) and the universalization of the Holocaust . In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 8 (2011), pp. 394–413.
- Christian Heidrich: Carlo Bayer. A Roman from Silesia and a pioneer of Caritas Internationalis. Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1992, in particular pp. 237-316.
- Philip S. Jowitt / Raffaele Ruggeri: Modern African Wars 5: The Nigerian-Biafran was 1967-70 , Oxford (Osprey Publishing) 2016. ISBN 978-1-4728-1609-2 .
- Marion Pape: Women write war. The literary processing of the Nigerian civil war . Diss. Humboldt University, Berlin 2006. ( As PDF document )
- Gustav Seeburg: The Truth About Nigeria / Biafra. Prehistory and background of the conflict. Paul Haupt Publishing House, Bern 1969.
- John J. Stremlau: The international politics of the Nigerian civil war, 1967-1970 . Princeton University Press 1977, ISBN 0-691-07587-5 .
- Gernot Zieser: The Biafras Propaganda Strategy in the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) . In: Publizistik 16 (1971), pp. 181–193.
Web links
- Pictures of the famine in Biafra 1968/1969 (press photographer)
- Essay on Biafra (English)
- La guerre du Biafra (French)
- The Air War between Nigeria and Biafra , accessed December 30, 2012
Individual evidence
- ^ Europa Publications : Africa South of the Sahara 1977-78. 7th edition. Europa Publications, London 1977, ISBN 978-0-905118-10-9 , p. 651.
- ↑ Nowa Omoigui. "Federal Nigerian Army Blunders of the Nigerian Civil War
- ^ Jean Ziegler "Switzerland, the gold and the dead", C. Bertelmann Verlag, Munich, 1977, p. 150
- ^ Anthony Mockler: The new mercenaries . Corgi Books, London 1986, ISBN 0-552-12558-X , pp. 181 ff
- ↑ Biafra War: The Count and the Rocket Babies. In: Spiegel Online . January 12, 2010, accessed December 16, 2014 .
- ↑ John J. Stremlau (1977): The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970 , p. 334 ( online )
- ↑ NIGERIA / CIVIL WAR Much more precise . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1966 ( online - June 30, 1969 ).
- ↑ Michael I. Draper: Shadows. Airlift and Airwar in Biafra and Nigeria, 1967-1970 , Hikoki Publications 1999, UK ISBN 1-902109-63-5 , pp. 174ff
- ↑ Frederick Forsyth: Outsider. The autobiography . Bertelsmann, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-570-10266-4 , pp. 186ff
- ↑ See Harneit-Sievers: Nigeria: the war of secession around Biafra , pp. 284f.
- ^ Zeise: The Biafras Propaganda Strategy in the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) .
- ↑ http://africanelections.tripod.com/ng.html#2003_Presidential_Election
- ^ German time of lawlessness . Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1977; New edition Ullstein, Berlin 1986 ISBN 3-548-20811-8
- ^ Walter-Verlag, Olten 1979 ISBN 3-548-20811-8
- ^ Anthony Mockler: The new mercenaries . Corgi Books, London 1986, ISBN 0-552-12558-X , pp. 192-199
- ↑ Luchterhand, Munich 2007 ISBN 978-3-630-87247-6
- ↑ So Biafra died. In: FAZ.net . December 14, 2007, accessed December 16, 2014 .
- ↑ dyingscene.com
- ↑ Among the Udala trees (Under the Udala trees), trans. Sonja Finck , Maria Hummitzsch , number Africa Wunderhorn. The Wunderhorn , Heidelberg 2018