Biafran Secession and the Nigerian Civil War
Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the eastern region of Nigeria independent as the Republic of Biafra on 30 May 1967, and the war that followed killed between one and three million people. The sequence that produced it was fast and terrible. A coup in January 1966 by mostly Igbo officers killed the federal prime minister and the premiers of the northern and western regions; a counter-coup in July killed the Igbo head of state; and pogroms in the north through 1966 killed something between eight and thirty thousand Igbo and drove a million east. The east held most of Nigeria's oil. Federal forces took the coast and Port Harcourt within a year, and the war became a siege. Biafra was cut off from the sea, and the federal government treated starvation as a legitimate instrument, blockading food and for a period refusing relief flights. The images of children with kwashiorkor were the first famine to reach Western living rooms by television, and they changed humanitarian practice permanently — Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971 by French doctors who had served with the Red Cross in Biafra and concluded that neutrality and silence were not the same thing. Britain and the Soviet Union armed Nigeria; France, Portugal and a handful of African states supported Biafra. It surrendered in January 1970. Gowon's government declared no victor and no vanquished and reintegrated the region without mass reprisals, which was more than most observers had expected. Ojukwu fled to Ivory Coast, was pardoned in 1982, and returned to stand for the presidency. Igbo separatist movements have revived repeatedly since.
- Year: 1967 CE
- Category: Political
