Tuesday 13 January 2015

45th anniversary of Nigeria’s launch of phase-IV of the Igbo genocide

What is Nigeria? This state in southwestcentral Africa inaugurated Africa’s current age of pestilence – starting from that dreadful mid-morning of Sunday 29 May 1966 when it embarked on the studiously-organised mass murder of its Igbo population domiciled in north Nigeria and later elsewhere in the country and subsequently expanded to the south Igbo country of Biafra. In this foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa, Nigeria murdered 3.1 million Igbo people or one-quarter of this nation’s population during the course of 44 months, ending 12 January 1970. Africa had not witnessed the unspeakable barbarity and range of such slaughtering of a people for 60 years; definitely, not since the German-organised genocide against the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples of Namibia in the early 1900s. Nigeria was supported in the execution of the Igbo genocide by a range of foreign powers which provided it with the critical military, financial, political and diplomatic resources:  principally Britain, the Soviet Union, Egypt, Syria, the Sudan, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Conakry. Since this genocide, 12 million additional Africans have been murdered in further genocides and other wars in Africa carried out by similarly ruthless African regimes and their foreign allies.

On 13 January 1970, evidently not content with the appalling magnitude and consequences of its death campaign, Nigeria launched phase-IV of the genocide which now focused on degrading/dismantling the surviving frames of the (pre-genocide robust) Igboland economy, pulverised during phases-I-III of the previous 44 months, a programme intertwined gruesomely by spates and stretches of pogroms that have continued, unabated, to this day as catalogued in the following link, especially from sub-title phase-IV
http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/phase-i-sunday-29-may-1966-30-march.html

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

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