By Cilas Kemedjio
As part of our on-going series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Biafra/Nigerian War, in a provocative piece by CIHA Blog co-editor, Cilas Kemedjio asks: “What if the humanitarian secession of the Republic of Biafra became at least a partial pawn of postcolonial power games?” Building on a post from last week, Kemedjio argues that the Biafra War offers an example of the militarization of humanitarian interventions long before Kosovo where boundaries between humanitarian, military, and political support blurred. With France using humanitarian cover as a convenient and opportunistic tool to advance her strategic and political interests, Kemedjio writes that France’s support for Biafra was consistent with the broader neocolonial French strategy in Africa, displaying a façade of neutrality while working for a Biafra victory through neocolonial networks and humanitarian aid. Beyond political calculations, Kemedjio holds that this raises ethical issues about France’s manipulation of the humanitarian flag to prolong the war, and the suffering of children, women, and men caught in the Biafra tragedy.
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Humanitarianism became a weapon in the military confrontation between the Republic of Biafra and the Nigerian Federal government. During the war, the blockade imposed by the Federal Military Government to force Biafra to surrender was interpreted as a weaponization of starvation. There have been, since the end of the war, documented suspicions that the Biafran leadership manipulated images of starvation to garner sympathy and political support (Achebe 2012; Emecheta 1982).
However, the humanitarian intervention in Biafra also did not escape the post-colonial politics of France, among other countries. U.S. President Richard Nixon “used the White House hotline twice” to discuss, with Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson, ways to aid the Biafrans, despite official British support for the Nigerian Federal Government. The Soviet bloc countries denounced Western relief effort as “gross interference in Nigerian internal affairs” (Time 19). The Nigerian central government, charged with using starvation of Biafrans as a weapon of war, decried relief operations as an infringement upon its sovereignty. General Gowon, the military leader of Nigeria, decided to “punish” NGOs that aided Biafra during the war by barring them from distributing what he angrily and contemptuously referred to as “blood relief supplies” (Time 19). Nigerian officials were once again asserting the primacy of state sovereignty at the risk of seriously jeopardizing the survival of people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. However, the expression “blood relief supplies” invites us to think about the murky side of humanitarian interventions. What if the relief supplies were indeed tainted with blood as Gowon suggested? What if the sanctuary was compromised by politics and military strategy? What if the humanitarian secession became at least a partial pawn of postcolonial power games?
The Republic of Biafra initially justified its very existence on the basis of a humanitarian secession. The humanitarian sanctuary was soon fortified by machine-guns. Pilots who were bringing humanitarian aid soon started flying combat planes, unleashing deadly bombs on enemy lines. Secular and religious NGOs sided with Biafra, further blurring boundaries between humanitarian, military, and political support. It is possible to infer that long before Kosovo, Biafra was one of the earliest theaters of the militarization of humanitarian interventions. The full scope of the atrocities and humanitarian emergency endured by Biafra, “heretofore forgotten part of the world” (Achebe 154), was revealed to the world conscience thanks to the sustained action of news outlets, humanitarian organizations, and activists such as Carl Van Rosen. Van Rosen put his expertise as pilot to the service of humanitarian missions. He then moved from the humanitarian to the military front as a war pilot: “Fed up with Nigerian air force interference with his peaceful missions, he entered the war heroes’ hall of fame after leading a five-plane assault on Nigerian aircraft” (Achebe 154). Van Rosen’s trajectory is symptomatic of the sea change in humanitarianism that occurred during the Biafra war. Since Biafra, partisan humanitarianism made it possible to advocate for the militarization of humanitarian interventions.
France used the humanitarian cover as a convenient and opportunistic tool to advance her strategic and political interests. France’s strategic objective was to break down the Nigerian State, as Jacques Foccart, longtime African advisor to several French Presidents, recalls in his memoirs. France saw Nigeria as an “outsized country,” a potential threat to her Francophone neocolonial empire (Foccart 1995 341). Foccart then saw the atomization of Nigeria as a preventive move against an eventual “Nigerian imperialism,” perceived as a threat to “balkanized” Francophone Africa. It was, to some extent, consistent with the neocolonial French strategy in Africa. France’s support for Biafra included sustained military assistance, the hiring of mercenaries, the charting of civilian and military aircraft to transport humanitarian aid, arms, journalists, and television crews. All this was designed to help Biafra’s forces achieve enough victories on the military field in other to strengthen their positions at the bargaining table. France, it could be surmised, never believed in an outright military victory for Biafra. Beyond political calculations, this raises even more ethical issues about France’s manipulation of the humanitarian flag to prolong the war, and the suffering of children, women, and men caught in the Biafra tragedy.
The means deployed to achieve these objectives deliberately create ambiguity about the legibility of the French stance, a classic double-entendre that was at the heart of the neocolonial strategy. The equivocal formulation was designed to entertain diplomatic confusion. France displays a façade of neutrality while working for a Biafra victory through its neocolonial networks and humanitarian aid. General Charles de Gaulle’s marching orders stipulated that France was neither going to intervene, nor give the impression that she was siding with either Biafra or Nigeria. De Gaulle was hoping for a “fragmented [rather] than a massive Nigeria, as it stood at the moment. Consequently, if Biafra were to prevail, it would not be a bad outcome for us” (Foccart 1997 : 664). Short of recognizing the Republic of Biafra, France engineered the hijacking of humanitarianism through a network of franco-centric States. The French strategy began with a refusal to sell arms to the Nigerian Federal Government. France then authorized the state-owned French Oil Company, Elf, to disburse oil royalties owed to the Nigerian government to Biafra (Foccart 1997 : 728, Foccart 1995 : 343). The purpose was to buy arms from Portugal. France used francophone states (Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon) as conduits and cover to provide unused stocks of weapons left from the Second War World to Biafra (Foccart 1998 : 14). Félix Houphouet-Boigny, the Ivorian president, communicated in advance to the French presidency the speech of the press conference during which he formally recognized Biafra. Gabon participated in the war effort by welcoming orphans of the Biafra war. The Gabonese presidential couple was personally and officially involved in this humanitarian enterprise that was part of the broad French support of Biafra. It is even rumored—though—not confirmed, that Gabon’s current President, Ali Bongo, might have been one the orphans brought from Biafra. France supplied Biafra with weapons flown from Libreville, Gabon’s capital.
The French Red Cross recognized the Biafra Red Cross, the International Committee of Red Cross having turned down such a demand from the Biafra Red Cross. On May 3, 1968, De Gaulle gave instructions to the French Foreign Service to facilitate the sending of humanitarian volunteers to Biafra. The French Red Cross’ coffers were empty. To fill the void, various governmental agencies financed the operation. A fund-raising campaign was also organized with the tacit help and blessing of the French government. De Gaulle insisted that French humanitarian aid to Biafra was to be channeled through the French Red Cross, not the International Red Cross. This was a way to highlight the unofficial support that France and its neocolonial empire were providing to Biafra. In fact, the “humanitarian camouflage” (“camouflage humanitaire”) was put forth to distract attention from the military and diplomatic support provided by France to Biafra.
The presence of the French Red Cross in Biafra was meant to cover the nightly arms shipment with a humanitarian veneer. François Vershave, a critic of the corrupt practices that were the norm of franco-african affairs, argues that the humanitarian air corridor was one of the responses to the blockade imposed by Nigeria on the secessionist region. The Nigeria Military government did offer to open a corridor that would go from Lagos to Biafra by road. The Biafra leadership rejected this alternative, citing, as Achebe reports in his memoirs, the fear of poisoning. The accusation of poisoning reinforces undocumented accusations of “genocide” advanced by Biafra and its public relations arm. It is more likely, as Vershave argues, that the preference for the air corridor was motivated by the ability to use humanitarian cargos to convey arms from Gabon and Sao Tome. Biafran leaders’ scheme to camouflage guns in planes and bags carrying humanitarian supplies merged with the neocolonial strategy that played out in an earlier theater of African suffering and disillusionment: Patrice Lumumba’s Congo. Years later, after the Rwanda genocide, France would again suggest a European humanitarian intervention, both to counter the growing influence of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front and help the genocidal forces regain their footing. The move was widely interpreted as an attempt to repair the damage caused by the alleged French support to Hutu forces that organized and carried out the 1994 genocide. Some saw the humanitarian mission as cover to restore French influence in the region.
Politics played out in the polemics around the use of the term genocide to describe the nature of Nigeria’s response to the Biafran secession. Vershave reports that the declassification of French archives has revealed that the word genocide was intentionally planted by French spy agencies in an attempt to embarrass the Nigerian Federal Government and help the Biafran regime gain the sympathy of Western audiences. The genocide designation that has become one of the most contested sites of the Biafra war laid the ground for the doctrine known as the right to intervene. This feature of international relations places the sovereignty of human rights over the State. The right to intervene “is used to justify a state of exception, and the conflation of political and moral registers manifested in the realization of operations which are at once military and humanitarian” (Fassim 2013, 10) Veterans of the humanitarian campaign in Biafra, chief among them Bernard Kouchner, were charged with forming and campaigning for the “Committee against Genocide in Biafra.” Biafra launched the humanitarian career of Kouchner–a modern-day Doctor Schweitzer–whose image as humanitarian is well entrenched in the French popular imagination.
Investigative journalist Pierre Péan, in Le monde selon K. (The World According to K.) (2008), accuses Kouchner of a “tentative d’annexion de l’humanitaire/an attempt to highjack humanitarianism” (Péan 71) to advance his ideological or political ambitions. Kouchner has gone on to occupy cabinet positions in both socialist and right-wing administrations. He has become the spokesperson of a brand of humanitarianism that does not hesitate to marshal the military power of the State against designated human-rights violators. Kouchner went to Biafra as part of the Red Cross intervention team. He then abandoned the neutrality of the Red Cross and sided with Biafra, aligning himself on the positions defended by the French government. By denouncing the “genocide” perpetrated by the Nigerian State against the Igbo people, Kouchner was executing a public relations strategy defined by the French secret service. The humanitarian rhetoric was invoked as a shield to cover military shipments to the rebels, to advance French national interests, and to effect the subversion of the Nigerian State.
Reading Biafra in the networks of French neo-colonial politics provides an angle that allows for the deconstruction of the politicization of humanitarian interventions. This line of interpretation teaches us that the sufferings of Biafra were made to be meaningful to the old colonial order. France’s support has two consequences: humanitarian aid was located within the broader context of breaking up Nigeria, perceived as a potential danger to smaller francophone states. France used humanitarian help as part of a strategy that included military and political support. It was rather a cynical attempt to hijack the ethical nobility of humanitarianism in the pursuit of political and strategic objectives. Humanitarian aid became precisely a validation of the secession because the secession played into these political and strategic calculations. Political and military support, diplomatic recognition, humanitarian compassion and militarized humanitarianism all combined to dis-incentivize the Biafra leadership to bring the war to an end. What is lost in the French unofficial diplomatic support of Biafra is the very nature of humanitarian work. Humanitarianism is a selfless gift done in the name of relieving the suffering of fellow humans. When the French Red Cross become the undercover tool of French strategic interests, the gift becomes self-serving. Neocolonial politics triumph over humanity. French actions raise troubling questions about the ethics of the humanitarian campaign in Biafra that is suspected of having prolonged the war and therefore the suffering. To go back to Richard Wright’s letter to Nkrumah, France wanted to fortify her neocolonial empire on the backs of the Biafra’s tragedy.