We post this week two more reflections from our conference on Biafra/the Nigerian civil war. The first is by Hans von Ruette, the archivist of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, who explores the historical documentation of the WCC to argue that the Council found itself in an unresolvable predicament and experienced severe tensions between remaining apolitical and taking sides in the conflict. Von Ruette ends his post with an impassioned plea to consult archives whenever possible. The questions of what archives exist (written, oral, pictorial) and how to access and interpret them became a major theme of the conference.
By Hans von Rütte, Archivist of World Council of Churches, Geneva (Switzerland)
Abstract: The World Council of Churches
was one of the most active external actors in the Nigerian/Biafran war. But it faced an intractable dilemma, caught between enacting Christian ethics of providing relief, on one hand, and keeping a neutral position in order to broker peace, on the other. Different agendas, internal and external, interfered with the result that the WCC became largely unable to act. Ultimately, the dilemma between answering the humanitarian call and receiving and mediating political-diplomatic intelligence was unresolvable. My analysis uses WCC archives to make this argument.
The World Council of Churches: its mission
The World Council of Churches (WCC) was founded in Geneva in 1948 (a few years after the United Nations and the same year as the proclamation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights). It was founded to consolidate the voice of Christians worldwide from various organizations after the catastrophe of World War II. Since that time, the WCC has grown to become a large organization that is active on a global level.
WCC engages in the following four principal domains:
First, to offer a platform for dialogue:
- between the member churches;
- between the WCC members, the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian denominations;
- between Christian and other faith traditions, first after World War II with the Jews, later with Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other representatives.
Second, to promote the common witness of the Christian gospel in work for mission and evangelism, in the sense of bringing the gospel to the people in a diverse, heterogeneous, and pluralistic world.
Third, to engage in Christian service by meeting human needs, breaking down barriers between people, seeking justice and peace, and upholding the integrity of creation. The WCC uses the Greek term diakonia to convey this goal, and its activities are practical, operational actions of solidarity wherever people are in need and in poverty.
Finally, the WCC engages in public witness on the level of international politics by raising the profile of issues including respect for human rights, building a just global community for women and men, and supporting initiatives for peace, reconciliation and justice. This is because people and churches in conflict areas need solidarity and accompaniment.
Let’s look more closely at the third and fourth elements of the WCC’s mission.
What is diakonia? What is public witness?
The WCC understands diakonia as giving the service of the Churches, or more generally of Christians, to the world. After World War II, the main WCC service activities included providing relief to prisoners of war, chaplaincy services (bible and worship services in camps), and other aid to refugees and to displaced persons. This also included emergency relief, rebuilding destroyed churches, and providing housing, public infrastructure, schools, hospitals and health services.
However, some criticized the “new missionaries” of post-World War II inter-church aid empire. As a result, the WCC’s strategy shifted away from practical reconstruction to policies of social advancement and economic development. The WCC learned that aid and relief are not simply about shipping goods from the rich to the poor, but that aid must always be provided in coordination with local societies, particularly with the participation of local churches in recipient countries, to ensure that resources are shared and local needs met. This shift was in part a result of the growing voice and influence of the Churches from the global South, whose representatives were increasingly participating in WCC strategy and action debates and decisions.
The WCC always aimed to engaged in public witness. The churches have a political role because they have a responsibility for people living in misery, constant fear and/or under oppression. Therefore, the WCC has considered itself as the representative voice of Christians engaged in struggles
- to end colonialism and racism;
- against war and nuclear arms, and for disarmament;
- for building peace and justice;
- for democracy and human rights.
The WCC’s actions during the Nigerian civil war
During the 1950’s and even more since Nigeria’s independence, the presence of the WCC in Nigeria has been strong, and located mainly in the Eastern province. There was, conversely, a strong presence of Nigerian delegates and Nigerian churches in the Ecumenical Movement as a whole.
Several national churches from Nigeria attained membership in the WCC (Anglicans, Presbyterian, Methodists, Baptists). The Nigerian Church Council (NCC) has been and is still one of the most important regional bodies of the churches in Africa. The influential position of Nigerians is illustrated by the fact that in 1966 the Central Committee meeting of the WCC was held in Enugu, later the capital of the Biafran state. Reverend Akanu Ibiam was one of the seven presidents of the WCC from 1961 to 1968; he was governor of the East Nigerian province from independence to the secession of Biafra.
At the outbreak of the war the WCC was certainly one of the best-placed global NGOs, with networks across both sides of the conflict (Nigerian state and Biafran). The WCC focused on two issues:
- participating in emergency relief actions of the international church community;
- seeking dialogue with churches of both conflicting parties in order to initiate a reconciliation process.
In general, other emergency aid organisations were quicker than the WCC to provide emergency relief, because the WCC has never been primarily an emergency aid organization. But in this conflict, the WCC tried to assume a coordinating role among church organizations. The WCC had well established relations not only in the region and among the churches but also with UN agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross ICRC. Furthermore, the WCC was, for the most part, welcomed by the participating actors as coordinator. The WCC’s main goal was to maintain its neutrality in order to:
- maintain its legitimacy as moderator between the conflicting actors;
- maintain its role as coordinator of the churches’ relief on the international level.
.Beyond this, the WCC had also an internal agenda:
- to avoid any breakout of the conflict inside the WCC among its member churches, and to hold the Ecumenical Movement together;
- to maintain the universal unity of the churches and to maintain the WCC as the representative body of the universal unity of Christians.
This required the WCC always to insist that:
- aid for people must always be given to both sides, to those individuals who were suffering;
- financial support should go equally to both sides.
These different agendas brought the WCC to a difficult point during the civil war. Regarding political negotiations for ending war and building peace, actors from both sides exploited the WCC. For example, at the WCC’s Uppsala General Assembly in July 1968, church representatives from both sides tried to use the Assembly as platform for their agenda. As a result, the resolution on the Nigeria/Biafra conflict in Uppsala was rather weak (WCC Archives 34.9/5bis/8). At this stage, the resolution stated, the WCC could not do more than:
- call for action to allow food and medical supplies;
- call to end bloodshed;
- call to both conflicting parties to accept a negotiator;
- urge other governments to stop arms deliveries to both parties.
The WCC and the Roman Catholic Church also released a similar common resolution in spring1968. The statement, albeit issued at the highest level of authority, remained at the level of the lowest common denominator.
Regarding its aid program, the WCC’s agenda failed more and more. When Nigeria had completed its embargo of Biafra, other churches and their emergency aid organizations strongly criticized the WCC for not being ready to give the most help to those who were suffering the most; i.e.,the Biafrans. Biafra was surrounded and isolated such that only airlifts could bring food and medical aid to the people. Northern Churches from Scandinavia and Germany especially criticized the WCC for remaining neutral. These churches began to act unilaterally, outside of WCC coordination, to aid Biafra and Biafrans. As a consequence, the WCC risked losing its coordinating role; these actions also put at risk its role as a neutral moderator in an eventual peace and reconciliation process. The Nigerian government could argue that the churches were unilateral supporters of the Biafrans.
These Scandinavian and German church actions also created tensions inside the WCC, especially between those responsible for relief action on the ground (in cooperation with international church relief agencies), and those responsible for bringing the conflicting parties – or at least church leaders from each side – to the negotiating table.
An internal memorandum between Lukas Vischer and General Secretary Eugene C. Blake of 17 October 1968 illustrates the WCC’s dilemma. Vischer, asked to lecture on the Biafra/Nigeria conflict, turned to Blake for advice, writing, “When I began to think about a possible lecture, I realized that it is extremely difficult to say anything intelligent because I do not know where to get reliable information.” He wanted to know “whether the WCC has not some responsibility in the field, Should not somebody prepare a kind of “white book” giving background to the conflict and explaining on what basis our own involvement is to be understood?” (17. Oct. 1968, WCC Archives 42.3.008/2). Blake responded,
“…let me say that reliable information on the Niagara/Biafra conflict is hard to come by, because our Christian constituency in the two countries sharply disagree as to the cause of the war, its likely end and where the right lies.” He continued: “The position of WCC has attempted to be apolitical. This is excessively difficult, as we found out at Uppsala. […] Europeans as North Americans tend to expect from the people of Africa a greater degree of transcendence of political positions of their nation than we have in our own various wars and conflicts among ourselves.” (22. Oct. 1968, WCC Archives 42.3.008/2). These words show both how difficult it was for the WCC to act in this conflict, and the perhaps unreasonable expectations of some European and North American church representatives. Blake’s quote demonstrates the perplexity and feelings of helplessness at the WCC.
In Oct 1968, Blake received a letter from a Roger Harless, a Presbyterian from the USA, which also illustrates the WCC’s problem. Harless urged that churches should “take more of a pro Biafran stand”. Blake, however, responded as follows: “In this conflict we have parts of our constituency involved on both sides. […] The policy obliges the WCC to see its role as essentially one of mediation and reconciliation. […] we have been hit from both sides. […]” (WCC Archives 42.3.008/2). There were no easy answers to any of the issues that emerged during this tragic conflict. Keeping an “apolitical” stance as a neutral actor did not work, but taking the side of one party against the other could not work either.
Moreover, the WCC’s calls for peace were not successful. As far as I can tell, they remained futile. Initiatives that attempted to start a reconciliation process, or even just negotiations on how an initiative could start, never succeeded, either.
The relief programme of the international emergency agencies increasingly turned into unilateral aid to Biafra alone. The ad hoc organization “Nord Church Aid,” later converted into “Joint Church Aid,” directed its actions more and more to the Biafran side. The western media increasingly documented and photographed the catastrophe of starvation and famine. The relief actions of various church relief organizations in Biafra were run under the name of the “World Council of Churches Refugee Relief,” which did not receive formal authorization from the WCC. For the Biafrans receiving the churches’ aid, however, there was no distinction – the action simply came from the WCC. This meant that the churches in general and the WCC were no longer neutral, and the Nigerian side suspected that the Churches in general and the WCC in particular unilaterally supported the Biafran cause. This situation also gave the Nigerian government an easy argument for not accepting the WCC and church leaders as moderators in an eventual peace process. However, the Nigerian government stated its readiness to negotiate and provide relief for the Biafrans if the aid was delivered by agencies or Nigerian churches it trusted The government regarded other relief actions, especially the airlifts from Sao Tomé (still a Portuguese colony at the time) as violations of the blockade.
The ongoing tragedy of the suffering people (Biafrans and Nigerians) led the WCC to insist on continuing with its relief actions. As Canon Burgess Carr indicated in an internal memo, the WCC had many operational difficulties with the Nigerian administration and the Nigerian Church Council: “[…] we mean [relief] business, and we want them to be in business with us or else… […] they have to realize that we are tired of pussy-footing with this relief business. We want to help, and not to make politics.” (letter of Canon Burges Carr to Hank Crave, January 25th 1969, WCC 425.04.057). Despite this assertion, the WCC General Secretary, Eugene C. Blake, declared in an interview with the Ecumenical Feature Service (EFS) that the Biafra/Nigeria tragedy “is first of all a political problem and that nothing short of a political settlement can bring an end to the suffering of the people involved” as “our humanitarian efforts do not suffice to overcome the conflict.” In fact, the WCC was fully aware of what many scholars have since charged: “the side effect of [the] relief operation […] of prolonging the war.” (sine dato [1969], WCC 425.04.057).
In spring 1969 Alan Booth, WCC secretary of the Church Commission on International Affairs CCIA, prepared a paper for the CCIA meeting in order to get some understanding of the background of the conflict and the place of the WCC. This paper reveals the helplessness and powerlessness of the responsible officers of the WCC given the record of relief to that point: “ The relief activities, “which the Division of Inter-Church Aid has done its best to correct where necessary, provide a main reason for the fact that the W.C.C. finds itself ill placed at this stage of peace-making.” (CCIA paper 24X/5 “Peace making in Nigeria”, April 1969, WCC 425.04.057, p. 5). Booth also acknowledged that “The World Council of Churches may have forfeited the possibility of mediating in the conflict” (ibid., p. 4).
Some concluding reflections
The WCC has never been and is still not today primarily a humanitarian organization. Nevertheless, it felt responsible and participated in situations when humanitarian aid, relief and support were needed. This is because, for the WCC and the Ecumenical Movement in general, humanitarian action has been an expression of diakonia: Christians are called to serve those who are in need. The WCC in some ways occupied a privileged position at the outbreak of the Biafra-Nigeria conflict, because it could rely on its ecumenical network in the region and on its established relations to church leaders on all sides. The WCC was not perceived as being an agent of colonialism: on the contrary, the WCC had always supported independence for the (former) colonies. Therefore it had achieved a great deal of acceptance among the newly-independent African nations. The WCC was also accepted as a coordinator of relief and aid programmes on the international level.
Despite the advantages of its position, the WCC soon faced an intractable dilemma. It was caught between doing what Christian ethics of diakonia is requiring, on one hand, and keeping a neutral position in the conflict, on the other. Different agendas, internal and external, interfered with the result that the WCC became largely unable to act. Ultimately, the dilemma between answering the humanitarian call and receiving and mediating political-diplomatic intelligence was unresolvable. Doing both was not possible. The room for manoeuvre became smaller and smaller to the extent that WCC’s peacebuilding mission became paralyzed and crippled. The practical relief operations in the field hindered the mission to act as peacebuilder. To play the peacebuilder role it is crucial to have a neutral position, accepted by all partners in the conflict. To act as a servant to help the most vulnerable people often needs resistance against those who have the most power. In the Nigerian civil war, the WCC did not succeed in meeting both of its goals.
A post scriptum: archives and history
Earlier, in my professional career, I was a historian; today I am archivist. Let me now talk about the importance of archives.
From where do you and I know what we know? Some of you have your own personal experiences. Many of you are younger. You did not live through these difficult years, and many who did lived it from a distance. Some of you have interviewed people to ask them what they have lived. This is one way to gain knowledge.
From where do you know what you know? You have certainly read many books and articles. This is also a way to learn and obtain knowledge. But from where do these authors obtain their knowledge?
My simple wish is: Go to the archives, wherever you find archives. Every organization should keep its archives. The WCC’s archives are accessible, and a large number of files remain unexplored, just waiting to be consulted. Many archives of other organizations, public or NGO’s, are unknown or inaccessible. I do not know whether the Nigerian state archives of the period in question are openly accessible. Soon we will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Biafran/Nigerian civil war. It is clearly time to have all of the archives on this war open for access to everyone.
Try to get access. Through reading the archived documents, try to understand the rationales of the actors of the time. Documents and records do not record everything that happens, many records and documents are lost or damaged. Still, many archives with abundant documentation exist.
Use the archives – state archives, archives of churches, of NGOs, of public institutions. Check your reflections by reading these documents. You will not find truth to be simple, because it never is.. And the truth of history is not written as “truth” in archival documents. Based on the archives you are better enabled to create your own truth about the past. The truth will come up through public source based discussion that never end, not through a governmental declaration or a judicial statement on court that aim to end discussion. The finding of historical truth must always go on as an open public debate – under the sole prerequisite open access to archives.
Hans von Rütte lives in Bern, Switzerland. He studies in history and archivisal science. He is the archivist of the World Council of Churches, Geneva, since 2010 and teaches Archival Science at University of Applied Science HTW in Chur, Switzerland.