The Genocaust: A personal experience of the Biafra Genocide and Holocaust

The Genocaust (Igbo Genocide and Holocaust)

We opened our arms in friendship.

We lived amongst you as one.

We shared with you our wealth and know-how.

We forgot our homes and your home we made ours.

We gave up our language that we may learn yours.

We preached love, brotherhood and unity.

But in return what do we get?

NYAMIRI – You cried!

NYAMIRI – Must die!

NYAMIRI – Kill! Kill! Kill!

NYAMIRI - Open the stomachs of the pregnant, and the unborn kill!

NYAMIRI – Cut their limbs and heads off!

NYAMIRI – Make their children parentless!

NYAMIRI – Confiscate their properties!

NYAMIRI – Wipe them off the face of the earth.

For now on the sidelines we stand.

For our feet we have wiped and our steps retraced.

For whom the world has rejected themselves cannot reject.

From the cry of the fatherless, deaf our ears are!

From the blood of the innocent, blindfolded our eyes are!

For the bones of our dead, picked clean by the vultures, yet unburied, in knots tied we are.

For as long as your crimes you acknowledge not

For as long as our forefathers unappeased remain

On the sidelines, we must, we will, we always must remain.

Maazi Nnaemeka Mene Onumonu-Uzoaru

There is an undeniable fact about Holocausts, Genocides, Pogroms and Massacres; no matter how careful the plotters of these heinous crimes are, there is always at least one survivor who is positioned to tell the story of what occurred to the world - the hand of Chi Ukwu (the Omnipotent Being) at work!

I survived the Port Harcourt Genocaust (Igbo genocide and Holocaust) to tell this horrific story because of my Itsekiri roots! Yes, because my mom was Itsekiri, and my oldest brother, may his soul rest in peace, who was in Warri, had asked his friend a nurse and sergeant major in the Nigerian army to locate his family when the Federal troops made it to Port Harcourt. I survived because despite the efforts of my Itsekiri brethren to keep me alive it took the efforts of this nurse, an Uhrobo, to keep me alive as efforts continued to make sure that I met the fate of other Igbo in Port Harcourt.

 I will always owe them a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid.

One of the places where Gowon’s seven point program was implemented was in the city of Port Harcourt:

 “It is pertinent to observe that the Atrocities Tribunal found as a fact that the Northern Nigeria authorities with their collaborators had devised a seven point program aimed at a complete extermination of the then Eastern Nigerians (now Biafrans) in Northern Nigeria and other parts of the federation. The program is outlined as follows:

1(a) To kill off the Major-general and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, T. J. T. Aguiyi-Ironsi;

(b) To kill off all Yamiri (Igbo) Army officers;

(c) and subsequently purge the Army of Yamiri by killing the rest in the ranks.

2. With the aid of the Westerners in the army, to take complete control of the Armed Forces, the Police and the Navy and to purge off the Yamiri in these forces too.

3. To kill off and dispossess all the Yamiri domiciled in the Northern region.

4. To use the control of the Armed Forces to take control of the country’s Government.

5. To revenge Sarduana’s and Abubakar’s death by killing Dr. Zik, Dr. Okpara, Ojukwu and Major Nzeogwu.

6. To destroy Port Harcourt, Enugu and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

7. To kill all

(a) Yamiri in top civil service posts;

(b) all wealthy Yamiri - male and female;

(c) all Yamiri educational giants;

(d) all grown up males and females of Yamiri;

(e) to leave out only sucklings in Yamiri land.

(Tribunal Report pp. 133 - 134)”

AN INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION OF JURISTS FIND PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE OF GENOCIDE

For those unaccustomed or un-informed about the heinous crimes that the leaders of Britain and Nigeria continue to try to cover, two recommended sites are:

THE VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS OF NDI IGBO IN THE FEDERATION OF NIGERIA (1966– 1999)

Press Release Biafra
Igbo Biafra Submission

Biafra lives till date

In 1968, as the Nigeria Troops rolled into the city of Port Harcourt and as the Biafran troops retreated from the superior federal firepower, the civilian Igbo population who had stayed behind against their better judgment where about to feel the full weight of what being a targeted people slated for extermination was.

Subsequent to the fall of Port Harcourt and prior to 1966, the Igbo had been deliberately portrayed as the problem in Nigeria to the point that the belief that if it were possible to eliminate the Igbo, Nigeria would have solved its problem - as the various speeches of Northern Leaders and massacres in the North portrayed (1945, 1953, …).

Most of the Igbo men had sent their families to their home towns and villages in the hinterland while staying behind to protect their properties; others had stayed behind for personal reasons. 

I was one of those who stayed behind for personal reason without the knowledge of members of my family who were sure I was amongst the thousands that had fled the city.

The carnage was complete and total! Igbo men were quickly identified and shot on the spot. Those who escaped were hunted down like rats and met the same fate as their brethren. Others who witnessed what was going on, escaped into the ceiling of their buildings but when they were forced to climb down to forage for food and water met the same fate as their brethren.

I live on to tell a tale that is whispered and not acknowledged because the involvement of civilians was nearly total. The declaration of Igbo properties as abandoned meant that if you were able to hunt down the owner of the property and kill him, the property was yours for the keeping. It meant that the Igbo civilians that escaped the bullet of the Federal troops, met the machete of the civilian.

I live to tell the story of a government run amok, a government that had turned brother against brother with its deliberate policies to demonize a section of its citizenry. A government that .murdered 500,000 of its citizens (children, women and men) in 1966 in the North and other parts of Nigeria because they were Igbo or looked like Igbo; yet not satiated and bloated enough with drinking innocent blood, declared war on the survivors of the carnage, in search of the final solution. 

A government that is finally reaping the results of the mayhem it sowed with its determination to wipe out from the face of earth a section of its populace. A government that has now become helplessly and hopelessly immobilized as death, anarchy, and lawlessness has become common place, a failed government or failed state!

As probably, the only survivor of the Port Harcourt Genocaust (Igbo genocide and holocaust), I will not be stopped. I will tell this story till the day I die, I will speak for those who are no longer able to. I will continue to point a finger at the British Government for the part it played in laying the ground work and making the Genocaust (Igbo genocide and holocaust) possible, and the Nigeria Government led by the Hausa-Fulani Leaders and their junior partners, the Yoruba Leaders, in the implementation of one of the most dastardly acts in recent human history in which more than 3 million civilians were either massacred or starved to death.

The sculpture Nyamiri and the previous sculpture, the Lament, is the first down payment in an effort to help bring this story to the world.

“For us, religion and law are unalterably interdependent. Religion establishes the social reason for the ideal, while law or government regulates how the ideal can be attained.

“Stealing is evil because it is contrary to the general social aim, namely, that a man is entitled to the possession and use of his own property. The thief has not conducted himself in accordance with what is good for all. God, under whom the community set up the Omenana system, does not sanction theft. Thus the action is both sin and offense. The thief must, therefore, cleanse himself and his family of the double guilt. First, he must perform sacrifice to God; and second, he must recompense his neighbor twofold or tenfold depending upon the custom prevailing in the community where the loser lives.”

Maazi Mbonu Ojike

My Africa (1946)

http://ekwenche.org/mbonu.htm 

There can be only one solution as the victims of this blood tasty abomination shout for vengeance.

Nigeria is dead!

Long Live the Islamic Republic of Arewa!

Long Live the Republic of Oduduwa!

Long Live the People’s Ohacratic Republic Of Biafara!

Long Live other Republics born from the deservedly death of the British Birthed Abomination, Nigeria!

Long Live mother Africa.

Maazi Nnaemeka Mene Onumonu-Uzoaru, Oha Ka (The People are SUPREME), Igbo Sculptor; & Igbo Analyst, Strategist and Long Range Planner. A founding member of both the Global Igbo Renaissance Moment & the Peaceful Actualization of Biafara

Related Stories:

• Proclamation of the Republic Of Biafra 1967 (Part 1)
• Details of the proclamation of the Republic Of Biafra 1967 (Part 2)
• Today in History: Biafra Declaration of Independence - Ojukwu's speech 1967
• Why Republic Of Biafra was declared in 1967 (Part 3)
• 1966 Revolution: Names and ethnicity of revolutinary soldiers who plotted the January 1966 event