‘Surrendering a struggle’: Biafran lessons to Tamil Eelam
[TamilNet, Friday, 05 October 2012, 15:56 GMT]
In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, famed novelist
Chinua Achebe, who hails from the Igbo community in Nigeria, opines that
decades after Nigeria’s genocidal war on the short-lived state of
Biafra, the Igbo people still face monumental problems under Nigerian
rule. The Nigerian-Biafran war ended after the internationally aided
Nigerian offensives on the Igbo people, which resulted in the death of
around 2 million, compelled the leaders of the armed resistance for
Biafra to capitulate. Whether the Solheim clique in the Western
establishments who now claim that they could have saved civilian lives
by facilitating the ‘surrender’ of the LTTE leadership in 2009 had the
same intentions for the Eezham Tamil nation, ask Tamil political
activists.
After the internationally forced capitulation, the political and
economic situation of the Igbo worsened, while Nigeria paraded
superficial improvements to the world.
Prof. Achebe, who is most
known for his novel ‘Things Fall Apart’, is also poet, academic and
postcolonial literary critic. Prof. Achebe had been a strong advocate
for Biafran sovereignty when the region of Biafra broke away from
Nigeria to form a de facto state in 1967.
After a brutal civil
war, which saw the deliberate targeting of civilians by the Nigerian
forces, imposed starvation, and cutting off medical supplies to the
Biafran territory, the Nigerian government retook the region after the
surrender of the leadership of the Biafran resistance in 1970. The death
toll among the Igbo during this period is said to range anywhere
between two to three million.
In its war on the Igbo, Nigeria was
assisted by a confluence of world powers, most notably the UK, which
had strong economic relationships with the Nigerian regime. On the other
hand, the political demands of the struggle for Biafra were not
recognized by any major power in the world, though issues of their human
rights violations touched Western media.
The parallels with
Tamil Eelam are obvious, but for the fact that the LTTE leadership did
not surrender the cause despite the compulsions by the International
Community of Establishment (ICE) that in practice abetted the genocidal
war against the Eezham Tamils.
Tamil political activists say
‘surrender’, as envisaged by some journalists, intellectuals and those
in Western establishments, cannot just be taken as a humanitarian action
that may have saved thousands of lives. They argue that it would have
severe moral and political consequences that would affect the life,
politics, and culture of the resisting people for generations to follow
as a mortal blow to the idea of resistance and justice.
The
current ramifications of the ‘surrender’ of the Biafran armed movement
more than four decades ago have been elucidated by Prof. Achebe’s
article in The Guardian through the questions he raises.
“Did
the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo
citizens – who set up the republic of Biafra in 1967 – through punitive
policies, the most notorious being "starvation as a legitimate weapon of
war"? Is the information blockade around the war a case of calculated
historical suppression? Why has the war not been discussed, or taught to
the young, more than 40 years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed
to repeat the errors of the past because we are too stubborn to learn
from them?”
“Supporters of the federal government position
maintain that a war was being waged and the premise of all wars is for
one side to emerge as the victor. Overly ambitious actors may have
"taken actions unbecoming of international conventions of human rights,
but these things happen everywhere". This same group often cites
findings, from organisations (sanctioned by the federal government) that
sent observers during the crisis, that there "was no clear intent on
behalf of the Nigerian troops to wipe out the Igbo people ... pointing
out that over 30,000 Igbos still lived in Lagos, and half a million in
the mid-west".”
“But if the diabolical disregard for human life
seen during the war was not due to the northern military elite's
jihadist or genocidal obsession, then why were there more small arms
used on Biafran soil than during the entire second world war? Why were
there 100,000 casualties on the much larger Nigerian side compared with
more than 2 million – mainly children – Biafrans killed?”
Despite world establishments lauding Nigeria for reintegration and
rehabilitation of the Igbo, Prof. Achebe notes that these have been but
superficial cases that the Nigerian regime parades to the world to
rehabilitate its own image.
“There are many international
observers who believe that Gowon's actions after the war were
magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about
how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news
for them: The Igbos were not and continue not to be reintegrated into
Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country's continued
backwardness.”
“Borrowing from the Marshall plan for Europe after
the second world war, the federal government launched an elaborate
scheme highlighted by three Rs – for reconstruction, rehabilitation, and
reconciliation. The only difference is that, while the Americans
actually carried out all three prongs of the strategy, Nigeria's federal
government did not.”
“What has consistently escaped most
Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys
the very fabric of a country as surely as a war – ushering in all sorts
of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery. Nations enshrine
mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for
the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently
assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do
not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or
special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where
Nigeria finds itself today.”
Colombo’s Defence Seminar of 2012,
that also saw the participation of military personnel from countries
that abetted the genocidal war on the Eezham Tamils, harped on five Rs –
rehabilitation, reconstruction, reintegration, resettlement and
reconciliation. With the aid of powers that that have vested interests
in the island, such grand terms are used to only to reconcile unitary
Sri Lanka with the world community.
It can be deciphered
through Prof. Achebe’s poignant article that the forced surrender of a
struggle fighting for a just cause might appear as saving a few thousand
lives at that particular moment, but in the long run, it only causes a
systematic depredation of the resisting people at the hands of the
oppressive system, the latter having gained more legitimacy owing to the
surrender.
Tamil activists wonder whether this was the solution
that those like Solheim had in mind when they claim now that they could
have arranged a ‘negotiated surrender’ of the LTTE leadership to the
Sri Lankan government.
At the height of the Vanni war, a
representative of the Biafra struggle sent a message to TamilNet. He
wanted the Eezham Tamils to remember that in his view they were fighting
not merely for them, but for the cause of an array of nations and
peoples like them all over the world. If the Eezham Tamils fail they
fail the world of liberation he had said.
In The Guardian
article, Prof. Achebe writes “As a writer I believe that it is
fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the
hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our
neighbours. Where there is justification for further investigation,
justice should be served.”
It is high time Eezham Tamils and
their supporters pose hard questions to the world establishments and
international bodies like the UN, demanding justice for the
internationally-abetted genocide through a restoration of their lost
sovereignty in the clearest of terms.
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