In the second of a three-part series on alleged BBC bias against Biafra, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe argues that the media corporation is not only hostile towards Biafrian independence, it also had a hand in what he calls the Igbo genocide.
Why is the British Broadcasting Corporation, a state public broadcaster largely funded by the British taxpayer, trenchantly hostile to the independence of the Biafran people in their homeland, 3140 miles away from Britain?
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Britain played a central role in the Igbo genocide – politically, diplomatically, and militarily.
Britain’s role covered the entire stretch of the genocide, phases I-III (May 1966-January 1970), namely from its conceptualisation in Lagos and Ibadan, and Kaduna and Zaria and Sokoto, to its catastrophic outcome.
“Half a million dead Biafrans”
Without Britain, the Igbo genocide probably wouldn’t have occurred.
It was therefore not surprising that as the slaughter of the Igbo people intensified Harold Wilson, the British prime minister at the time, said that he “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” for Nigeria to destroy Igbo resistance to the genocide.
Such is the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide in Europe.
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As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo demonstrates, Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigerian subalterns perform far in excess of his grim target.
The Nigerian military, equipped zealously by Britain, used more small arms ammunition in its campaign to achieve its annihilative mission in Biafra than the total amount used by the British armed forces during the whole of the Second World War.
As for the BBC, the role of its World Service channel during the Igbo genocide was nothing short of being the external radio station for the prosecuting Nigerian junta in Lagos bent on genocide.
Voice of genocide?
This service was much more robust in its rationalisation of the genocide (“one Nigeria, “territorial integrity”, “inviolability of colonial-set frontiers”, “indissolubility of colonial-set borders”, “rebels”, “unacceptable precedence for rest of Africa”, “secessionist!”, “secessionist!”, “secessionist!) than the rambling, ramshackle Voice of Nigeria.
Did BBC ‘bias’ has anything to do with the deaths of Igbos during the civil war?
— Naij.com (@naijcom) December 10, 2015
Fifty years on, the BBC is still at it – supporting genocide against the Igbo people by Nigeria in its broadcasts, as this crime against humanity continues to play out in phase-IV.
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