IRIN Focus on new Biafra movement

The political temperature in Nigeria has been rising in recent months over a new movement for the secession of southeastern Nigeria, three decades after the end of the 1967-1970 Biafra War. Ahead of the 33rd anniversary of the declaration of the secessionist republic of Biafra, the Nigerian authorities have tightened security in ost parts of the former Biafran enclave over plans by a new movement to re-enact the failed breakaway on Saturday. On 27 May 1967, a young army colonel, Emeka Ojukwu, announced a move to pull the Ibos - one of the three biggest of Nigeria’s 250 ethnic groups - out of the country along with several minorities in the southeastern oil-producing region. What followed was Africa’s biggest, modern war. Nearly three years and over one million deaths later, Biafra was defeated and southeastern Nigeria was once more part of Africa’s most populous country. But the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) led by lawyer Ralph Uwazurike, an ethnic Ibo, has in recent times announced that it will declare another Biafra Republic on 27 May 2000. “MASSOB is a struggle for the independence of Biafra,” Uwazurike told a local newspaper, ‘National Concord’, in a recent interview. “By May 27, we would have had a nucleus of a nation. We would have had our own flag, our anthem and so on. Biafra must be enacted on that day.” He was quick to add that his group did not intend to resort to arms. “MASSOB is a non-violent movement...,” Uwazurike said. “The former Biafra has gone. It was a violent Biafra, it was defeated in a war. But ours is a new Biafra that people can identify and negotiate with. If we do not get the Biafran nation this year, we will get it next year; it is a dream that must come alive.” Uwazurike said MASSOB was formed in the wake of the disappointment he and others felt because, in their eyes, President Olusegun Obasanjo failed to redress the perceived marginalisation of southeasterners in general and Ibos in particular, after winning elections that ended more than 15 years of military rule. “We came to the conclusion the best thing is to leave Nigeria,” he said. Since then the group has led several demonstrations in the country’s biggest city, Lagos, to back demands for a separate republic. State security agents have taken Uwazurike in for questioning on a number of occasions in recent months. Each time they have released him. On 18 April, police broke up a demonstration by the group in a suburb of Lagos and Uwazurike and 40 members of MASSOB were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct before being freed on bail. A demonstration in Port Harcourt on 22 May drew thousands of youths, but for all his efforts, MASSOB’s objectives remain unpopular among the larger Ibo population. The elected governors of the five majority Ibo states - Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo - and the Ohaneze group, representing leading Ibo intellectuals and businessmen, have dissociated themselves from the movement’s aims. Both groups had called for a loosening of the Nigerian federation into a confederation in the wake of ethnic and religious riots which rocked the country in February. “The young men who are calling for Biafra again are people who are dissatisfied with the situation in Nigeria as it is,” Ojukwu, now in his 60s, told journalists recently. “The answer, I humbly posit, is to look into their problems ... I do not believe, today in the year 2000, that the answer is the hasty proclamation of the Republic of Biafra.” Not a few Ibos think the same way, but most believe they have been hard done by since the end of the civil war in 1970 when bank deposits and other property owned by Ibos in some parts of the country were confiscated. Many often point to the fact that Ibos have been excluded from top and sensitive positions in the armed forces and other security agencies since the end of the war. But not much was heard by way of protests until the return to civilian rule. Ohaneze, in a petition filed last year before a panel President Olusegun Obasanjo set up to investigate human rights abuses dating from Nigeria’s first military coup in 1966, demanded 8.3 trillion naira (US $1 0 naira) as compensation for losses suffered by the Ibos. But while the Ibos have become more assertive of their perceived rights since the end of military rule last year, they remain the ethnic group that is most diffused in the country, controlling commerce and the retail trade in almost all of Nigeria’s towns and cities. For this reason they are the least likely as a group to benefit from a breakup of Nigeria. So far Obasanjo, who was very prominent as a soldier on the federal side in efforts to end the secessionist war, has not commented on the activities of MASSOB, but the diligent strengthening of security in the southeastern states is an indication his government will not brook the group’s campaigns much further. “MASSOB is only trying to test the patience of the government, to see the tolerance level of the government,” says Professor Alphonsus Nwosu, Obasanjo’s political adviser and an ethnic Ibo. “It is part of the tolerance of Mr President and this country … that these things are happening.” But MASSOB has unfurled its flag, vowing to declare independence on 27 May and it is likely that the tolerance level of the government will have reached its very limit by then.