There was nothing for it but to have a word in the right ear. Two nights later, yelling and screaming, not a happy camper, with his hands roped behind him, Steiner was bundled onto a plane for Libreville and never returned.
A MEDIA EXPLOSION
It should never be forgotten that the Nigeria-Biafra War fell into two quite different periods, and the transition from one to the other lasted no more than a fortnight.
For the first year, from July 1967 to June 1968, it was just an ordinary African war, plodding its incompetent way across the landscape. The Nigerians, with their standing army of 8,000 infantry in the summer of ’67, had presumed they would sweep through the secessionist province as of right. The Biafrans believed that Lagos would wage war for a few months and then, realizing it was hopeless, give up. Neither happened.
After the short-lived debacle of the Biafran invasion of the Mid-West across the Niger, Nigeria introduced compulsory conscription, forcing into uniform tens of thousands of unwilling young men. This huge expansion required weapons from rifles to artillery and armored cars, and staggering quantities of ammunition to replace what had largely been fired into the treetops, as well as training. That was where the British Establishment came in. Behind a mendacious screen of “neutrality,” the Wilson government poured in the equipment without which the war could not have proceeded. That was what the Biafrans had not foreseen.
The Whitehall-sourced propaganda stumbled from lie to lie, but for the first year the media paid little attention, because eastern Nigeria was obscure, far away, and of minimal reader interest. The first lie was that London would only “fulfill existing contracts,” but these were soon swamped by the expansion of the Nigerian Federal Army, and shipload after shipload were needed.
Payment was not the problem; there were always the oil royalties, and Nigeria’s credit was good. It came down to the licenses. Impelled by urgings from the High Commission in Lagos, these were granted without demur.
Another early lie was that no weapons at all were being shipped from Britain to fuel the war. The key word was from, not by. In fact, the supplies were coming from British stocks at the immense NATO weapons park outside Brussels, and thus technically from Belgium. They were then replaced by shipments from Britain to Belgium.
Slowly, both the enlargement and the supplies had their effect. The Nigerian Federal Army crawled across the territory, village by village and town by town. The capital Enugu was taken, to be replaced by the town of Umuahia. Port Harcourt fell and its airport was lost. With Enugu Airport also gone, a new one was created at Uli from a stretch of road two miles long. This became the only entry and exit point, with clapped-out old cargo planes coming in from the offshore islands of Fernando Po and São Tomé.
The transformation started deceptively in May 1968, when the missionaries noticed worried mothers from the deep bush bringing emaciated children for examination.
The missionaries were a network across the country, mainly the fathers of the Holy Ghost and the nuns of the Holy Rosary, both from Dublin. These ran the churches with, attached to them, a school and a dispensary. There were some Protestant missionaries, but the great majority were Catholics. The Ibos were overwhelmingly Catholic, and Islam had never penetrated south of the savannah land.
The priests and nuns knew exactly what they were looking at: kwashiorkor. The total shutoff of protein-rich foodstuffs was finally having its effect. No one had foreseen this, because no one had thought the war would last that long. Without the Wilson government’s intervention, it would not have. But the appearance of kwashiorkor transformed an incompetent bush war into a massive humanitarian tragedy, the like of which neither Africa, Europe, nor North America had ever seen. But they were about to.
The priests appealed in Ireland for funds, and a few suitcases of medications came in. But no one took any notice. The media visit of February, which the BBC had ostracized, had been and gone before the signs were evident. I had arrived back after Israel sometime in May. In June, two British newspapers sent a team of one reporter and one photographer each. They were the Daily Express and the now-defunct Daily Sketch.
Due to the action of Stewart Steven, the foreign editor, I had been retained by the Daily Express, so my job was to escort Walter Partington and David Cairns. The visit started with the usual formalities: a briefing on the military situation and then a visit to a couple of fronts where some combat was going on.
Walter, who had arrived with a half case of whiskey and several cartons of priceless cigarettes, declined to move from his allotted bungalow, where he sat consuming his supplies and sharing with no one. David Cairns and I went off to the fronts with army escorts. When we got back, Walter was a bit too indulged to be able to write copy, so I wrote and transmitted all his dispatches myself, but in his name.
(Rather amusingly, when he got home he filed the lot for the International Reporter of the Year award—and won.)
Then we found the starving children at a Catholic mission house. David Cairns and his colleague from the Sketch took hundreds of pictures, stored the rolls in light-proof capsules, and took them home. Back then, we could transmit words by telex, but not photos.
I never saw the editions of the Express and Sketch that appeared the following week, but the effect was dramatic. Today, we have all seen pictures of starving children from Africa and Asia, but in 1968 no one in the West had ever seen anything like it.
This was the catalyst the situation required. It changed everything, turning a low-intensity, low-interest African war into the greatest humanitarian cause of the decade.
Back in Britain, later Europe, and then the United States, ordinary citizens just expressed their horror, protested, and donated. Out of this was created the most extraordinary mercy mission the world had ever seen, a nightly air bridge from the offshore islands to the ultra-basic Uli airstrip in the heart of the rain forest.
From Denmark, a Protestant minister, Vigo Mollerup, recruited airline pilots from all the Scandinavian airlines to give up their vacations to fly freight planes carrying baby milk concentrates through the night to Uli. That was called Nord Church Air. What they carried was contributed by the World Council of Churches (Protestant) and Caritas (the international Rome-based Catholic charity). The Pope ordered Monsignor
Carlo Bayer, a Silesian, to raid the funds of Caritas and mount the Catholic contribution.
Also in the mix was the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) under the Swiss Karl Jaggi. And what was really extraordinary was that the whole thing was illegal. By law, those lifesaving planes were invading Nigerian airspace against the wishes of the Lagos-based military junta, which acquired MiG fighters and pilots from the Communist bloc to try to shoot them down. That was why the relief planes had to fly at night and land in darkness. It had never happened before, and it has never happened since.
By late autumn, the air bridge, collectively called Joint Church Aid, or mockingly Jesus Christ Airlines, was up and running, or rather flying, and it continued to the end. The three main agencies, WCC, Caritas, and ICRC, all put an estimate of children who died at about a million and a similar figure on those saved from death.
By the end, the network of feeding centers sprawled across the still-defiant enclave, where the children lay waiting for death or a bowl of protein-rich milk, served an estimated transient population of half a million. The burial parties would often put a hundred children from one center into their mass grave in a single day.
And the media came, in hundreds, with their reporters and their cameras, along with hundreds of volunteers who just wanted to help in whatever way they could. Many had to be refused passage—there were just too many.
And the British government of Harold Wilson and the Foreign Office? It stuck doggedly to the old discredited policy, doubling up the supplies, advice, and propaganda aid to the Nigerian junta. The press office of the FCO stooped to quote incredible levels of mendacity to fulfill its brief.
One canard that had seriously been proposed to the attendant press in London was that there were really no starving children in the “rebel enclave” save for a group kept deliberately as living skeletons for display purposes. Whenever a mission of visiting VIPs was touring the villages, these emaciated wretches would be trucked ahead of them so that they were always there to greet the visitors. It was an ex–public school product with an old-school tie and a degree who offered that little gem to the media.
On another occasion, the war hero Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC was asked to go to visit, be shown around Nigeria only, and return to peddle the official line. He duly went to Nigeria, but then refused not to go to Biafra. What he saw on the second visit so shocked him that he came back and denounced the official policy. He was immediately smeared as a gullible fool.
It was pretty standard to smear every journalist who expressed disgust at what was going on as either a mercenary, arms dealer, or Ojukwu propagandist, even though a million pictures are rather hard to dispute.