Nigeria is faced with a crucial test – the genocide in Biafra should not longer be a taboo subject

Nigeria is faced with a crucial test if the genocide in Biafra remain a taboo subject, fears the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV). In the light of the mass protest of several million Ibos against the high-treason case against the Ibo leader Ralph Uwazuruike and six of his colleagues in Nigeria the GfbV Africa expert Ulrich Delius declared in Göttingen: "The southeast of Nigeria is like a powder barrel. The majority of the Ibos no longer accepts the official Nigerian silence on the genocide in Biafra from 1967 to 1970 with more than a million victims.” Several million Ibos brought public life in the southeast of Nigeria more or less to a standstill on Monday with a general strike. Schools, shops, banks and filling stations remained closed. The Ibos make up with more than 40 million people about one third of the total population of Nigeria.

The GfbV warned against criminalizing the Biafra movement, for this would cause a further escalation of the already strained relations in the southeast of Nigeria. Uwazuruike and his six colleagues of the "Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra” (MASSOB) are accused of separatism.

Uwazuruike founded his movement in 1999 to work for the non-violent achievement of the right of self-rule for Biafra. Since the beginning of the year 2005 meetings of the MASSOB have been increasingly forbidden and supporters arrested. On 25th October 2005 Uwazuruike was finally arrested by the State Security Service and on 8th November charged at the Supreme Court of Nigeria with "conducting a war to overthrow the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”.

Since the arrest of the MASSOB leader the security situation in the southeast of Nigeria has become extremely tense. The police meet the protests of the Ibo with brutal force. Several people have already been killed at demonstrations by the security forces. "It is clear that President Olusegun Obasanjo with an eye to the presidential elections in 2007 intends to invoke severe measures against supposed "separatists” in the multinational state”, said Delius. For this reason he had another leader of a protest movement of the indigenous people from the Niger delta, Alhaji Asari Dokubo, arrested and charged with high reason.