Issues Involved Despite its emotional and historical significance to many, Biafra's Remembrance Day remains highly offensive to Nigerian...
Issues Involved
Despite its emotional and historical significance to many, Biafra's Remembrance Day remains highly offensive to Nigerian and British establishments, especially within Nigeria. The issues surrounding it are political, legal, ideological, and security-related. One major issue concerns what the British government, acting through the Nigerian government, considers highly provocative: the national debate over self-determination.
The various acts of injustice, which form the basis for the emasculative policies pursued and stringently implemented against #Biafrans by the British government (wearing the mask of Nigerian Government), have compelled Biafrans to ensure that the efforts of our forebears are neither made light of, nor consigned to the dustbin of history.
As we pursue Biafra's independence as stipulated in ARTICLE 1 of the UN CHARTER (SELF-DETERMINATION), we Biafrans who observe Biafra's Remembrance Day always confront the world with the visible and inescapable reality of the Nigerian Government's oppressive and genocidal policies, often manifested or demonstrated in the form of structural inequities, marginalization, insecurity, and political imbalance deliberately meted out to Biafrans. These continue to validate and justify Biafrans' demand for sovereignty or referendum-based self-determination.
On the other hand, the British fraud and killing field called the Nigerian State frequently interprets #SELF_DETERMINATION as a threat to national unity and territorial integrity. Consequently, remembrance activities have most times been met with restrictions, arrests, military deployments, and outright massacre of #Biafrans, mainly identified as Indigenous People of Biafra.
Because the Nigerian and British Governments have been dodgy about the Biafran Genocide, they have resolved not to address the critical issues involved in the pre- and post-war eras, which have equally made them apprehensive, thereby making them see anything that has the appearance of Biafra as a ghost that keeps haunting them.
Some of these pre and post genocidal war issues include
~The causes of the war.
~Responsibility for wartime atrocities.
~Casualty figures.
~The humanitarian blockade imposed on Biafra.
~The post-war treatment of the Biafrans.
The world knows that the war has never been honestly addressed within Nigeria's official national discourse. They have highlighted the fact that silence and suppression cannot produce genuine reconciliation. Conversely, the British and Nigerian Governments fear that the constant revival of Biafran consciousness will expose their atrocities, deepen ethnic tensions, and threaten whatever they call national cohesion, which, in truth, does not exist, as a result of their oppressive policies against Biafrans.
Thus, May 30 stands at the intersection of memory, identity, justice, nationalism, and political resistance.
(To be continued)
Written by
Mmadụ Awụchukwu
For
Lagos State Media Team
No comments