The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria has carpeted Chief Ayo Opadokun, Chief Ebenezer Babatope and other Yoruba leaders over their umbrage at the internationally reputable writer and novelist, Prof. Chinua Achebe, following his claim in a yet-to-be released book: ‘There was a Country’, in which he accused former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, and his regime’s Minister of Finance, late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, of acts that could be categorised as war crime against the civilian populace of the defunct Bafran Republic.
The Guardian of the United Kingdom had in an excerpt of the essay contained in Achebe’s latest work, quoted the author to have written: “It is my impression that Awolowo was driven by an overriding ambition for power, for himself and for his Yoruba people. There is,on the surface at least, nothing wrong with those aspirations. However, Awolowo saw the dominant Igbo at the time as the obstacles to that goal, and when the opportunity arose with the Nigeria-Biafra war, his ambition drove him into a frenzy to go every length to achieve his dreams. In the Biafran case, it meant hatching up a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.”
HURIWA defended Achebe’s claim that certain policies introduced by the then military regime foisted starvation on the civilian populace in the now defunct Biafran Republic, which actually led to the untimely demise of hundreds of thousands of children from kwashiorkor.
The Rights group called on the Federal Government to invite United Nations experts to probe the implementation of some of these draconian national policies by the then military regime to determine the extent of war crime committed by the actors on both sides of the divide.
HURIWA, whose leadership met over the weekend on the issue, tasked those it identified as ethnic champions to stop spreading ethnic sentiments of hatred and ideology devoid of concrete superior facts than those said to have being disclosed by Achebe in the yet-to-be published work but to also publish their own version of the war-time stories if they have other contrary opinions than those encompassed in the intellectual and historical body of work done by the world acclaim novelist and university teacher.
HURIWA, in the statement endorsed jointly by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Officer, Miss Zainab Yusuf, stated that those they identified as some self-acclaimed Yoruba such as Adebanjo and Babatope erred by branding the facts contained in the new book as the rehash of the ‘hatred’ of the Yoruba race by Achebe.
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