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Saturday 19 September 2015

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE...

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE THE CHIEF PROSECUTOR INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE PEACE PALACE IN THE HAGUE NETHERLAND 20TH SEPTEMBER 2015.


Over the years I have picked much interest in the activities around the globe with special attention to your organization the international Court of Justice and its administrative mode of selective of justice of who to protect or to punish where necessary and I asked myself just one simple question. Are there justice to the less-privileged set of ethnic group? On March 4, 2009 Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, became the first sitting president to be indicted by ICC for directing a campaign of mass killing, rape, and pillage against civilians in Darfur. The arrest warrant for Bashir follows arrest warrants issued by the ICC for former Sudanese Minister of State for the Interior Ahmad Harun and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb. But there has been a systematic approach in which you handled the extend invitation of war lord who through their parochial interest many lives were lost and am yet to see you mention the name of the then head of States in Nigeria Gen Gowan whom masterminded the extension of over six million Biafrians from the surface of the earth and he is today a free man traveling around the globe, Oh may I remind you that genocide as is been called is “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group …”.

The UN general assembly defined it in 1946 as “… a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups”. Throughout the conflict the Biafrans consistently charged that the Nigerians had a design to exterminate the Igbo people from the face of the earth. This calculation, the Biafrans insisted, was predicated on a holy jihad proclaimed by mainly Islamic extremists in the Nigerian army and supported by the policies of economic blockade that prevented shipments of humanitarian aid, food and supplies to the needy in Biafra, Did the federal government of Nigeria engage in the genocide of its Igbo citizens – who set up the republic of Biafra in 1967 – through punitive policies, the most notorious being “starvation as a legitimate weapon of war”? Is the information blockade around the war a case of calculated historical suppression? Why has the war not been discussed on the international media, or taught to the young as in the case of Sudan and Burundi , more than 100 years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the errors of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them? Or we are been manipulated by the power that be? As noted earlier, there is no commonly accepted definition of genocide.

Even among scholars who subscribe to the 1948 UN Convention, many would agree that its principal criteria – intent, targeting of racial, ethnic or religious groups, and the destruction “in whole or in part” of such groups – defy precise measurement. Nonetheless, they provide important analytic touchstones for differentiating the character of the Biafran insurgency from the ensuing carnage. The element of intent emerges with tragic clarity from the deliberate, systematic elimination of all Biafran elites and potential elites; ethnic targeting was far more consistent at every stage of the genocide. If only because of its “selective” character – the elimination of an ethnically defined elite group – the case of Burundi does not fit into the Holocaust (or the Rwanda) paradigm. It cannot be described as a total genocide, and for that reason some may quibble about the appropriateness of the genocide label. Jacques Sémelin’s definition – “that particular process of civilian destruction that is directed at the total eradication of a group, the criteria by which it is defined being determined by the perpetrator” (Sémelin 2007, 340) – might conceivably offer conceptual ammunition to those who would challenge the view that anything like genocide has been committed against Tutsi or Hutu.

By the same token, as defined by the perpetrator as the group to be eradicated, there can be little doubt that the extermination of the Hutu elites stands as a tragic illustration of the genocidal urge to “purify and destroy” Once all is said and done, no amount of retrospective ratiocination about the applicability of the genocide label can ever erase from their collective memories the agonies, On December 15, 1968, the American Jewish Congress issued a memorandum titled “The Tragedy of Biafra.” Phil Baum, director of the Commission on International Affairs of Congress, called attention the humanitarian tragedy going on in Biafra: “For more than a year, a little noticed but nonetheless savage and tragic war has been going on between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the former Eastern Region of that country which, in May 1967, proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Biafra.” Up till then, the war drew little public attention despite the fact that it was “already responsible for more deaths than have occurred in Vietnam Burundi and Sudan and is now causing the death of thousands of people each day as in the recent killings of harmless Baifrans on the 30th of August 2015 by the combinations of military and Police and which is just one of such killing going on in Nigerian under the leadership of Mohammed Buhari lad government.” By this time the brutal war between federal Nigeria and secessionist Republic of Biafra had lasted for nearly one year. The thirty-month-long war led to the death of over six million ethnic Igbos and other Easterners. Described as the first black-on-black genocide in postcolonial Africa, the war had a terrible impact on the Igbo people with its massive civilian death toll. With the passage of time, many of these outrageous claims are receding from public and private memories. Furthermore, beginning with the Aburi conference and the opening a new phase of referendum for a peaceful secession of Biafra And on this note I call on the United Nation, The international court of justice, The Russian Government, The American Government and the World at large to expect Action to bring the book those behind the Genocide in Biafra

Cc: The African Union
Cc: The United Nation
Cc: The International Criminal

By Justice Oscar Onyeani Umah
(For Family Writers)

8 comments

  1. Its obvious that Nigerian government can't survive this

    ReplyDelete
  2. Un talk about biafran genocide

    ReplyDelete
  3. Un talk about biafran genocide

    ReplyDelete
  4. God please free us, Grant us freedom the United Nation.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Truly the Nigerian government can't survive it, if the united nation will be frank to them-self.

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  6. Biafrans have right to live.you world powers are looking the othe4 way round because Hausa gives our oil to you at cheaper rate, we will give you free oil if you help us to regain our nation back.
    We are the owner of the land and everything in it.Help us now..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can't beg them. Biafra must come!

      Delete
    2. We can't beg them. Biafra must come!

      Delete

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