Nigeria: Search for a Sterile Scalpel

More versatile with their press releases than they have yet been with their guns, the commanders of Major General Yakubu Gowon’s federal army of Nigeria shrugged off the recent loss of their country’s Midwestern Region. The unexpected victory of the rebel Biafrans from the east was only “a temporary setback.” When the Biafrans penetrated the Western Region as far as the crossroads town of Ore last week, Gowon’s spokesmen called it “the last desperate move of the rebels before their total collapse.”

Gowon himself knew better. Desperately he recalled 600 troops from Bonny, a federal foothold in Biafra. From the Northern capital of Kaduna, another 500 came racing in on railroad cars. From Lagos itself, more troops moved out to meet the invading Biafrans. For transport they commandeered everything available; groundnut wagons rolled toward the front behind big red-and-silver municipal passenger buses. But hard as the federal troops hit back, the rebels continued to hold Ore. And since the rebel forces of Oxford-educated Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu are largely Ibo tribesmen, Nigerians behind the front in Lagos retaliated by beating and killing any Ibos who were still living in their capital. “The short, surgical police action” with which Gowon promised to put down the revolt, said Nigeria’s leading playwright, Wole Soyinka, “is being conducted with blunt and unsterile scalpels.”

Apparently convinced that he needs sharper scalpels, Gowon, who has been refused arms by the U.S., has turned to the Soviet bloc for help. Last week the Kano airport was shut down for the arrival of secret cargo. The secret was soon out. The cargo included two dozen obsolescent Russian MIG fighters and six Czech L -26 jet trainers that can be fitted to carry bombs and rockets. With them came some 150 Soviet-bloc mechanics, many of them with small arms in holsters at their waists.

However soon the Russians can get the planes ready, Gowon has yet to find the pilots to fly them. All last week Lagos was alive with rumors that foreign mercenaries were on the way—Egyptians, Algerians, Swedes, Finns—the nationalities seemed endless. But the only flyer who actually showed up was the 69-year-old “Black Eagle of Harlem,” Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, who hinted that he could supply a squad of Negro-American pilots.

With Ojukwu’s men still clobbering his best troops at Ore, Gowon needs more reliable help than Colonel Julian, who, for all his flamboyance, has never provided much aid to anyone.