Obama must tell the world why he supported the Igbo genocide

On 7 April 2016, I published an essay on Barack Hussein Obama entitled “‘African American son’: US foreign policy and Africa” (Pambazuka News, 7 April 2016). The former US president had just had a wide-ranging interview with The Atlantic magazine on his foreign policy during his two-terms in office, conducted by Jeffery Goldberg and captioned “The Obama Doctrine”. My essay is essentially a response to that entire Obama-Goldberg Atlantic conversation.

Africa, African affairs, African subjects, hardly feature anywhere in this foreign policy review. Obama only refers to Libya, recalling the outcome of the tripartite US-Britain-France invasion which overthrew Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, but even here Libya is discussed within the sphere of Middle East/Islamic world geopolitical priorities and not Africa’s. Nowhere in the interview, for instance, is the very important subject of France’s routinised military interventionism in the so-called francophonie states of Africa raised. President George W Bush had blocked these French invasions throughout most of his presidency as “punishment” for the 2003 French opposition to the US-led war in Iraq but Barack Hussein Obama reinstated it soon after taking office, enabling the French to resume their invasions of Africa with impunity. Soon, France carried out its most notorious invasion of the era – its attack of Côte d’Ivoire (its 49th invasion of an African state since 1960) and the ousting of its president and the latter’s replacement with a preferred French choice, and the murder of 2300 Africans during the course of the assault. Several business and residential districts of Abidjan were destroyed during this French invasion.

Presidential legacy

But most importantly, though, the Atlantic interview did not focus on the very gruesome template that defines the  catastrophic legacy of the Barack Hussein Obama presidency – that Barack Hussein Obama, first person of African descent to be elected to the position of president of the United States 233 years after the founding of this republic, supported the Igbo genocide, the foundational genocide of post-(European)conquest Africa which has been waged by Britain and its Nigeria client state since 29 May 1966 and continues till this day with all its interlocking virulence, 51 years after.

Barack Hussein Obama’s support for the Igbo genocide was pursued with virtual devotional zealousness. It formally began in March 2015 when he imposed Muhammadu Buhari, one of the vilest Nigerian genocidist operatives during these 50 years of the Igbo genocide, as head of Nigeria regime. This imposition was carried out with then British Prime Minister David Cameron. Muhammadu Buhari has been a genocidist operative in the Nigeria military – straight ahead from the launch date of the Igbo genocide and during the Nigerian expansive trail of the mass slaughter of Igbo military and civilians alike in north and west Nigeria regions from 29 July 1966-July 1967 to encapsulate phases I-II of the genocide timeframe. During phase-III of the genocide, the invasion of Biafra, July 1967-January 1970, Buhari was commander of a genocidist corps in north and northcentral Biafra, slaughtering to the hilt.

As from 13 January 1970, beginning of phase-IV of the genocide, Buhari has adhered rigidly to or overseen the Nigeria regime’s blanket policy of non-development of occupied Biafra, the regime’s aggressive degradation of socioeconomic life in Biafra, and the regime’s exponential expropriation of the rich oil reserves of Biafra. Biafran assets looted by the occupation stand at $1000 billion. Over time, since 13 January 1970, Buhari has exhibited a calculated, deafening silence over the course of the murder of those tens of thousands of Igbo people across Nigeria but especially in his north Nigeria homeland by regime forces/allied forces including those massacred by the Boko Haram terrorist organisation in the past six years.

Since Buhari was installed in power by the Barack Hussein Obama-David Cameron duo, 2000 Igbo across Biafran cities, towns and villages have been murdered by his genocidist military and his two other adjunct forces, Boko Haram and Fulani militia – two of the world’s five deadliest terrorist organisations (Melissa Clarke, “Globally, terrorism is on the rise – but little of it occurs in Western countries”, ABC News, 17 November 2015). Neither Barack Hussein Obama’s White House nor his state department nor his embassy in Nigeria ever condemned any of these murders. It had been left to the audacious outreach of the London-based Amnesty International to shatter the deafening silence that emanated from the Barack Hussein Obama presidency on this ongoing genocide by publishing widely on the genocide (Amnesty International, “Nigeria: At least 150 peaceful pro-Biafran activists killed in chilling crackdown”, London, 24 November 2016).

In sharp contrast, we mustn’t forget to note, the Barack Hussein Obama administration issued a robust response on 12 December 2015 when a Buhari regime’s military brigade operating in Zaria, northcentral Nigeria, attacked and murdered several Shiite muslim protesters in a procession. The US statement was clearly unambiguous in its outrage: “The United States calls on the government of Nigeria to quickly, credibly, and transparently investigate these events in Zaria and hold to account any individuals found to have committed crimes”. This same Barack Hussein Obama US-led government wouldn’t, didn’t follow up with similar or any other statements of concern in the entire stretch of genocidist massacres perpetrated by its imposed Buhari client on the Igbo population in Biafra throughout the period.

Why? Why? Why?

Barack Hussein nwa Obama, O gini ka ndiigbo melu gi? Barack Hussein child of Obama, what is your problem with the Igbo of Biafra, southwestcentral Africa? What is it about the historic Igbo heritage of unrelenting resistance against African subjugation for freedom across the Americas during the 400 years – the enslaved plantation estates of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Jamaica, Barbados, St Lucia, Surinam, Saint-Domingue, Brazil… – that you must find very anguished? Or, is it the Igbo vanguard role, 1930s-October 1960, in freeing Nigeria from the British conquest and occupation which constitutes your problem with the Igbo? It is the latter that riles the British and for Harold Wilson, prime minister, the Igbo genocide becomes an opportunity to “punish” the Igbo for playing this cardinal role in terminating its occupation in this part of Africa (Harold Wilson had insisted that he “would accept a half million dead Biafrans if that was what it took” Nigeria to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide [Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, 1977: 122]).

Barack Hussein Obama, when/how/why did your own anti-Igbo hate originate? Whilst studying in California after the relocation from Hawaii? Whilst studying in New York, Harvard, living in Chicago, campaigning for the US presidency? Whilst, earlier on as a younger person living in Indonesia? When? Why? Why? Why? Barack Hussein Obama must tell the world everything about why he supported the Igbo genocide, this odious trail of Igbo hate...

The Igbo Studies Association had in a conference held at Howard University in April 2012 on “Nigeria and Boko Haram terrorism and its impact on the Igbo population in north Nigeria” noted the overall silence by the Barack Hussein Obama administration over this emergency. Barack Hussein Obama remained unrelentingly adamant, throughout this phase of his presidency, of not designating the Islamist Boko Haram, a terrorist organisation despite the latter’s murder of thousands of African peoples, overwhelmingly Igbo, at the time (it wouldn’t be until November 2013 that the US declared Boko Haram “terrorist” because Washington judged the group was “[now] develop[ing] links with other [islamists] such as al-Qaeda … to wage a global jihad”).  This was despite the evidence, from the grounds in Nigeria, that those who supported Boko Haram, including Muhammadu Buhari who Barack Hussein Obama would soon impose as head of the state’s regime, were well known to the Goodluck Jonathan regime in power.

Jonathan himself personally made an astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world to this effect: “Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security [services] … Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house”.

Despite this Boko Haram terrorist-pressure on Jonathan, Barack Hussein Obama had no sympathies for the plight of this regime whatever. Olusegun Adeniyi in his Against the Run of Play (2017), quotes Jonathan “[that] Obama made it clear [right from the outset] that he wanted a change of government in Nigeria” (allafrica.com, 26 April 2017). Jonathan, an Ijo zoologist, is the first personage without any connections or roles in the Igbo genocide to occupy the position of head of regime in Nigeria since 29 May 1966.

No US president, since the outbreak of the Igbo genocide in May 1966 during the Lynden Johnson presidency, has unambiguously supported the mission of genocidist Nigeria as Barack Hussein Obama. Barack Hussein Obama has in fact dramatically disrupted the fulsome goodwill for the people of Biafra begun by the Richard Nixon presidency (Republican president, “right wing”!) soon after the end of phase-III of the genocide (12 January 1970) (see Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, “Igbo genocide, Britain and the United States”, Pambazuka News, 9/16 July 2015) and continued by subsequent presidencies to date, Republican or Democrat, of an enhanced Igbo emigration programme to the US. This accounts for the hundreds of thousands of Igbo Americans presently, 50 years on, many of them in very influential positions in academia, the corporate world, media and information and the state, and their children and grandchildren thriving appreciably...

Unconscionable


It is surely an unconscionable tragedy of incalculable historical consequences that Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-descent president of the US republic in 233 years of existence was elected in office in November 2008 to end up with a dreadful presidential legacy supporting the Igbo genocide – executed on the ground by Nigeria, an Islamist-led state, and its suzerain state Britain. The duo genocidist states have murdered 3.1 million Igbo and tens of thousands more since the launch of the genocide on Sunday 29 May 1966.

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