Achebe’s “There Was a Country” risks opening old wounds

By Michael Holman

There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra

Chinua Achebe

Allen Lane, 318pp £20.00

The author is one of Africa’s finest novelists, the subject is one of Africa’s greatest tragedies, the accusations he makes could not be more serious, and his prognosis for Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is grim indeed. The combination should make for a compelling read. Instead the result is a quirky mix of opinion and autobiography, history and polemic, uneven in quality and partisan in perspective.

It has been more than forty years since Nigeria’s civil war over the breakaway state of Biafra ended and Chinua Achebe, its best known son, has at last broken his silence on the subject: “It is for the sake of the future of Nigeria, for our children and grandchildren, that I feel it is important to tell Nigeria’s story, Biafra’s story, our story, my story.”

The story he tells has all the elements that were to become so familiar across the continent: ethnic divisions, religious rivalries and regional tensions, a problematic colonial legacy, and an elite of venal politicians and ambitious soldiers who plundered national resources.

This volatile combination came to a head in January 1966 when an Igbo-led coup overthrew Nigeria’s civilian government. Achebe, an Igbo himself, describes the coup as “naively idealistic”. Idealistic or not, the outcome changed Nigeria forever.

In May government plans to abolish regional autonomy, which would have allowed the better-educated Igbos to dominate the civil service, triggered a counter coup in July. It was a ghastly time, with many thousands of Igbos, who are mainly Catholic, slaughtered by the northern Hausa, almost entirely Moslem. Achebe calls the killings as “pogroms”, evidence that the “the northern military elite” had a “jihadist obsession”. Time and again he insinuates that religion played a big part in the civil war – yet General Jack Gowon, the Nigerian military leader, was a Christian from the Middle Belt region, as were several of his senior generals. And far from pursuing a “jihadist obsession”, the same northern elite backed Gowon’s “no victor, no vanquished” policy at the end of the war.

Whatever the merit of Achebe’s claims about the role of religion, no-one disputes the fact that as many as a million Igbos from around the country fled to the sanctuary of their homeland in eastern Nigeria. On May 30, 1967, the Oxford-educated Igbo general, Emeka Ojukwu, declared the independent state of Biafra.

Achebe argues that the roots of the ensuing civil war go back to well before the January coup. They can be traced to Britain’s encouragement of “inter-ethnic tensions” which were, he alleges, a key element in the “rigging” of the 1960 independence election to ensure that the north would dominate the new administration: “Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule”.

The Biafran civil war triggered by Ojukwu’s announcement might well have been dismissed as an obscure conflict in a far-off country but for two factors: the country’s huge oil reserves, which were in Biafra territory; and it was the first war of the television era. Having calculated that the Nigerian regime would emerge the victor, Britain sold it the weapons that helped bring this victory about, the arms reinforcing an economic blockade imposed by Nigeria, including a ban on relief flights. The result shocked the world. Newsreels of skeletal, saucer-eyed starving children, victims of what Achebe calls genocide, appeared on television around the world.

For the supporters of Biafra, the heart-breaking pictures were enough to win their sympathy. For opponents of Biafra’s bid for independence, a dangerous genie had to be put back in the bottle. If it succeeded, secessionist movements would be inspired by a precedent that would undermine the territorial integrity not only of Africa’s most populous state, but could threaten arbitrary, fragile and disputed borders across the continent.

At the time of the January 1966 coup Achebe was working in the talks department of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, and describes how he and his wife went into hiding in Lagos before heading east. There he had a unique vantage point as an emissary who put Biafra’s case to governments around the world, drawing on his first-hand experience of conditions on the ground, and mourning the children who were victims of a “genocidal obsession.”

Thirty months later the breakaway state surrendered. It was, writes Achebe, “something Nigeria has never really recovered from”. Nor, it appears, has Achebe, now 84 and living in the United States. His pain and his grief are as raw as ever, his anger abides. A third of the way through the book, he offers a further reason for telling his story.

“The moment has come for Nigerians and the world to ask the proper questions and draw the right inferences about what happened in those terrible years.” Yet it is far from clear just what those questions and inferences are. And as he compiles his indictment he gets careless. On one page he writes that “over two million” Biafrans died; on the very next page it has risen to “perhaps three million dead.” He claims that “more small arms were used in Biafra than during the entire World War”, which seems unlikely, but is nevertheless cited by Achebe as further evidence of the genocidal intentions of the military regime.

Had post-Biafra Nigeria proved a success, Achebe might at least be reconciled to his memories. But on the contrary, there has been a disastrous succession of military coups, followed by civilian rule, both corrupt. Billions of dollars of oil revenue have been squandered, and sleaze remains endemic.

Achebe’s fear for contemporary Nigeria has the same prophetic ring as his prescient novel, A Man of the People, published on the eve of the 1966 coup. Some four decades later he warns: “Corruption in Nigeria has passed the alarming and entered the fatal stage, and Nigeria will die if we continue to pretend that she is only slightly indisposed.”

But when he deals with what he calls the “endless cycles of inter-ethnic violence, mindless carnage” his anger spills over and his language verges on the intemperate, even inflammatory: “For over half a century the federal government has turned a blind eye to waves of ferocious and savage massacres of its citizens – mainly Christian Southerner, mostly Igbo or indigenes of the Middle Belt – with impunity.”

By this stage however Achebe’s story has become a harangue, one that risks opening old wounds and reviving old scores, and failing to provide the fresh insights into the African tragedy that was Biafra.

Michael Holman, brought up in Zimbabwe, is a former Africa editor of the Financial Times. His satire on aid, the Last Orders at Harrods trilogy, is published by Polygon.

This Review was first published at The Africanist and The London Literary Review

The Dr. Joseph & Bootsie Howard Instrument Gallery

The Howard Instrument Collection of the Watts Towers Arts Center is a permanent, revolving installation of musical instruments from around the world. It was assembled by Dr. Joseph H. Howard and donated to the center in 1989. The collection at the watts Towers Arts Center, about a quarter of Howard's total collection, consist of 144 instruments, the majority of which are non-Western.

Book Review: There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra -- Chinua Achebe

"Things Left UnSaid" By Chimamanda Adichie/London Review of Books

Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation, created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn in history class in the endlessly repeated sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form one country and his wife gave it the name Nigeria.’

It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an economic policy; the British colonial government needed to subsidise the poorer North with income from the resource-rich South. With its feudal system of emirs, beautiful walled cities, and centralised power systems, the North was familiar to Lord Lugard – not unlike the Sudan, where he had previously worked. In the South, the religions were more diverse, the power systems more diffuse. Lugard, a theorist of imperial rule, believed in the preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories of what native cultures should be. In the North, the missionaries and their Western education were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools. Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as competitors, and became autonomous at different times; there was no common centre. A nation is, after all, merely an idea. Colonial policy did not succeed in propagating the idea of a nation: indeed, colonial policy did not try to. In the North colonialism entrenched the old elite; in the South it created a new elite, the Western-educated. This small group would form the core of the nationalist movement in the 1950s, agitating for independence. They tried to establish the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ as binary, in opposition to each other, a strategy they believed was important for the exercise of nation-building. But the politicisation of ethnicity had already gone too far.

After independence a vicious regional power struggle ensued. The ‘fear of domination’ of one region by another was everywhere. Elections were rigged. The government was unpopular. Only six years later a group of army majors carried out a coup and murdered top government officials. In the North the coup was seen as an Igbo coup, a plot by the southern Igbo to gain dominance. It didn’t help that the new head of state, in a clumsy attempt to calm the nation, instituted a unitary decree. Instead of regional civil services Nigeria now had a single civil service. A second coup by northern officers saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered. Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’ may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who were killed between May and September 1966, their homes ransacked and set on fire: Nigerian civilians killed by Nigerian civilians. The numbers are still disputed, but most agree that at least seven thousand died. The federal government seemed incapable of stopping the killings. Had the massacres not occurred, or had they been dealt with differently, the south-eastern region would not have seceded and declared itself the independent nation of Biafra.

The darkest chapter of Nigeria’s history: the Nigeria-Biafra war that left a million people dead, towns completely destroyed and a generation stripped of its innocence. On the Biafran side, intellectuals actively participated in the war, buoyed by their belief in the secessionist cause. They drafted press releases, served as roving ambassadors, made weapons. The best known and most influential African poet in English, Christopher Okigbo, joined the Biafran army. He was a romantic, unsatisfied with the administrative or diplomatic roles his fellow intellectuals took on; Chinua Achebe, his close friend, describes him as a man about whom there was a certain inevitability of drama and event. Mere months into the war, he died in battle. Achebe’s recollection of Okigbo’s death in There Was a Country is brief, and no less moving for that. Achebe hears the announcement on his car radio and pulls up at the roadside:

The open parkland around Nachi stretched away in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had no one else heard the terrible news?

When I finally got myself home and told my family, my three-year-old son, Ike, screamed: ‘Daddy don’t let him die!’ Ike and Christopher had been special pals. When Christopher came to the house the boy would climb on his knees, seize hold of his fingers and strive with all his power to break them while Christopher would moan in pretended agony. ‘Children are wicked little devils,’ he would say to us over the little fellow’s head, and let out more cries of feigned pain.

In the years since the war, Okigbo has become an icon to writers throughout the continent: venerated, enmeshed in myth, his death a striking example of the great tragedy of the war. Achebe almost died too. Before the war started, when Igbo people were under siege in Lagos, soldiers raided his house and only just missed him. Later, his home and his office were bombed, and later still the Biafran army set up an armoury in his porch overnight; his family woke to the sound of shelling and knew it was time to flee. His story is a story of near-misses, of deep scars left by what could have been. After an air raid in Enugu at the beginning of the war, Achebe stares at the ruins of what had been the office of Citadel Press, a publishing company he had started with Okigbo, and thinks: ‘Having had a few too many homes and offices bombed, I walked away from the site and from publishing for ever.’

Achebe is the most widely read African author in the world, and was already a known and respected writer in 1967, when he joined the Biafran war effort. He served as an ambassador for Biafra, travelling to different countries to raise support for the beleaguered nation, and participating in various committees, one of which came up with the Ahiara declaration, a moving if starry-eyed document that was the new nation’s intellectual foundation. He has written poems and short stories about Biafra – Girls at War (1972) is a magnificent collection of stories set there. But many have waited and hoped for a memoir, for his personal take on a contested history. Now at last he has written it. Although it is subtitled ‘A Personal History of Biafra’, There Was A Country is striking for not being very personal in its account of the war. Instead it is a Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that never was; Achebe is mourning Nigeria’s failures, the greatest and most devastating of which was Biafra.

This is a book for Achebe’s admirers, or for those not unfamiliar with his work. Parts are similar to passages from previous essays, and interspersed in the narrative are poems which, even if tweaked here, have been published before. Keen followers of Achebe will be interested in some of the new material about his life in the first section of the book. But the second section, about the war itself, mostly forgoes personal memory. In writing about the major events, Achebe often recounts what he was told rather than what he felt and the reader is left with a nagging dissatisfaction, as though things are being left unsaid. There are a few glimpses. On a visit to Canada as a Biafran ambassador, one of his hosts at the Canadian Council of Churches made a joke, and in the middle of the loud laughter that followed, it occurred to Achebe that Biafra had become different from other places, where laughter was still available. And, later, hearing a plane take off from Heathrow, he instinctively wanted to dive for cover. There are other small details, but all tantalisingly brief, sometimes oblique. I longed to hear more of what he had felt during those months of war – in other words, I longed for a more novelistic approach.

The book’s first section is much more satisfying in this respect: more involved and personal. There is his happy childhood, his close-knit family, with portraits of his father, an upright missionary teacher, and his mother, about whom he writes: ‘It is her peaceful determination to tackle barriers in her world that nailed down a very important element of my development – the willingness to bring about change gently.’ The first section is also a celebration of the richness of Igbo philosophy and cosmology and its inclusive culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white missionaries, he writes about ‘how wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from thousands of miles away, with their different customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo religion, which he found more ‘artistically satisfying’. Much of his work is rooted in this tension between old and new, between the Christian religion of his parents and the retreating older religion of his ancestors.

He began to write Things Fall Apart after a British lecturer told him an earlier story he had written lacked ‘form’, but was then unable to explain to him what form meant. ‘I was conscripted by the story,’ he writes, ‘and I was writing at all times – whenever there was any opening. It felt like a sentence, an imprisonment of creativity.’ He is, famously, one of the writers who ‘wrote back’ to the ‘West’, who challenged, by writing his own story, the dominant and reductive Western images of his people. In his essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher’ he wrote that he would be happy if his work did nothing more than show his people that theirs had not been a life of darkness before the advent of the Europeans. ‘The writer,’ he says, ‘is often faced with two choices – turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.’ On the other hand, his work never sinks under this burden of responsibility.

He describes the situation in eastern Nigeria in the months leading up to war. In Nigeria’s urban mythology, the war would not have happened had it not been for the personal ambition of the Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an overambitious man who had engineered the secession and manipulated his people into supporting him. Many others have repeated this view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four months starting in May 1966, which was compounded by the involvement, even connivance, of the federal government … secession from Nigeria and the war that followed became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence of mind could not easily be manipulated into supporting a war. He writes about the reaction among Igbo people after the Northern massacres:

One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit one did not know existed, a determination in fact. The spirit was that of a people ready to put in their best and fight for their freedom … But the most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was that they were finally in a safe place … at home. This was the first and most important thing, and one could see this sense of exhilaration in the effort that the people were putting into the war. Young girls, for example, had taken over the job of controlling traffic. They were really doing it by themselves – no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit existed made us feel tremendously hopeful.

One gets the sense from Achebe’s memoir of a man who is effortlessly himself, who will keep silent rather than say what he doesn’t believe. He is meticulous and sincere in his expressions of praise and gratitude – to fellow writers, to people who helped him or helped Biafra. He has a sense of humour, but very little cynicism. Today, when many Western male writers of a certain age are mythologised for their bad manners – rudeness, selfishness etc – as though great male talent must be accompanied by boorishness, it is refreshing to encounter a great male talent of a certain age who feels no need for posturing.

Achebe has sometimes been characterised as a writer lacking ‘style’, that word often used by people for whom prose, to be noteworthy, must be an exercise in flashy phrasemaking. If style is that, a form of pyrotechnics, then this is a fair characterisation of his work. But if style is a distinctive way of writing prose, whatever that may be, then Achebe’s style is quite evident. His sentences are confident. He writes a Nigerian, and sometimes a distinctly Igbo English. His writing is quiet, and in this regard he is similar to writers like William Trevor and Okot p’Bitek. He is free of literary anxiety.

My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this universal storytelling before we can say, ‘Now we’ve heard it all.’ I worry when somebody from one particular tradition stands up and says, ‘The novel is dead, the story is dead.’ I find this to be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet.

His prose, which often has the cadence of spoken Nigerian English in his fiction, is sometimes plainly conversational here. I was reminded of my father, a contemporary of Achebe’s, telling stories of his past, in the circuitous storytelling tradition of the Igbo, each story circling in on itself, revelling in coincidence. I imagine Achebe would tell the stories in this book in much the same way as he writes them, with an elegiac, gentle vagueness, a lack of interest in adhering to hard fact. He ‘came first or second’ in an exam; his wife’s father died ‘in the mid-1980s’. There are many repetitions, school friends are introduced more than once, there are digressions, and he casually uses quaint words like ‘lad’ and ‘serpent’. There is more of what writing teachers call ‘telling’ and less ‘showing’. Sometimes, his stories are fable-like, with the simplicity – and simplifications – of that form. In Nigeria under colonial rule, he could travel from Lagos to the south-east at night without worrying about armed robbers. This, he argues, is because the British managed their colonies well. His simplification is rooted in disappointment. He is a member of Nigeria’s generation of the bewildered, the people who were fortunate to be educated, who were taught to believe in Nigeria, and who watched, helpless and confused, as the country crumbled. He was a Biafran patriot, as were most of his Igbo colleagues, because they no longer felt they belonged in Nigeria. He still seems surprised, almost disbelieving, not only at the terrible things that happened but at the response, or lack of response, to them. ‘As many of us packed our belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades, jeered … that kind of experience is very powerful. It is something I could not possibly forget.’ Later:

I was one of the last to flee Lagos. I simply could not bring myself to accept that I could no longer live in my nation’s capital, although the facts clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was one of profound disappointment. Not only because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the North, but because the federal government sat by and let it happen.

Achebe mourns Biafra, but his anger is directed at the failures of Nigeria. His great disappointment manifests itself in a rare moment of defiance towards the end of the book:

There are many international observers who believe that Gowan’s actions after the war were magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country’s continued backwardness, in my estimation.

Book Review: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe - review

Memoir and history are brought together by a master story-teller, writes Noo Saro-Wiwa

NOO SARO-WIWA, THE GUARDIAN

Achebe: an exhortation to better governance. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

No writer is better placed than Chinua Achebe to tell the story of the Nigerian Biafran war from a cultural and political perspective. Yet, apart from an interview with Transition magazine in 1968 and a book of Biafran poems, Nigeria's most eminent novelist has kept a literary silence about the civil war in which he played a prominent role – until now. In his engrossing new memoir, There Was A Country, Achebe, now 81, finally speaks about his life during the conflict that nearly tore Nigeria apart in the late 60s.

In many ways, the early part of Achebe's life mirrors the story of early Nigeria. Nicknamed "Dictionary", Achebe was a gifted Igbo student and enthusiastic reader, a member of the "Lucky Generation" of young students who rubbed shoulders at top institutions under the tutelage of Oxbridge colonials. They were effortlessly absorbed into the media, industry and civil service, serving a Nigeria driven by optimism on its way to freedom from British rule.

By independence in 1960, Igbo people dominated commerce and the public sector in a land where the three biggest ethnic groups (the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) were jostling for supremacy. Achebe attributes Igbo domination to their self-confidence, inherent democratic values and adaptability, which were suited to Nigeria's modernising economy. But many Nigerians resented it, and Achebe admits that the Igbo could be cocky, brash and materialistic, though he rejects the popular suspicion that there was a pan-Igbo agenda to control Nigeria – his people have too strong an "individualistic ethic".

Six years after independence, corruption and electoral rigging preceded a military coup that overthrew Nigeria's first prime minister, the Muslim northerner, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Although most of the coup-plotters were Igbo, Achebe disputes that it was an "Igbo" coup, partly on the basis that its leader, Major Nzeogwu, had grown up in the north and was Igbo in name only. Nevertheless, the murder of Nigeria's northern leaders led to pogroms in which 30,000 Igbos living in the north were killed. The bloodshed culminated in General Emeka Ojukwu's declaration in 1967 that the Igbos' south-eastern region would secede from a country in which his people "felt unwanted".

Fearing the disintegration of Nigeria, the government blocked the secession with military force, backed by a UK government keen to protect its oil interests. Profoundly disappointed by this turn of events, Achebe left his job at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in Lagos and returned with his family to the south-east, now calling itself the Republic of Biafra. The Nigerian army launched a three-pronged attack to subdue the Biafrans, who fought back assiduously despite being out-resourced. Achebe describes a wartime spirit that inspired Biafran engineers to build army tanks out of reinforced Range Rovers and to invent the infamous ogbunigwe (bucket bomb) with devastating effect. Though he abhors violence, Achebe cites these as evidence of the quality of the Nigerian people, and he laments the corruption that strangled such ingenuity.

In the middle chapters, memoir gives way to largely neutral historical analysis, with Achebe citing a range of voices, media reports and books. There are interesting insights into the war's two central players: Biafra's leader Ojukwu and Nigerian president, General Yakubu Gowon, both Sandhurst-trained young men. Rivalries between them and within their teams "confounded political science models". Possessing little administrative experience, the two men pursued ego-driven policies, and missed opportunities to end the conflict sooner. Achebe cites Biafran diplomat Raph Uwechue, who accused Ojukwu of choosing ideology over pragmatism when he rejected relief supplies from the British.

In the following chapters, Achebe's personal story re-emerges. Despite the war, he lived a remarkably productive life. Driven by his belief in the political obligations of the writer, he became Biafra's international envoy, promoting the cause in Canada, Europe and Senegal. He set up a publishing company with his close friend Chris Okigbo, and became Biafra's communications minister, writing a manifesto for the republic. He describes being part of an intellectual elite that came together to recreate a Biafran microcosm of Nigeria's early spirit, their ideals drawn from a mix of traditional Igbo philosophy, US-style liberalism and socialism.

As the federal army closed in, Achebe and his family moved from town to town before settling in his father's village. The atrocities proved inescapable: at a market, Achebe's wife Christie saw a bomb split a pregnant woman in two. Achebe relays such horrors – including the deaths of his mother and friend Okigbo – with stoic brevity; his strongest expressions of sorrow are his poems, such as the famous "Refugee Mother and Child". Reproduced from his 1971 Biafran poetry book Beware, Soul Brother, these verses are scattered between chapters, offering affecting interludes.

As the conflict dragged on, Biafra buckled under a blockade so brutal it provoked an international outcry: mass starvation, kwashiorkor and mental illness devastated the Igbo landscape, where vultures, those "avian prognosticators of death", circled overhead. Biafra was the world's first properly televised conflict, and millions across the world were appalled by the horrors flickering on their screens. Such people as Joan Baez, John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Karl Vonnegut galvanised international responses to the tragedy, in an age before "Africa fatigue" had set in.

By the time hostilities ended in 1970, three million Biafrans had died, in contrast to 100,000 casualties on the federal side. Igbos weren't mere casualties of war, Achebe insists, but victims of calculated genocide. Ojukwu, meanwhile, escaped to live in exile in Côte d'Ivoire, inviting accusations of cowardice. Achebe rationalises this move on the basis that if the Biafran leader had stayed in Nigeria, Gowon would have been less magnanimous and conciliatory towards Igbos after the war.

Igbos were reintegrated into Nigerian society, but still faced economic discrimination. Achebe offers an excerpt of an interview in which Gowon tries to justify the crippling £20 flat fee given to every Biafran wanting to convert their Biafran currency back to the Nigerian naira. This sense of persecution still persists today: Achebe believes that Igbo people are the engine of Nigeria's advancement, stifled by a corrupt elite that prefers power and mediocrity to meritocracy. Igbo ostracisation, he says, is "one of the main reasons for the country's continued backwardness". Some might call this supremacism, but Achebe is ultimately a Nigerian patriot who sympathises with ordinary Igbos, rather than any broad Igbo power structure.

The final chapter is an exhortation to better governance, in which he examines corruption, ethnic bigotry, state failure and the steps Nigeria must take to rehabilitate itself. This prescriptive wish list reminds us of the gap between theory and practice in Nigerian politics; it makes you pine for the likes of Achebe to govern. But sadly, he's not writing a manifesto; instead, we have in There Was A Country an elegy from a master storyteller who has witnessed the undulating fortunes of a nation, which – unlike young "Dictionary" – has yet to fulfil its potential.

• Noo Saro-Wiwa's Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria is published by Granta.

Emmanuel Morah, Others Arraigned For Fuel Subsidy Fraud

Emmanuel Morah and George Ogbonna, Rocky Energy; Ngozi Ekeoma, Chief Executive, Nepal Oil & gas; Ifeanyi Anosike, Anosyke Group of Companies; Adamu Aliyu Maura and eight other suspects were arraigned Friday, October 5, 2012 by Nigeria's Eco nomic and Financial Crimes Commission in connection with part of a multi-billion dollars fraud involving the fuel subsidy program before the Justice Habeeb Abiru Federal High Court sitting in Ikeja, Lagos. The suspects have been accused of being involved in a $23.57 million fraudulent activities while working for five companies. The companies involved are Anosyke Group of Companies, Dell Energy Limited, Downstream Energy Sources Limited, Rocky Energy Limited and Nepal Oil & Gas Company. Nigeria pays twice as much for gasoline and fraudulent deals cost the treasury a whopping $6.8 billion between 2009 and 2011, a parliamentary inquiry found.

‘Surrendering A struggle’: Biafran Lessons To Tamil Eelam

In an article published in The Guardian on Tuesday, famed novelist Chinua Achebe, who hails from the Igbo community in Nigeria, opines that decades after Nigeria’s genocidal war on the short-lived state of Biafra, the Igbo people still face monumental problems under Nigerian rule. The Nigerian-Biafran war ended after the internationally aided Nigerian offensives on the Igbo people, which resulted in the death of around 2 million, compelled the leaders of the armed resistance for Biafra to capitulate. Whether the Solheim clique in the Western establishments who now claim that they could have saved civilian lives by facilitating the ‘surrender’ of the LTTE leadership in 2009 had the same intentions for the Eezham Tamil nation, ask Tamil political activists.

After the internationally forced capitulation, the political and economic situation of the Igbo worsened, while Nigeria paraded superficial improvements to the world.

Prof. Achebe, who is most known for his novel ‘Things Fall Apart’, is also poet, academic and postcolonial literary critic. Prof. Achebe had been a strong advocate for Biafran sovereignty when the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria to form a de facto state in 1967.

After a brutal civil war, which saw the deliberate targeting of civilians by the Nigerian forces, imposed starvation, and cutting off medical supplies to the Biafran territory, the Nigerian government retook the region after the surrender of the leadership of the Biafran resistance in 1970. The death toll among the Igbo during this period is said to range anywhere between two to three million.

In its war on the Igbo, Nigeria was assisted by a confluence of world powers, most notably the UK, which had strong economic relationships with the Nigerian regime. On the other hand, the political demands of the struggle for Biafra were not recognized by any major power in the world, though issues of their human rights violations touched Western media.

The parallels with Tamil Eelam are obvious, but for the fact that the LTTE leadership did not surrender the cause despite the compulsions by the International Community of Establishment (ICE) that in practice abetted the genocidal war against the Eezham Tamils.

Tamil political activists say ‘surrender’, as envisaged by some journalists, intellectuals and those in Western establishments, cannot just be taken as a humanitarian action that may have saved thousands of lives. They argue that it would have severe moral and political consequences that would affect the life, politics, and culture of the resisting people for generations to follow as a mortal blow to the idea of resistance and justice.

The current ramifications of the ‘surrender’ of the Biafran armed movement more than four decades ago have been elucidated by Prof. Achebe’s article in The Guardian through the questions he raises.

“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, or taught to the young, more than 40 years after its end? Are we perpetually doomed to repeat the errors of the past because we are too stubborn to learn from them?”

“Supporters of the federal government position maintain that a war was being waged and the premise of all wars is for one side to emerge as the victor. Overly ambitious actors may have "taken actions unbecoming of international conventions of human rights, but these things happen everywhere". This same group often cites findings, from organisations (sanctioned by the federal government) that sent observers during the crisis, that there "was no clear intent on behalf of the Nigerian troops to wipe out the Igbo people ... pointing out that over 30,000 Igbos still lived in Lagos, and half a million in the mid-west".”

“But if the diabolical disregard for human life seen during the war was not due to the northern military elite's jihadist or genocidal obsession, then why were there more small arms used on Biafran soil than during the entire second world war? Why were there 100,000 casualties on the much larger Nigerian side compared with more than 2 million – mainly children – Biafrans killed?” Despite world establishments lauding Nigeria for reintegration and rehabilitation of the Igbo, Prof. Achebe notes that these have been but superficial cases that the Nigerian regime parades to the world to rehabilitate its own image.

“There are many international observers who believe that Gowon's actions after the war were magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of treatises that talk about how the Igbo were wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have news for them: The Igbos were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the main reasons for the country's continued backwardness.”

“Borrowing from the Marshall plan for Europe after the second world war, the federal government launched an elaborate scheme highlighted by three Rs – for reconstruction, rehabilitation, and reconciliation. The only difference is that, while the Americans actually carried out all three prongs of the strategy, Nigeria's federal government did not.”

“What has consistently escaped most Nigerians in this entire travesty is the fact that mediocrity destroys the very fabric of a country as surely as a war – ushering in all sorts of banality, ineptitude, corruption and debauchery. Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today.”

Colombo’s Defence Seminar of 2012, that also saw the participation of military personnel from countries that abetted the genocidal war on the Eezham Tamils, harped on five Rs – rehabilitation, reconstruction, reintegration, resettlement and reconciliation. With the aid of powers that that have vested interests in the island, such grand terms are used to only to reconcile unitary Sri Lanka with the world community.

It can be deciphered through Prof. Achebe’s poignant article that the forced surrender of a struggle fighting for a just cause might appear as saving a few thousand lives at that particular moment, but in the long run, it only causes a systematic depredation of the resisting people at the hands of the oppressive system, the latter having gained more legitimacy owing to the surrender.

Tamil activists wonder whether this was the solution that those like Solheim had in mind when they claim now that they could have arranged a ‘negotiated surrender’ of the LTTE leadership to the Sri Lankan government.

At the height of the Vanni war, a representative of the Biafra struggle sent a message to TamilNet. He wanted the Eezham Tamils to remember that in his view they were fighting not merely for them, but for the cause of an array of nations and peoples like them all over the world. If the Eezham Tamils fail they fail the world of liberation he had said.

In The Guardian article, Prof. Achebe writes “As a writer I believe that it is fundamentally important, indeed essential to our humanity, to ask the hard questions, in order to better understand ourselves and our neighbours. Where there is justification for further investigation, justice should be served.”

It is high time Eezham Tamils and their supporters pose hard questions to the world establishments and international bodies like the UN, demanding justice for the internationally-abetted genocide through a restoration of their lost sovereignty in the clearest of terms.

.........TAMIL EELAM

Eighteen Los Angeles-Area Residents Charged as Part of Nationwide Medicare Fraud Strike Force Takedown

91 Defendants Charged in Seven Cities Linked to about $430 Million in False Billing

LOS ANGELES – LawFuel.com - Eighteen Los Angeles-area residents – including three doctors and one physical therapist – have been charged in six local cases for their roles in schemes to submit more than $65 million in false billing to Medicare.

The charges in Los Angeles are part of a nationwide takedown by Medicare Fraud Strike Force operations in seven cities that led to charges against 91 individuals for their alleged participation in schemes to collectively submit nearly $430 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare. The more than $65 million in fraudulent billing from the Los Angeles cases is believed to be the highest amount of false Medicare billing in a single Los Angeles takedown in Strike Force history.

“Medicare fraud is a national problem that has a very local dimension, impacting patients, health care providers and taxpayers in every part of the nation,” said United States Attorney André Birotte Jr. “Here in Southern California, we will continue to work with our federal, state and local partners to crack down on the unscrupulous profiteers who threaten the integrity of our health care industry, as well as the well-being of its patients and practitioners.”

In Washington today, Attorney General Eric Holder said: “Today’s enforcement actions reveal an alarming and unacceptable trend of individuals attempting to exploit federal health care programs to steal billions in taxpayer dollars for personal gain. Such activities not only siphon precious taxpayer resources, drive up health care costs, and jeopardize the strength of the Medicare program – they also disproportionately victimize the most vulnerable members of society, including elderly, disabled and impoverished Americans. (see today’s Department of Justice national press release at: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/October/12-ag-1205.html.)

According to court documents unsealed today in Los Angeles, four people affiliated with the Los Angeles-based Alpha Ambulance, Inc. were charged with submitting more than $49 million in false claims to Medicare between 2008 and 2012. According to the indictment, Alpha’s owners – Alex Kapri, 55, of Hollywood Hills, and Aleksey Muratov, 31, of Burbank– along with employees Wesley Kingsbury, 33, of Bloomington, and Danielle Medina, 35, of Corona, submitted claims for medically unnecessary transportation services and then created fake documentation to support those claims. Kapri, Muratov, and Kingsbury were arrested this morning and they – together with Medina, who self-surrendered this morning – are scheduled to make their initial appearances before a United States Magistrate Judge this afternoon.

“The FBI is committed to addressing criminal activity in the healthcare system that drains the Medicare Program of billions each year, a cost borne by taxpayers in the end,” said Timothy J. Delaney, the Acting Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. “The defendants are accused in various cases of schemes targeting Medicare beneficiaries, primarily the elderly, and billing the federal government at inflated rates for services, or for services that were never provided.”

In three separate cases, individuals associated with four durable medical equipment (DME) companies – Bonfee Medical Supplies; Ibon, Inc.; Fendih Medical Supplies, Inc.; and Las Tunas Medical Equipment, Inc. – were charged with submitting fraudulent claims to Medicare.

The owners of Bonfee and Ibon – Charles Agbu, 58, and his daughter, Brooke Agbu, 25, Agbu, of Carson – were previously indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit health care fraud related to medically unnecessary power wheelchairs. In a superseding indictment returned by a federal grand jury late last month and unsealed today, four additional defendants were added. The new defendants are Dr. Emmanuel Ayodele, 64, of Westlake; Dr. Juan Van Putten, 65, of Ladera Heights; patient recruiters Alejandro Maciel, 41, of Huntington Park; and Candelaria Estrada, 37, also of Huntington Park. The doctors and patient recruiters are charged with conspiring with the Agbus to provide bogus prescriptions to Bonfee and Ibon, which allegedly used those prescriptions to submit more than $12.3 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare for the recruited patients. Ayodele, Maciel, and Estrada were arrested this morning and are scheduled to make their initial appearances this afternoon. Van Putten and the Agbus are expected to appear in federal court for an arraignment later this month.

In another case unsealed today, Victoria Onyeabor, 52, and her husband, Godwin Onyeabor, 49, both of Ontario, who own Fendih Medical Supplies in San Bernardino, were charged with conspiring with Dr. Sri J. Wijegunaratne, also known as “Dr. J,” 57, of Anaheim, to commit health care fraud. According to the indictment, the Onyeabors received prescriptions for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs from Wijegunaratne in return for kickbacks and used those prescriptions to submit more than $1.5 million in fraudulent billing to Medicare. The Onyeabors, Wijegunaratne, and a fourth defendant, Heidi Morishita, 51, of Valencia, who brought prescriptions to Fendih, also conspired in the payment and receipt of illegal kickbacks related to Fendih’s Medicare billing. Wijegunaratne and Morishita were arrested this morning and they, together with Godwin Onyeabor, are scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in United States District Court in Los Angeles

Tigran Aklyan, 36, of Van Nuys, was arrested this morning on charges that he caused the San Gabriel DME company he owned, Las Tunas Medical Equipment, to submit more than $900,000 in fraudulent billings to Medicare, primarily for medically unnecessary power wheelchairs. Aklyan is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon. In another case, one defendant self-surrendered today on charges related to fraudulent Medicare billing for physical therapy claims.

Eddie Choi, 44, of Westlake, was a co-owner of California Neuro-Rehabilitation (CNR), a physical therapy clinic that allegedly submitted more than $2 million in fraudulent claims Medicare. Choi allegedly submitted bills for physical therapy when, in fact, the services, to the extent they were rendered at all, were massage and acupuncture that Medicare does not cover. A second person charged in this case – Won Suk Lee, 54, most recently of Murrieta, who is currently a fugitive – performed some of the treatments, even though he is not licensed to perform physical therapy. Choi allegedly caused CNR to bill Medicare for Lee’s patients and then paid Lee with approximately 60 percent of the Medicare reimbursements CNR received. Choi is scheduled to make his initial appearance this afternoon in United States District Court.

Finally, in a sixth case made public today, Vivian Neri, 58, of Baldwin Park, was charged with soliciting home health referrals in exchange for kickbacks. Neri is associated with at least $40,000 in home health services claims submitted to Medicare. Neri self-surrendered this morning and is scheduled to make her initial appearance this afternoon.

Glenn R. Ferry, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, Los Angeles region, stated: “It is exceedingly important that federal, state and local law enforcement be tightly coordinated and flexible enough to address health care fraud in its many evolving forms. So as in today’s actions, when ambulance companies, physical therapy operations, durable medical equipment companies, or other health organizations are suspected of breaking the law, they can expect swift justice.”

The defendants charged in these cases face a variety of criminal offenses, including conspiracy to commit health care fraud, a charge that carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison.

The Medicare Fraud Strike Force operations are part of the Health Care Fraud Prevention & Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), a joint initiative announced in May 2009 between the Department of Justice and HHS to focus their efforts to prevent and deter fraud and enforce current anti-fraud laws around the country.

Since their inception in March 2007, strike force operations in nine locations have charged more than 1,480 defendants who collectively have falsely billed the Medicare program for more than $4.8 billion. In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.

In addition to the six Los Angeles-area cases made public today as a part of the nationwide Strike Force takedown, prosecutors recently arrested Bamidele Tola Abdulrahoof, 60, most recently of Palos Verdes, on charges he submitted fraudulent claims to Medicare for medically unnecessary or not-provided DME products through his company, Warz Medical Supply. Indicted in August 2009, Abdulrahoof remained a fugitive until September 2012 when he was arrested coming across the U.S.-Mexico international border. Abdulrahoof entered a not guilty plea last month.

An indictment contains allegations that a defendant has committed a crime. Every defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in court. The Los Angeles cases announced today are being prosecuted by Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams comprised of attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Fraud Section of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. The investigations in these cases were conducted by agents from the FBI, HHS-OIG, and the California Department of Justice.

To learn more about HEAT, go to: www.stopmedicarefraud.gov. Persons who want to report incidents of Medicare fraud can file a report directly from the website, or they may call the toll-free number for HHS-OIG at 1-800-HHS-TIPS (800-447-8477).

.........LAW FUEL

NIGERIA: Weekend Papers, October 5-7, 2012

COMPILED BY AMBROSE EHIRIM

CLICK ON LINKS TO READ FULL STORIES

Public office holder's kids may stop schooling abroad

A Bill which seeks to prevent children of public office holders from schooling abroad has passed a second reading in the Senate.

88 Petrol-laden Ships, Others Arrive Lagos Ports

Ships laden with petroleum products and other items have started arriving at Nigerian ports, especially the ones situated in Lagos. The ships, which numbered over 88, were said to have started arriving since September 28, 2012.

Blast outside Nigerian bar kills one, wounds 11 -witness

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast in the town of Jalingo, Taraba state, an area which has been occasionally targeted by Islamist sect Boko Haram.

Nigeria's Export to Europe hits 24.2 billion Euros.

The value of Nigeria's export to Europe increased from 10.2 billion Euros in 2007 to 24.2 billion Euros in 2011, the delegation of German Industry and Commerce said in Nigeria on Thursday.

Residents appeal to FG to repair Lagos-Badagry road

Some residents and road users in Lagos State have called on the Federal Government to urgently repair the deplorable Lagos-Badagry expressway. The residents said the condition of the road was affecting their social and economic activities.

Floods: Jonathan, govs in crucial meeting •2-hour rain causes panic in Lagos

AS flood disasters, precipitated by torrential rains across the country continue to wreak havoc on public and private infrastructure with growing human casualties and threat to food security, President Goodluck Jonathan, on Thursday, summoned a meeting with the state governors of the affected and other stakeholders.

Nigeria, ravaged by flood

In the face of the ongoing flooding tragedy in many parts of the country, Sulaimon Olanrewaju provides an insight into the tragedy and the efforts made to contain it.

Pains, agonies across the nation

The ongoing flooding incident across the country has done incalculabe damage. Gripping details of the situation in the affected states are provided by our correspondents in this report.

UN urges central banks to allow postal services to issue e-money

The UN Universal Postal Union (UPU) says that with more than 660,000 outlets throughout the world, and significantly larger networks than banks in many developing countries, postal services can play a major role in boosting financial inclusion.

Despite Global Slowdown, African Economies Growing Strongly

Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to grow at 4.8 percent in 2012, broadly unchanged from the 4.9 percent growth rate in 2011 and largely on track despite setbacks in the global economy

What African American Communities Can Learn from Africa About Stopping the Spread of HIV/ AIDS

I was shocked to discover that the HIV infection rate for black males in our nation's capital is higher than that of some African countries such as Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Goodluck Jonathan Reshuffles His Service Chiefs

Ola Sa'ad Ibrahim/NAN File Photo

President Goodluck Jonathan in what had been speculated about reshuffling his service chiefs earlier this week, on Thursday, October 4, 2012, by-passed the Chief of Army Staff, General Azubuike Ihejirika who in all expectations was to get t he powerful military post, appointed Naval Chief Vice Admiral Ola Sa'ad Ibrahim as the new Chief of Defense Staff replacing Air Chief Marshall Oluseyin Petinrin who is retiring. Ihejirika retained his post while Rear Admiral D.J. Ezeoba took over from Ola Ibrahim. Air Vice Admiral A.S. Badeh from the troubled state of Adamawa is the nation's new Chief of Air Staff replacing Air Marshall Diko Umar who is also retiring.

NIGERIA: Police Raid In Kano

The Nigerian Police Force spokesperson in Kano, Magali Majiya, disclosed Tuesday, October 2, 2012, that at least 96 suspected criminals have been arrested at 'various spots' including uncompleted structures in the Kano metropolis on a neighborhood watch program. The spots had been hideouts from where the alleged criminals operated. Ak 47 rifles, cutlasses, dane guns, locally made pistols and house breaking equipments were among items recovered from the raid. The arrests were carried out September 26, 2012, according to Majiya.

Analysis: Towards intervention in Mali

Iyag Ag Ghali, veteran Tuareg leader and head of Islamist Group Ansar Dine open to talks. Image: Brahima Quedraogo/IRIN

BAMAKO, 2 October 2012 (IRIN) - After weeks of shuttle diplomacy, speculation and contradictory signals, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) now looks to have the backing of the Malian government for a major troop deployment in northern Mali.

ECOWAS is still seeking support from the UN Security Council, whose members are divided on the issue of military intervention. Internal ECOWAS documents point to a draft plan, outlining provisional troop numbers, budget and time-frame.

In Bamako, supporters of an ECOWAS deployment are adamant that a strong outside force is crucial if Mali wants to “recapture” the north, ousting the Islamic movements which took over the area six months ago but have dominated an extensive criminal economy for years.

Speaking at a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the General Assembly last week, Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon highlighted the Sahel's need for closer regional cooperation and a special UN emissary of its own, warning of "terrorist groups, transnational criminal organizations and insurgencies", and noting: "Human trafficking is on the rise, along with drug-trafficking and arms smuggling.”

Who is in control in the north?

When the rebellion in northern Mali broke out in January, it was the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) that quickly out-manouevred a demoralized, ill-equipped army, capturing large swathes of territory.

The MNLA's demands for an independent state carried strong echoes of previous insurgencies but its combatants and fledgling administrations were rapidly supplanted by radical Islamic movements.

For Bamako, the main enemy no longer had a separatist agenda, but a rigid commitment to a Salafist Islam largely alien to Mali. At the same time, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), widely presented as the controller and financier of the Islamic radicals in the north, has extensive trafficking and kidnapping networks there - reportedly secured with the discreet connivance of sections of the Malian military and Algerian security forces.

While there has been endless speculation about the size, military strength, internal structures and support networks of the three main movements (Ansar Dine, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa - MUJAO, and AQIM), hard information has often proved elusive.

Visitors to the north suggest AQIM's leadership is very much present, but extremely mobile, individual warlords frequently shifting location, while MUJAO’s strength is allegedly growing, much of it fuelled by non-Malian West Africans.

What about mediation?

Regional mediation efforts have yielded little. ECOWAS's designated mediator, Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaoré, was much criticized in Mali, seen as pro-Tuareg and taking unilateral initiatives without consulting the transitional government in Bamako.

Peace initiatives from Mali have been exploratory. Among those to have headed north was the Guinna Dogon (GD) movement, representing the Dogon ethnic community, mainly based around Mopti and Djenné in the north. "We went as cousins", GD president and Foreign Ministry adviser Mamadou Togo told IRIN. Both "occupiers and those being occupied" wanted peace and dialogue, but he found AQIM and MUJOA to be dominated by non-Malians, who seemed to have little understanding of the country, he said.

Togo found Ansar Dine veteran Tuareg leader and long-term negotiator Iyad Ag Ghali more approachable, but still with a wholly unrealistic agenda. "Iyad wants Sharia", Togo explained. "The Islamists argue that 95 percent of Malians are Muslims, so Sharia must be imposed now. How do you negotiate with that?"

What are the human rights concerns?

In a 23 September report Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that under the control of Islamic radicals "stonings, amputations and floggings have become the order of the day in an apparent attempt to force the local population to accept their world view."

There is evidence of strong cohesion between the three movements on imposing Sharia, with courts now sitting regularly in Timbuktu and Gao, according to senior HRW Africa researcher Corinne Dufka, who also confirmed major recruitment drives of children and adults.

Could intervention make matters worse?

The reports of excesses in the north have inevitably strengthened the calls for prompt, decisive military action, with warnings that the longer the Islamists are left to their own devices, the more difficult they will be to dislodge.

But there are serious caveats about the humanitarian implications of renewed conflict. "There are no easy answers," Ban ki-Moon warned. According to Oxfam West Africa Regional Director Mamadou Biteye, “there is a major risk that military operations in northern Mali would make an already fragile humanitarian situation much worse.”

Dufka of HRW warned of a conflict where humanitarian law would get little recognition, emphasizing that aerial strikes and drone attacks were likely to feature.

She also warned of a "fratricidal" element to the conflict, with armed groups like the northern militia group Ganda Koy (made up of ethnic Songhai and traditionally violently opposed to the Tuaregs), coming into the picture. Many Tuareg refugees told IRIN they were too afraid to return home because they would be targeted in attacks.

Dufka also expressed concern about the professionalism of the Malian military. An investigation has been promised into the killing of 16 Malian and Mauritanian Islamic preachers from the Dawa movement at Diabaly, 400km northeast of Bamako on 8 September, an incident which has further complicated Mali's relations with Mauritania and drew a furious response from Islamists in the north.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has warned in a recent report that "all scenarios are still possible in Mali," including a wave of attacks, major social protests, or another coup. The ICG urged the international community to help heal divisions and build strength in Mali’s military, re-establish stalled development aid, and give the crisis a much higher profile.

Is ECOWAS capable of effective intervention?

Diplomats, who see a conflict as likely if not yet inevitable, suggest an intervention begun in haste will be catastrophic, not least because serious questions remain about ECOWAS's own capacity.

Key member states like Senegal appear lukewarm about intervention in Mali. Nigeria, facing its own Islamic fundamentalist threat in the shape of the radical Boko Haram movement, may face domestic pressure not to commit troops.

Few available ECOWAS troops have combat experience in a desert. Mauritania, which has criticized Mali in the past for being “soft” on “Islamic terrorism”, and has sent its own troops into Mali on counter-insurgency operations, is not an ECOWAS member.

Neither is Algeria, accused by many Malians of spawning the Jihadist movements and their accompanying kidnapping and trafficking networks, which have played such a destructive role in northern Mali.

Neither the Malian army nor ECOWAS will be able to tackle the influx of arms and soldiers from Libya to northern Mali through southern Algeria and northern Niger, warns the ICG without “clear involvement of the Algerian... authorities”.<
ECOWAS has made it clear that it needs and expects strong backup from outside, particularly in airlifting troops to the combat zones, promoting speculation that France and the USA could play critical roles. Both, predictably, are downplaying their importance.

France has serious concerns about French hostages still held by Islamic radicals. The US formally suspended military engagement with Bamako after the National Committee for the Recovery of Democracy and the Restoration of the State (CNRDRE), headed by US-trained Captain Amadou Sanogo, took power on 22 March.

What about the new government in Bamako?

Military intervention is further complicated by the power vacuum in Bamako, where the government has no electoral mandate and where none of the three actors sharing power has sufficient legitimacy, say observers. Critics warn that the restoration of democracy has barely begun.

The government formed by President Dioncounda Traoré in August under outside pressure and headed by Prime Minister Cheikh Modibo Diarra, remains a weak, compromise administration, described by one diplomatic observer as, at best, "an imperfect construct, but one that could move forward".

Other concerns include continued support for Cpt Sanogo, the military's retention of key ministerial portfolios, including Defence, Home Security and Territorial Administration; and a history of serious human rights violations, with security forces targeting critical journalists and the reported torture and disappearance of soldiers hostile to the military junta.

"This is not a normal democracy; this is Mali post-coup," said a Bamako-based analyst.

Relations between ECOWAS and CNDRE have been volatile, with Sanogo and his political allies wanting to keep foreign troops outside Bamako and confining ECOWAS’s role to logistics and training. The current civilian administration is more accepting, with Traoré issuing an invitation for military intervention.

But there is no evidence yet of a more robust approach from the Malian military, with reports instead of dangerous schisms, particularly after the “Red Berets” - Mali’s elite force - were accused of leading a counter-coup attempt in late April.

Timbuktu parliamentary representative Sandy Haïdara is adamant Mali cannot go it alone. "We are from the north and we know our army cannot do this," he told IRIN. "They will need help".

.....IRIN