World: NIGERIA'S CIVIL WAR: HATE, HUNGER AND THE WILL TO SURVIVE

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The federal government bitterly admits that it has come out second best in the war of words. Nigerian Minister of Transport Joseph Tarka last week took pains to set one matter straight. "The Western press printed many pictures of the so-called rats sold in African markets for human consumption," he said. "I can tell you that the so-called rat is a real delicacy in our part of the world, and I'd rather eat your so-called rats than your damned frog's legs." Gowon, who has recently begun reading books about the American Civil War, seems resigned to his unfavorable image. As he told TIME Correspondent Friedel Ungeheuer in Lagos last week: "I know that world opinion thinks of me as a monster. But the war is not against the Ibos. It is against the personal ambitions of Ojukwu and his rebel gang." Federal officials accuse Ojukwu of shattering the unity of their nation and scoff at the idea of a plot to exterminate the Ibos. Some 30,000 Ibos who remained in Lagos, they point out, are in considerably better health than those trapped in Iboland. "I am sure that if the Ibos return to the fold and are prepared to be honest and fair," says Gowon, "Nigerians will forget the past and welcome them with warm hearts and open hands."

Byzantine Obstruction. The trickle of food that has managed to penetrate Nigerian lines to reach the Ibos has mostly landed aboard a fleet of Super-Constellations owned by a German-American entrepreneur named Hank Warton, who is also Ojukwu's major gunrunner. Both Caritas, the international Catholic relief organization, and the International Red Cross have paid for his services (cost of a round-trip flight: up to $25,000), simply because it was the only way to get medicine and food to Biafra. Some flights were temporarily suspended by bad weather and the Nigerians' radar-directed antiaircraft fire, but last week a Swedish DC-7 landed at Annabelle by a new, still-secret route. It was piloted by Count Carl-Gustaf von Rosen, 59, a legendary air adventurer who began his long career by landing an air ambulance behind Italian lines in Ethiopia in 1935. The sum total of relief so far delivered to the Biafrans, however—some 900 tons—is not even enough to meet a week's needs.

In the sheer act of getting something done, Warton and Von Rosen have won applause from a legion of frustrated humanitarians. Relief officials who elected to go through the usual channels have encountered, and sometimes created, a wall of Byzantine obstruction. Tons of food are now stockpiled on the islands of Fernando Poo and Sao Tome, in Lagos and at other points—but the combatants cannot agree on how it is to be delivered. Nigeria insists that it come by overland route, where federal forces can make an in spection for arms. Biafra insists on an air route, claiming that the Nigerians will poison the food if they get close to it.

Airlift as Symbol. Ojukwu's fear of mass poisoning is not so ridiculous as it seems to the Western mind: the traditional way of doing in an enemy in Africa is to poison him, and Ibo lore abounds with such tales.

There can be little doubt, however, that Biafra's leader is holding out for an airlift for other reasons, too. He knows only too well the value of an airlift as a visible symbol of the world's helping a besieged people stay alive. That, in turn, is the