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The thrusting Nigerian advance created havoc. Biafran civilians piled pots, pans, clothing, radios and washtubs atop their heads and fled before the federal troops. One priest who flew out shortly afterward saw evacuees from a Biafran hospital hobbling down a road with intravenous needles still stuck in their arms and glucose bottles held aloft so the fluid could drip down. "The roads were choked with people," another priest recalled. "I could see terror in their faces." The exodus reminded him of an Ibo proverb: "A man who is running for his life never gets tired." But some did; they sat down along the road and never rose. Then the vultures swooped in, swiftly and silently.
The Nigerians were less affected. Even so, in addition to battle casualties their economy was battered by a war that at its climax was costing the government $1,000,000 a day. "There are no victors in a civil war," B. A. Clark, the Deputy Secretary for Nigeria's External Affairs Ministry, said sadly last week. "Not when the people you have been fighting were classmates or your friends or the man that used to work at the next desk or maybe even your cousin. All wars are bad, but civil wars are hideous."
Compounding the horror of Biafra was the moral ambiguity that enveloped it from the first. Great powers and small became involved in the conflict, frequently for questionable reasons. The Soviet Union, eager to regain a foothold in Black Africa, delivered arms to help crush a rebellion that Moscow would, in another context, have hastened to hail as a "just war of national liberation." Britain, worried about African balkanization, Soviet influence and its own oil interests, supplied weapons to the Nigerians. The British were also concerned with preserving a state that its colonial officers had nursed to nationhood.
France's Charles de Gaulle, fearful that a too powerful Nigeria would serve as an irresistible example for such former French colonies as Niger and Chad, backed the Biafrans; he might also have been hoping that a secessionist victory would give France a crack at the immense oil reserves in the Niger Delta. The Biafrans were also supported by South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal, all obviously interested in preventing a united Nigeria from realizing its potential as the most powerful state in all of Black Africa. Black-ruled African nations, worried about the effect of the rebellion on their own disparate tribes (see box following page), were overwhelmingly pro-Nigeria. Officially, the U.S. took no sides, but it irritated the Nigerian government by undertaking an airlift of public and private food supplies to keep Biafrans alive.
The Uses of Starvation