Word: nigerians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spirit of these agreements--to prevent civilian death on a massive scale--is clear. Yet the relevant third parties determined that the Nigerian government was not guilty under the letter of international law: not enough Ibos were imperiled to qualify as genocide, the starvation was not intentional, merely collateral...
...LAWS of national sovereignty are themselves based on the fundamental principle of self-determination. The same principle that underlay Nigerian claims to independence decades earlier could have been invoked to legitimate outside intervention on the Ibo's behalf. Indeed, the French government of Charles de Gaulle, before initiating covert military assistance to the rebels, declared: "The bloodshed and suffering of the Biafran people for more than a year shows their will to affirm themselves as a people...
...second, more explicit, legal basis to violate Nigerian sovereignty had been incorporated into a body of international human rights law in the aftermath of World War II. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, for example, prohibits "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. "The Geneva Conventions states: "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited...
Although the Nigerian leaders' fervent anti-communism hardly made credible a close alliance between Nigeria and the Soviet Union, the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations was sufficient to cause one State Department official to threaten: "the United States government will do everything in its power to block" private citizens from organizing a relief effort...
...sure, the Nigerian Civil War was not the first instance that implacable fear and hatred of the Soviets outweighed all other concerns--moral and otherwise--in the making of U.S. foreign policy. And as the current fiasco in Nigeria illustrates, nor was it the last...