Black hats and brave men

BY A curious irony, missionaries are our most experienced war veterans. In many a small war over the past 40 years, Irish priests have been at the heart of the action, organising relief and saving lives with almost military precision. Biafra was one such small war, but it was also a massive humanitarian disaster. One million people died in the two and a half years after the people of Eastern Nigeria declared independence from the main Nigerian state in July 1967.

Since almost all the Irish missionaries in Nigeria were working in Biafra at the time, they were inevitably sucked into the conflict. Tony Byrne's book is a lively account of the airlift that was organised to save one million people from starvation, and of the diplomatic and political intrigues designed to stymie these efforts.

As Frederick Forsyth, who worked as a BBC correspondent during war, writes in a foreword, Biafra established several firsts. "One was that it became the first mass-starvation of men, women and children in Africa to reach the people of western Europe and North America in all its horror by the medium of television. Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan came later.

"The second was that the West, the Soviet Bloc and Third World governments all supported the Nigerians in the conflict. Ordinary people, disgusted by the suffering they witnessed, largely supported the breakaway young state of Biafra. The result was that any aid reaching the dying children was devoid of official backing, something that has never happened before or since," writes Forsyth.

As a new wave of leaders come to power in Africa, it's timely to look again at how the West manipulated the newly-independent states in the 1960s. Byrne says oil was the main reason why Biafran independence was opposed. The war, which was supposed to last a few weeks but dragged on until January 1970, brought in the usual supporting cast of mercenaries, arms traders, oilmen and conmen.

In his foreword, Forsyth takes a pot shot at the government bureaucrats who opposed the air-lift, among them Irish officials whose antagonism towards the missionaries was revealed in recently-released State papers. "These papers were written by plump white hands, of men on plump white bottoms, who had never heard the rattle of machine guns between the palms, the crack of a mortar in a crowded village square, the singing hiss of an incoming bomb nor the whimper 6t a dying child."

Byrne - "the Green Pimpernel" - and his colleagues in Joint Church Aid broke the blockade of Biafra by organising more than 5,500 relief flights, mostly from the Portuguese island of Sao Tome, to a variety of improvised airstrips in Biafra. The flights, with their much-needed cargoes of stockfish, salt and medical supplies, had to run the gauntlet of Nigerian fighter planes and bombers before making their night-time landings.

The pilots were an extraordinary bunch of people, Byrne writes. "They felt it was `doing something useful to spend their annual holidays on the airlift. Many stayed on - some arranging leave of absence, some quitting their regular jobs. Most of them had never flown in a war zone before."

Yet many of the pilots would fly relief supplies one day, bombs for the Nigerians the next. "As far as my boss is concerned, we simply deliver freight for anyone who pays us," one told Byrne.

Then there were the white mercenaries, working for both sides. One explained his training methods to Byrne. "Before starting, I line up 12 trainees . . . call one of them to me ... I shoot him dead between the eyes. Then I tell the other 11 that they'll receive the same treatment, if they attempt to retreat from the front-line."

The tone for Byrne's time in Africa was set on his voyage there in the early 1960s. Together with a dozen other priests, also bound for the missions, he climbed to the upper deck. From there they tossed their black hats - then an essential part of clerical attire - into the Atlantic Ocean. The career of the rebels had begun.