Honorable Catriona Laing
British High Commissioner to Nigeria Plot 1137 Diplomatic Drive
Central Business District
Wuse, Abuja
Nigeria
RE: Biafra Self-Determination
Dear High Commissioner Laing:
I was astonished if not appalled by your May 12 tweet. You voiced delight at meeting with Ambassador President General George Obiozor of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo and other senior leaders from the South East. Why the delight or the meeting? Ambassador Obiozor is to Biafrans during their ongoing genocide by the Fulani what Lord Haw-Haw was to the British during the Nazi Blitz? Why would you meet with a quisling?
Even more reprehensible was your tacit enthusiasm for a united Nigeria, indistinguishable from a suicide pact for Biafrans. As you know, Nigeria was artificially created by the United Kingdom (UK) at the point of machine guns in 1914. Following its signature divide-and-conquer colonization policy, the UK forced the Biafran people, with a right to self- determination, against their will into a combustible mixture of incompatible ethnic groups under the umbrella of UK sovereignty. The UK decamped in 1960 leaving Nigeria poised to explode like nitroglycerin. The 1967-1970 genocide of Biafrans, aided and abetted by the UK itself, was as predictable as Newton’s laws of motion.
Prior to compelled unification in 1914, the British negotiated treaties with Biafra. A jus cogens norm of international law endows the Biafran people with a right to self-determination against a Fulani-controlled Nigerian government that has notoriously excluded all Biafrans but a handful of bribable defectors from the corridors of power. One stark fact speaks volumes. No Fulani has ever been prosecuted and punished for murdering a Biafran in the history of Nigeria!
Self-determination stands at the apex of all internationally recognized human rights because it is preservative of all others. Self-determination is a shield against oppression by the tyranny of the majority or the ruthless. The UK insisted on self-determination for Protestant Northern Ireland to forestall probable persecution by the Roman Catholic Republic of Ireland. It supported a 2011 South Sudan self-determination referendum to redress the persecution of the largely Black, Christian-Animist minority in Sudan by the Arab-Muslim governing majority.
Instead of supporting a united, lawless, Nigeria confected by the British for ulterior motives, you should be advocating a United Kingdom suit against Nigeria in the International Court of Justice for denying the people of Biafra a self-determination referendum as required by Article I of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and an infinite number of corresponding human rights treaties and resolutions. It is the least that the UK can do to atone for its egregious crimes and sins against the Biafran people that have persisted for more than a century.
There is no statute of limitations on justice.
I expect a substantive response at your earliest convenience.
Self-determination is too important to be left to temporizing or tergiversation.
Sincerely,
/s/Bruce Fein
Bruce Fein
International Counsel and Spokesman for Nnamdi Kanu, leader of Indigenous People of Biafra