Agony in Biafra

For the second time in 14 months of cruel civil war, Nigeria's federal government and Biafra's secessionist regime were edging toward peace talks last week. Meeting in Niamey, capital of Niger, under the aegis of the Organization for African Unity, the warring parties promised to undertake a second try at a full-scale peace conference in Addis Ababa on Aug. 5. At the very least the Biafran leader, Lieut. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, hopes to achieve a temporary ceasefire. For Biafra desperately needs a respite in the bitter war.

Despite a relative lull in the fighting, the little breakaway country finds itself in a nearly untenable military situation. Its small army of 25,000 is outmanned four to one by the federals. It has no heavy weapons and suffers from chronic ammunition shortages. One of its best brigades has arms for only 3,000 of the 6,000 men on its roster.

Children's War. The real enemy, however, is the protein shortage that afflicts blockaded Biafra, and grows worse with each day. Attempts to alleviate it through large-scale relief measures have so far foundered on either Nigerian or Biafran intransigence. Kwashiorkor, a deadly protein deficiency, is killing scores of Ojukwu's people daily. Estimates of the extent of the suffering are at best approximate, but from 1,500 to 40,000 Biafrans are dying of starvation each week. The grisly figures are expected to mount dramatically if the war does not end soon. "There is so little food that one feels guilty every time one eats," reported TIME Correspondent James Wilde after traveling through Biafra for several weeks.

Thousands of refugees from the war zone have filled Biafra's towns to overflowing; other thousands are packed into refugee camps that have neither enough food nor enough medicine. At Umuaka Camp near Port Harcourt, where 100 refugees have to share a 15-by-15-foot room, the daily ration consists of two cups of cassava, a starchy, sawdust-like root. When Wilde visited there, a child had just died--it was a year and a half old and weighed no more than eight pounds. Its mother was too weak to brush the flies off the body. "This is a children's war," said the Rev. Jack Finucane, one of 100 Holy Ghost Fathers who are caring for the sick and the destitute. "At the moment there's little we can do but pray to God to save some of these little fellows."

No Anesthesia. The children at Umuaka are sad, misshapen creatures, their legs dangling like loose strings, their bellies bloated by malnutrition, their skin bleached by sores, their eyes wide and pleading. Some are too weak to walk and have to be dragged along by friends. Out in the lush countryside, in some of the mud-walled villages, the crisis is worse. When one of the Catholic priests visits he is immediately surrounded by haggard faces begging for medicine, food, anything. At the Seventh-day Adventist Hospital in Okpala, a sign at the gate reads "No Vacancy." At Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Umuahia, the largest in the region, doctors one day recently counted 1,800 patients suffering from kwashiorkor: during the whole of 1963, the same hospital treated 18 such cases. At the military hospital in the same city, Major David Ofomata, chief medical adviser, tells visitors that everything from antibiotics to catgut is needed, and explains that surgeons have to operate without being able to anesthetize their patients.

Prices in Biafra have skyrocketed. A chicken that cost 70-c- before the war now brings $5.50. The government and the missionaries are advising the people to eat rats, dogs, lizards, even white ants to get some protein into their systems. Gasoline is rationed and electricity is in short supply.

Kerosene-Lit Airstrip. Relief officials estimate that Biafra needs daily food imports of at least 200 tons, a target that a fly-by-night air lift of chartered old Constellations has not been able to meet. A bare trickle of supplies has been flown in, some by the Vatican. The flight into Biafra is a dangerous trip through radar-guided Nigerian antiaircraft fire to a secret, kerosene-lit airstrip that one pilot describes as "little wider than a bicycle path." A medicine-laden aircraft crashed last month, killing its American pilot and two other Americans.

Yet despite the perilous squeeze, despite the widespread fear that if Nigeria takes over all Biafrans will be killed, Ojukwu's people have somehow managed to retain surprising morale. Visitors receive friendly greetings in the street and hear the plea "Help us win the war." In the villages, shouts of "Nno!" (Welcome) are accompanied by the traditional offer of a cup of palm wine, still in plentiful supply. With that, the host will usually break open a kola nut--a mild stimulant that helps stifle hunger.

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