The brutality of nations.

The Brutality of Nations.

Dan Jacobs. Knopf, $22.95. In this era of instant history, when one calamity erases the memory of another and tragedies like the Ethiopian famine are already being forgotten, it would seem quixotic to write about the famine in Biafra, which occurred almost 20 years ago. Yet this is relevant. The same malevolent forces that prevented food from reaching the children of Biafra in 1969 were also at work preventing food from reaching the children of northern Ethiopia in 1984. And from what we know so far, the record in Mozambique will be no different.

Jacobs, a speechwriter, political analyst, and United Nations consultant, has a liberal's sense of moral outrage but, thankfully, doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve. He knows that individual men are rarely evil, but when they are part of a bureaucratic framework, they often end up doing evil things. The bad guys in this book are precisely the ones who are most loyal to the narrowly defined needs of the institutions they served be it the U.N., the State Department, the British Foreign Office, the Canadian government, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. The good guys are often those with the least amount of institutional loyalty. That's why, according to this insider's story--Jacobs was a U.N. press officer at the time of the Biafra crisis--men like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger come out of this whole affair looking much better than such lofty personalities as U Thant, Pierre Trudeau, Harold Wilson, and Elliot Richardson.

All these institutions had a vested interest in good relations with Nigeria, a nation that was on the brink of an oil bonanza promising jobs and contracts for many western companies, particularly British ones, with colonial links to draw on. Diplomatically, too, Nigeria was a big fish; the most populous nation in Black Africa and a power in the then-emerging Third World majority at the U.N. On the other hand, Biafra, the break-away province of Nigeria's industrious Ibo tribe, had no such leverage. It had no U.N. lobby. It wasn't even a member of the U.N. It had few friends among the area experts at the State Department and Whitehall. So when Nigeria employed starvation as a weapon of war, the international community --as represented by these institutions --basically collaborated. The British Labor government even pumped arms into Lagos, rationalizing that a quick Nigerian victory would be followed by an opening of the air and land routes into Biafra, thus allowing food to flow in.

While the Nigerian military shot down relief planes and carried out mass executions of Biafran civilians, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, U.N. Secretary General U Thant, and Under Secretary of State Ellio Richardson were urging the Biafran authorities to cooperate more with international relief efforts, while saying nothing about the atrocities committed by Nigerian government troops. Though the Nixon White House, with Kissinger's approval, supported a more straight forward, "humanitarian' approach, according to the author, Richardson was swayed by the "hard political line' of State's Africa Bureau. As for the British Labor government, Wilson, in a private meeting, reportedly "remarked that if a million Ibos had to die to preserve the unity of Nigeria, well, that was not too high a price to pay.' (That's more or less what it took.)

The Soviets were no angels either. Whenever Wilson seemed to be wavering in his support for the Nigerian military, the Russians were right there to supply as many arms as Lagos needed to finish off Biafra--for the sake of influence later on.

Having covered the famine in Ethiopia myself, all this has a familiar ring. In Ethiopia, there were two break-away provinces, Eritrea and Tigre, which together accounted for half of the famine victims. But international aid at times was running 9-1 in favor of the starving on the government side. While the Ethiopian government, with Soviet support, was strafing relief convoys with MIG-23s and poisoning wells in drought affected areas, U.N. and other officials were advertising the Ethiopian government's concern for the welfare of its people. But at least the rebels in Eritrea and Tigre had a left-wing reputation to draw on, which won them a lot of help and sympathy in Western Europe. The Renamo guerrillas fighting the internationally recognized government in Mozambique are less fortunate. Pity the starving children in Renamo-held areas, whom almost nobody seems to care about. One lesson of Jacobs's book is that there should be fewer pious pro-nouncements about the rights and wrongs of each particular secessionist struggle, and more efforts to get food to famine victims trapped in rebel areas, whether the recognized governments like it or not.