A little shy of my teenage years, I made my first discoveries of the world outside the borders of my own country. The first of these came at Expo 67, a world fair hosted by Canada in French-speaking Montreal, where I experienced my first extended exposure to a language other than the English I had grown up with in the United States.
The next trip, the following year, was much bigger in nearly every way. With my mother at the wheel, my family drove through Western Europe, where the language along with much else changed with every border crossing. In the Netherlands, I read the diary of Anne Frank. Camping in the forest of Germany, I recall falling asleep to family readings of short stories from South Africa. These spoke movingly of the inner workings of apartheid, from the racial passbook system to the brutal working conditions and long-term separations from kin suffered by poor, Black migrant workers.
As much as experiences like these opened my young eyes and mind to the world, it was something staring out at me from billboard ads for weekly magazines and from newspaper front pages displayed at Europe’s ubiquitous tobacco kiosks that haunted me. Day after day during that summer of 1968, continental media splashed visuals of the immense suffering stalking people in a distant part of the planet on their covers. The news in question was from Nigeria, a country then in the midst of a murderous civil war. The big display photographs were not of the violence, though, or at least not of violence as we usually think of it. Instead, as many as 3,000 people a day, most of them children, were being cut down by starvation.
The Biafran War, as this conflict was called, from the adopted name of a province in southeastern Nigeria whose bid at secession failed, seized the attention of much of the world that summer. Western media put a vivid face on the suffering, the haunting visages of children reduced to stick figures with rust-colored hair, sharply protruding ribs, and oddly ballooning bellies. Suddenly everyone knew the term for this medical condition: kwashiorkor. This was the vividly grotesque result of Biafrans trying to survive with hardly any protein. For the lucky, emergency aid supplies provided paltry amounts of rice, and in their desperation, parents tried to make do by cooking up shoots of grass and weeds to serve to their starving children.
It was only years later that I understood that starvation was no side effect of this war. It was baked into the very politics of the clash between two ruthless sides. What is more, the loss of much of southeastern Nigeria’s population to famine that summer also reflected the politics of the various outside players—Western countries, for the most part—that we often reduce to a bland amalgamation, the “international community.”
As morally repugnant as its position was, some in the Nigerian government nonetheless had the virtue of candor in explaining their attitude toward the death through deprivation that played out among Biafrans that horrible summer. “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war. I don’t see why we should feed our enemies fat, only to fight us harder,” said Obafemi Awolowo, then vice chairman of Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council. Awolowo’s statement was wholly unfounded. Rules of war dating at least to the Geneva Convention of 1949 severely restricted, and later prohibited, the use of starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.
To morally complicate things further, the military leader of Biafra, Odumegwu Ojukwu, rejected the opening of a land corridor to carry international relief supplies into his breakaway region. The commonly understood reason for this was that his armies stood little chance of prevailing, and international attention to the starvation might create pressure for a settlement that he could never win on the battlefield.
The outside world’s role in the Nigerian conflict in 1968 was just as murky and abhorrent. The essence of this was captured in a headline in the Los Angeles Times, which read: “Guns for Nigeria; Food for Biafra.” This referred to Britain’s unstinting armament of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its former colony, where London retained many important economic interests, especially in petroleum production. Other European countries such as France (eager to strengthen its influence in Africa by helping to break up its largest English-speaking country) and Portugal (still clinging to colonial rule while Nigeria supported anti-colonial movements) aided Biafra’s breakaway. While Britain bolstered Nigeria’s federal government and military, it salved its own conscience by supplying a trickle of airlifted food to Biafra.
An opinion column in the New York Times by Anthony Lewis that July captured some of the flavor of all this. “Even in a world hardened to human inhumanity, what is happening in the Nigerian rebellion must seem unbearably pointless and cruel. It is just one more testament to the ferocity of tribal or racial feelings––here African but in many other instances European––that mean nothing to outsiders.”
Memories of the Biafra crisis, long forgotten by most people outside of West Africa, have occupied my thoughts for most of the last two weeks or so. That is because of the human and humanitarian catastrophe that has been visited upon Gaza. It seems like just yesterday that the prospect of famine among this Palestinian enclave’s roughly 2.1 million people had finally risen to the point of global alarm. I say “finally” because there have been warnings of catastrophic famine at least since late last year, and the international media has done little to explain how Palestinians in Gaza have managed to feed themselves, given that Israel has severely restricted the delivery by truck of relief supplies from the early stages of its assault on the territory.
Even more striking is how few images the world has of the travails of the Palestinians who are cordoned off inside this war zone. For a crisis of these dimensions, the world’s press should be saturated with images of daily life and suffering in Gaza. Where, moreover, are the photos of starving children, the images showing the effects of kwashiorkor or other forms of dietary restriction? The world recoiled in momentary shock earlier this month when Israel’s military attacked a food convoy, killing seven workers from World Central Kitchen, a fraction of the extraordinary 200-plus aid workers killed in this war so far. But Israel has been remarkably successful in limiting independent press access to Gaza of the sort that brought the haunting images of Biafra to the attention of the world more than 55 years ago, even as 24-hour cable news channels and the constantly updated, photograph-heavy web pages of major publications have become standard.
What is most remarkable to me, though, is how quickly the Gaza famine emergency story seems to have been displaced. This was not because of any breakthrough in food delivery, as far as I can tell. It seems to have been overshadowed, rather, by attention to Iran’s drone-and-missile reprisal against Israel for bombing Tehran’s diplomatic outpost in Damascus. If I am correct, that amounts to a dismal statement about the Western press’s interest in the life of the residents of Gaza, people who are paying a price for this conflict every bit as tragic as that of the people of Biafra who were so cynically reduced to pawns by both sides decades ago.
Assigning motives in war can be tricky, but it does not seem outlandish to imagine that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu timed its strike against the Iranian generals in Damascus precisely to help shift the world’s attention away from the catastrophe in Gaza. There have been strong signs recently that Israel had been losing public support in the United States over its extremely violent campaign in Gaza, with a death toll now estimated at more than 33,000, most of whom are civilians.
Commentators of different stripes have also long speculated that Netanyahu has sought to prolong the crisis in Gaza because to end it would bring calls for new elections in Israel, an investigation of Israel’s unpreparedness for Hamas’s murderous attack on Oct. 7, and the pursuit of pending legal cases involving Netanyahu himself.
Equally skeptical explanations have been offered for the timing of the provocative strike in Damascus. Netanyahu, who, according to this line of interpretation, has long sought to enlist the United States in an open conflict with Iran, gave Washington virtually no forewarning of its attack on Iran’s consulate, hoping that any counterattack by Tehran would force the United States to help it confront Israel’s hostile neighbor.
There are other columns for other days to be written about the complexities of the antagonistic triangle linking Israel, Iran, and the United States. If people are starving in Gaza, though, this is a story for right now, day after day, and the world’s media outlets have no excuse for averting their gaze.
