I Wonder Why Genocidal Scholars Omit Biafra Genocide In Their Articles (Part 3)

I Wonder Why Genocidal Scholars Omit Biafra Genocide In Their Articles (Part 3) Biafran refugees flee federal Nigerian troops on a road n...

I Wonder Why Genocidal Scholars Omit Biafra Genocide In Their Articles (Part 3)

Biafran refugees flee federal Nigerian troops on a road near Ogbaku, Nigeria in this 1968 photo. Between one and three million people are estimated to have died. (AP Photo/Kurt Strumpf)

The situation had not changed appreciably by the 2000s. Harff, again excluded the 1966 massacres from her survey of genocide and political mass murder since 1955 because the government was not complicit in killings carried out by private groups and again she omitted the subsequent war and famine. No mention was made of the Nigeria–Biafra war in the canonical century of genocide anthology in 2004, nor in the fourth edition of 2013, although the third edition (2009) contained a chapter with few paragraphs on the war in relation to undefeated perpetrator regimes. Ben Kiernan’s mammoth, prize-winning world history of genocide, makes no mention of Biafra despite purporting to cover ‘genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur’. Neither does it appear in new books on ‘forgotten’ and ‘hidden’ genocides, if at all, it is briefly mentioned in passing, as in Benjamin Valentino’s monograph on mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century and Philip Spencer’s Genocide since 1945. Usually, genocide scholars do not even list Biafra among the cases excluded from their definition of genocide. Continue here