Biafra, scene of a bloody civil war decades ago, is once again a place of conflict

At first, the mood at the demonstration staged on a high school playing field in the city of Aba, Nigeria, was almost festive. Dozens of demonstrators, calling for Biafran independence, waved red, black and green flags, and danced, clapped and chanted. Within hours, the military moved in and opened fire with live bullets.

The flags toppled and were picked up by soldiers who used the wooden flagpoles to beat protesters who had fallen, as others fled. The scene plays out on a video taken by a witness and of­fered to the rights group Amnesty International.

The protest on Feb. 9 re­ceived little international attention at the time, but a report last week by Am­nesty International has cast a spotlight on the incident and an ongoing conflict that has gone largely unnoticed outside Africa.

The region in southeast Nigeria saw a deadly civil war and starvation in 1967 after it declared itself an in­dependent country, Biafra. The government imposed a food blockade, and around 2 million people died, most­ly from starvation.

Renewed calls for seces­sion have sprung up in re­cent years, led by a separat­ist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, which emerged in 2012. The pro-Biafra movement involves mainly the Igbo people, a group that long has felt mar­ginalized and neglected by Nigerian governments.

The Amnesty Internation­al report, released Thursday, accused Nigerian security forces of a “chilling cam­paign” of torture and kill­ings to clamp down on a pro-Biafran independence movement.

Between August 2015 and August 2016, Ni­geria’s military killed at least 150 pro-Biafran protesters, according to the report, warning the actual numbers killed could be much higher.

Nigeria’s military says it acted with restraint and ac­cused the protesters of vio­lence. Military spokesman Sani Usman told Reuters that protesters killed five police officers at a May pro­test and attacked both mili­tary and police vehicles.

The Amnesty Interna­tional report addresses sev­eral incidents but focuses in particular on the Feb. 9 pro­test at Aba National High School.

“They started shooting us, killing our brothers. Over 10 of them were lying dead there,” wept one young male protester in the video of the protest.

The video also quotes a woman who was at the pro­test: “People dying. People falling on the ground. Blood gushing out. The whole part of that field was filled with human beings’ blood. Then after awhile, they started carrying dead bodies into their van.”

Four days later, 13 bodies of protesters were found in a shallow pit by the Aba-Port Harcourt highway in Abia state, Amnesty Internation­al said.

The organization inter­viewed 146 eyewitnesses and reviewed 87 videos and 122 photographs in its in­vestigation of the violence and found that police re­peatedly fired live ammu­nition at protesters without warning.

“Eyewitness testimony and video footage of the ral­lies, marches and meetings demonstrate that the Nige­rian military deliberately used deadly force,” accord­ing to the report.

In the worst incident at a protest on May 30, in Onit­sha, Anambra State, at least 60 pro-Biafran demonstra­tors were killed when sol­diers opened fire on a pro­test, the report found. Some protesters who took cover in gutters were pursued by sol­diers and executed, accord­ing to the report.

One protester, a 28-year-old teacher who hid in a gutter, told Amnesty In­ternational that he saw the soldiers piling up bodies of those who were shot. He said a soldier found him in a gutter and poured acid on him.

“I covered my face. I would have been blind by now. He poured acid on my hands. My hands and body started burning. The flesh was burning. They dragged me out of the gutter. They said I’ll die slowly.” In a video of an interview with Amnesty International, the man still bears burn scars on his arms.

A 28-year-old woman re­counted getting a morning phone call from her hus­band on May 30, from the scene of the Onitsha dem­onstration. He told her he had been shot in his stom­ach and had been thrown on the back of a moving military vehicle with six other people, four of whom were dead.

Then her husband started whispering. He told her the vehicle had just stopped.

“He was scared they would kill the remaining three of them that were alive,” the wife, who has one child, told Amnesty International. “He paused and told me they were coming closer. I heard gunshots, and I did not hear a word from him after that.”