Biafra: Nigerian Governors Condemn Call for Ethnic Cleansing of North

Nigerian politicians have criticized a call to expel members of one of the country’s main ethnic groups from the north of the country, as tensions rise ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Biafran civil war.

The governor of Kaduna State in northern Nigeria said he had ordered the arrest of the leaders of a coalition of group claiming to represent the north’s interests, which on Tuesday issued a statement calling for the expulsion of all Igbos from the north. The Igbo are one of the three largest ethnic groups in Nigeria and are based mostly in the east of the country.

Governor Nasir El-Rufai said that he had ordered police to arrest signatories to the statement, whom he said had sought to “promote their own agenda of hate, division and incitement.”

The call relates back to the Biafran war, which was preceded by the flight of Igbos across Nigeria to their ancestral homelands in the east of the country. On May 30, 1967, a former Nigerian military commander, Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the annexation of a Republic of Biafra in eastern Nigeria