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NIGERIAN CRISIS                                   BARRETT

the ideals of the young January coup leaders then the July mutiny would have been staved off. But this did not happen. The July mutiny however was the best thing that could have happened at that time because it succeeded, again by default, in placing the issues of division squarely before the nation. Ironically just as the January coup could be said to have failed so can the July mutiny be seen as a failure. Neither action resulted in its primary aim. But remarkably the failure of the July mutiny seemed to give rise at last to a Government that was prepared to honor the ideals of the first coup. When Major General Yakubu Gowon stepped in to quell the mutiny he did so with a full understanding of the native grievances of the mutineers. For this reason he did not seek to berate them but rather to soothe their feelings and to promise that if given a chance he would head a national Government that would seek to correct the grievances that they sought to eliminate by violence, in a peaceful manner. Obviously such a promise was not in the best interests of the nation's enemies and what is more the implied Government would obviously be forced to review the basic causes of the alienation of the governed from the governing in an effort to heal the breach. Now it became necessary for the foreign interests who were the driving force behind the continuation of this alienation to step up their efforts to maintain a position of strength in Nigeria by finding and supporting any internal movement that might promote division. We can now only speculate on the reasons why this search bore greater fruit in the East under Ojukwu than it did in the rest, of the Federation under Major General Gowon. While both are young men, one, Ojukwu, had been openly contemptuous of the mutineers in July while the other, as has already been pointed out, was courageous enough to admit that native grievances existed but to express the opinion that such grievances could not be remedied by the method chosen. It is therefore not surprising that Ojukwu should have felt that his own stand, which he was not prepared to change would not be popular within the framework of a reconstructed Government that based its premise of justification on the recognition of the verities inherent in the grievances exposed by the July mutiny. Thus it was that right from this point in an effort to gain some semblance of legitimacy for his own stand Ojukwu found it necessary to overplay the essence of ethnic divisionalism present in the upheaval and to project this essence upon the national situation in such a way as to impress foreign groups with the hysteria of purported genocidal persecution. Given his peculiar histrionic and oratorical talents it is not surprising that

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