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NIGERIAN CRISIS                          BARRETT
he could at that meeting to maintain the state of deadlock. When he was unsuccessful in this he found that the honly chance of success for the force of division lay in ignoring the very points that he had won in the meeting and going ahead full steam towards his goal of a separate nation. This surmise is borne out by the fact that his own Eastern advisers were wary of his proposed trip to Aburi, feeling that just such a degree of rapport might be reached. His trip to Aburi was undertaken in an atmosphere of the closest secrecy even at the point of his departure from his regional capital Enugu. Oburi was the greatest surprise that Ojukwu and his foreign supporters ever had, but it is interesting to note that the first signs of division in the ranks of his native advisers, especially in the military forces appeared immediately after the Aburi conference and culminated eventually in the death of two of the guiding lights of the original January coup. Major Nzeogwu (Ibo) who was the most idealistic and fearless initiator of the original effort in January, was taken out of the jail in which he had been placed by Major General Ironsi and forced to lead secessionist soldiers at the early battlefront near Nsukka. There he made an attempt to escape from the rebel side into the Nigerian lines but was shot by a Nigerian sentry whose alertness played no truck with political ramifications. To this day senior officers in the Nigerian Army lament this misfortune. The other highly idealistic Ibo officer, Major Emmanuel Ifeajuna, who sought to effect reconciliation after the Aburi conference, was executed for his pains by Ojukwu in Enugu in September, 1967 just before Enugu was liberated by the Federal Troops. But all this is a bit ahead of the sequence of events. The Nigerian developments following the Aburi Conference featured Major General Gowon's repeated pleas for another conference to iron out whatever differences might have given foreign interests a loophole for influencing Ojukwu to ignore his most concrete gains. Furthermore the re-development of troops according to their regions of origin was started, but had to be halted when it became apparent that another clause of the agreement eschewing violence as a solution for the crisis was not apparently sufficiently engrained in the actions of, and principles of, the secessionist Army commanded by Ojukwu, since they were then discovered to be involved in large arm deals through the agencies of such nations as Portugal and South Arica. It was at this point that the Lagos Government led by Major General Yakubu Gown decided to turn its efforts to some of the more profound political decisions necessary to secure the future stability of a united Nigeria. 

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