NIGERIA: More than 100 people arrested at separatist Biafra rally

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

LAGOS, 10 May 2005 (IRIN) - Riot police arrested more than 100 people at a rally in the oil-rich southeast of Nigeria last weekend organised by a group campaigning for an independent Biafra, according to witnesses and police.

Described as a Christian revival meeting, the Sunday rally in Abakaliki, capital of Ebonyi state, was called by the outlawed Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), and featured preachers who prophesised the secession of south-eastern Nigeria and urged the audience of hundreds of people to fight for a separate state, the sources said.

But while the rally was underway, truckloads of policemen swooped on the venue firing tear gas into the meeting hall and shooting into the air, witnesses said.

"They arrested 126 people while 42 others escaped arrest with injuries. No one was killed," Uche Madu, a spokesman for MASSOB who was at the rally, told IRIN.

"But we're not relenting. We even welcome the arrest because it's one of the sacrifices we have to make for Biafra," he added.

The movement's proposed republic of Biafra would include the oil-rich Niger Delta that produces nearly all of Nigeria's 2.5 million barrels of daily oil exports.

An attempt to declare an independent Biafra in 1967 resulted in nearly three years of civil war and more than one million deaths, and threatened to tear apart the then newly independent nation.

Ebonyi state police commissioner Paul Ifeghoghi confirmed that arrests had been made at the rally, but said only 80 people were detained and charged on Monday for treason, conspiracy and illegal assembly.

"They disguised the rally as a religious crusade and we got intelligence reports about it," Ifeghoghi told reporters in Abakaliki. "The law stipulates that before you hold any political rally you must obtain a police permit, and they didn't."

MASSOB, formed by lawyer Ralph Uwazurike in 1999, is seeking the establishment of an independent Biafra in the region dominated by Igbos, one of Nigeria's three biggest ethnic groups. The country’s 126 million people belong to about 250 different ethnic groups, the largest being the Hausa/Fulanis of the north, the Yoruba of the southwest and the Igbos.

Uwazurike’s claims that successive governments have oppressed and discriminated against Nigeria's estimated 30 million Igbos have struck a chord among thousands of Igbo youths, many of them jobless, who have joined MASSOB's ranks. Oil companies in the southeast are frequently the target of attacks by youths demanding jobs in the industry.

More than three decades after the Biafra war, MASSOB this time around insists that the separatist campaign is non-violent and it has organised a series of rallies, demonstrations, boycotts and stay-at-home protests, often featuring symbolic declarations of independence.

Human rights groups say that dozens of pro-Biafran activists have been killed over the last six years for campaigning for such beliefs and more than 300 are currently in detention after being arrested by the police at marches and rallies organised by MASSOB.

Fifty-three people arrested in the country's biggest city Lagos for participating in a soccer tournament organised in the name of Biafra last year are facing trial for treason.

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