With rare exceptions, all persons who mattered in the Biafra lobby had had a previous material connection with Nigeria, often an extended period of residence or travel in the former Eastern Region. Their experience made it easier for them to champion Biafra authoritatively; but it also made them less susceptible to outside control or direction. They were certainly not tools of the Biafran government or its London office. Biafra did not arrange for the pressure groups to be established nor did it intervene in their policies or funding. Indeed, the groups were usually shoe-string affairs; and what little monetary flow there was moved in the other direction, small sums occasionally being raised for Biafran humanitarian or political purposes. Individual lobby members did not lack informative ties to the Biafran government-they were in frequent contact with Biafra House, sometimes met visiting Biafran officials, and on rare occasions even made brief sorties into the enclave-but it was generally they and not Biafran officialdom who initiated and shaped the interactions.

The multiplicity of Biafra lobby organizations in Britain reflects disorganized competitiveness as well as yeasty enthusiasm. Their variability, however, also permitted a useful division of labor. The ex-colonial officials, for example, utilized long-standing relationships with persons in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, prepared lengthy and reasoned position papers, and circulated petitioning letters to Members of Parliament. The Britain-Biafra Association published intelligently partisan booklets and circularized a handy and usually reliable weekly newsletter specifically aimed at a British readership. (Initially, the BBA based its news of events inside Biafra on Bernhardt releases mailed from Geneva; but later it discovered that it could obtain almost identical material days earlier from telex messages posted in Biafra House.) The Association also attempted some low-keyed contacts in Parliament. Other Biafra lobby groups adopted more overt or impassioned communications. Biafra '69, for example, tapped a moneyed stratum through champagne dances and Albert Hall musicals, while the Save Biafra Committee. . . engaged in rallies, marches, sit-ins, and similar forms of pseudo-violence.

As with many other cause groups, the leaders of the Biafra lobby frequently lacked normal family lives. With depressing regularity they were divorced, separated, unmarried. Still, this did mean that they could put their whole heart into their organization's communicative work and into monitoring the activities of friend and foe. Not until the last half-year of the war, to be sure, did most of the lobby groups (and others) join any formal Coordinating Committee. And not until a ayear after that did three still extant groups-the Britain-Biafra Association, Friends of Biafra, and Save Biafra Committee-meld their efforts in a single project, a rather wan exhibition about the war and its origins. The leading lights in the various organizations had been keeping in touch all along, however, through telephone messages from house to house, casual or arranged meetings, conversational linkages provided by concerned ex

perts like news analyst Suzanne Cronje and economic consultant George Knapp, and in due course reading about one another's activities in the pages of the militantly pacificist journal, Peace News.

Similar judgments-about white dominance, independence of Biafran governmental control, complexity of structure, functional division of labor, and only partial and often informal coordination-apply to the emergent American, Canadian, and Dutch pro-Biafran group ensembles of which I have knowledge; and I would imagine that analogous comments apply elsewhere in Europe. Pressure groups that arose to favor the Federal Nigerian casue, by contrast, were scarce indeed. The only such organization I know of in Britain is the United Nigeria Group; and it began in fact as a front inspired by Nigeria's public relations consultant. Its small membership included establishment types with business, military, and government backgrounds, who were easily discouraged when their turgid pronouncements were not eagerly accepted by a grateful press; who usually had wives and children and a normal life to engross them; and whose performance, however sincere their views, was characterized by a zealous concern for personal thrift and by yawning lassitude. In all this they resembled, for good or ill, the Federal regime they ostensibly supported.

FOREIGN LEGISLATORS

Legislators, especially but not exclusively those who favored Biafra, often saw in the war a vehicle they could ride to prominence in hearings and debates, and hence in the media and in the minds of their constituents. . . . And even when constituency pressures were absent, . . . it was the legislator who chose his own approach in the light of his own preconceived doctrines. Members of Parliament . . . who visited Nigeria and/or Biafra, played a featured part in the many debates and questions on the Biafran struggle that roiled the Commons after the first year of the war had passed. They were also able to get letters and articles about their trips into the press and their views fleetingly memorialized on radio and television. American Congressmen . . . who journeyed to Africa. . . received similar though muted coverage, the United States all during this time being primarily concerned with . . . Vietnam.

Except for personal visits, most ordinary legislators, in Britain and elsewhere, were limited to much the same sources of information as lay publics. They could listen to the pronouncements of Gowon or Ojukwu and their entourages, though these would be subjected to a heavy, almost total, discount. They received professionally edited materials from the public relations firms retained by the governments—a little for Nigeria, a mountainous heap for Biafra-but these too, with the exception of some Galitzine-produced materials that a few M.P.'s found signally worthwhile, they almost automatically consigned to their "circular files." (Many pro-Biafran M.P.'s considered the snowdrift of releases blowing in from Geneva a dysfunctional embarrassment.) They could rely

on the position statements offered by their own government, or by their party leaders, or by their party research offices, all of which supported a generally pro-FMG [Federal Military Government] postion. They could rely on one another, either through open debates recorded in Hansard, or private conversations singly and in unofficial parlimentary and semiparliamentary committees. (The three committees most relevant to this narrative were all on the Federal Nigerian side. Biafran sympathizers in Parliament made do with informal tête-à-têtes. This off-the-record communicating was not accessible to large publics.) Legislators who favored Biafra could also obtain information processed by indigenous pressure groups, receiving it either directly or through intermediaries whose sound judgment they particularly trusted. Finally and perhaps most crucially, newsmakers though they were, it was to the news media, and particularly the quality press, that M.P.'s turned both for reporting (which in its most arresting versions... often had a strongly pro-Biafran slant) and for editorial opinion (usually subtly pro-Nigerian, but sometimes... blatantly so).

FOREIGN GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

Elected and appointed governmental executives supplemented public sources of information with more discreet materials. Diplomatic cables and reports moved continually between the Nigerian land-mass and the home capital. International comity being what it is, most Western countries sustained better contacts with the authorized Lagos government than with its Biafran rival. And even in that Federal domain, views and facts were usually obtained only from a narrow, establishment-favoring stratum. Conflicting accounts from Nigeria, and almost everything issuing from Biafra, were typically suppressed or ignored. Nonetheless, executives in the United States, Holland, Britain, and elsewhere could speak with genuine assuredness, since they did have access to otherwise unavailable information-or at any rate to otherwise unavailable devices for carrying that information. . . .

The authoritative tone which the executive branch adopted on Nigeria-Biafra, as on foreign policy questions generally, was enhanced by a feeling common in Western capitals that the Nigerian government was incapable of presenting its side of events. Biafra, in the view of many foreign ministries and of the State Department, was good at selfjustification, and Nigeria simply was not. What Nigeria could not do alone, therefore, the friendly Western governments tried to do for it. Their bureaucracies issued statements, speeches, bulletins, and even booklets defending the Nigerian cause-which was, after all, their cause, too. They affected diplomatic reporting and editorial policies by constant thematic reiterations at open news conferences and closed background sessions. They subjected newsmen returned from Biafra to hostile debriefing sessions, while they deftly manipulated their much prized relationships with other correspondents in order to moderate criticism and induce more

favorable evaluations. In all this the British government apparently took the lead, while the behavior of the United States and other Western countries was similar but fainter. At the least, America's "policy of not intervening in the internal affairs of African nations while at the same time, distinguishing between non-interference politically and the humanitarian obligation to help lessen human suffering," to quote a former State Department official, meant that it would do nothing to staunch the British flow of material and verbal support for Lagos, that indeed its own gentler trend of language and action would move along nearly the same lines.

MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS

Foreign businesses like Shell and United Africa Company lay low during the war. Their business, so they think, is business, not politics; and a native war was not seen as a boon to them. Fundamentally, they wanted to be on a profitable footing no matter how the war ended. Except for certain grudges against the Ibos, they did not care much who won the struggle or what the ultimate political map of Nigeria resembled. Their greatest desire was to retain their customers, markets, and skilled workers throughout the entire area. As a result, expatriate firms (until close to the end of the war) generally avoided public statements about the struggle. In private they were more ready communicators. They were willing to meet with Biafran officials and their lawyers during the early days of that regime and discuss oil royalties and rents. They were willing a year later to endure a harsh tongue-lashing by Nigeria's Chief Enahoro in the City of London. Not unlike canny operators making political contributions in American two-party cities, they understood the advantages in extending financial support to students from both Biafra and Nigeria who were taking courses abroad. Such communication was careful and quiet. Its obvious aim was to reduce the intensity of public discussion about the

war.

INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN ORGANIZATIONS

Relief and eleemosynary organizations played their role far more openly. Some with particularly close links to government did prefer impermeable modes of communication-thus, the Presbyterian Church in Canada and the Save the Children Federation in Britain-but most turned skillfully to the mass media. Religious groups often used these public channels more effectively than their secular counterparts; but the excellent, though shortlived, propaganda efforts of Oxfam indicate that religiosity was scarcely a necessary condition for such an ability. A better explanation for much of the difference is that responsiblity for relief efforts behind the Federal lines, where needs were less sensational and where only natural and bureaucratic obstacles, not anti-aircraft fire, impeded logistics, fell to a largely secular consortium headed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Relief efforts in

Biafra, where the story was far more colorful, were by contrast most notably undertaken by an ecumenically Protestant-Catholic organization, Joint Church Aid (JCA).

Organizational proclivities and human resources within the ICRC and JCA themselves, however, also help explain their differing communicative behavior. The ICRC was centralized, ponderous, and bureaucratic. It was enmeshed in a time-honored legalistic (“juridique") tradition. Its past achievements and future intentions made it leery of being considered partisanly political; but that is precisely what its preoccupation with international legal norms constrained it to become. (The result was that ICRC efforts were an adjunct of Nigerian, but not Biafran, activities. The howl that emanated from ICRC headquarters, when the organization was charged by the Nigerian government with political interference and bias is, therefore, sadly understandable.) As for JCA, many of its constituent groups worked in Federal Nigeria as well as Biafra; but the consortium itself, unlike the Red Cross, never entertained any vain hope of operating simultaneously effectively in both jurisdictions. It had no need, therefore, continually to strike poses of objectivity; and it readily became identified as a Biafran champion.

To obtain funds the ICRC activated many time-worn connections to Western governments; but it also avoided behavior that might jeopardize that network for the future. JCA-as a temporary, one-cause groupwas less inhibited. Through secondment it enjoyed the talents of component organizations in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy, as well as those of distribution teams in Biafra and of many religious groups throughout the world. Leaders in JCA . . . quickly learned how to make descriptively harrowing and numerically impressive statements to the press. It was to such religious figures, too, rather than to Biafra's special representatives or its public relations firms, that newsmen increasingly turned for information or for help in obtaining entry into the Biafran enclave. Even more impressive in their totality were discussions and articles and fund drives at the parish and local church levels. For while JCA, like the ICRC, depended primarily on governments to fund its relief activities, it always sought a wide constituency of private contributors as well.

Despite JCA's genuinely ecumenical structure, many persons viewed Biafran relief as primarily Catholic in inspiration. The prominence of Catholicism in Biafra helps explain this, as does the anti-Catholicism expressed by some of its opponents. . . . The exceptional communicative skills of many Catholic spokesmen also pressed in the same direction. One can cite in evidence many Holy Ghost Fathers, in Biafra and Fernando Po and in the sorties outside; the film "Flight to Uli," which focused on that Order's activities; JCA press releases issued in Geneva by the Overseas Office of Catholic Relief Services, [and the like]. . . . Such a superabundance of talent became almost too good for its own advantage.