OTHER INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Other international bodies besides the relief agencies also commented publicly and effectively on the Nigerian-Biafran war. The three to be discussed here-and the three most important. . .-all furnished crucial support to Nigeria's regime.

The United Nations, in the person of U Thant, came down squarely in favor of Nigerian territorial integrity. The failure of the issue to be debated in any United Nations forum worked more subtly to the same end, for it deprived Biafra's supporters of a floodlit opportunity to present their views. The frequently reiterated stand of the Organization of African Unity, favoring the Federal regime and requesting a virtually unnegotiated Biafran surrender, helped justify U Thant's position as well as that of most Western governments.

It was Nigeria's canny decision in late 1968 to invite an international team of military observers into the country, though, that was most instrumental in re-establishing the moral probity of the Lagos government. One can justifiably object to the ease with which the Team was satisfied on evidence as well as the narrow syllogism with which it apparently reasoned (a. Wartime conditions are usually hell; b. Things are hell in Nigeria; c. Everything is as it should be); but clearly the Team's several Reports did help undercut Biafra's genocide claims. Indeed, this genocide charge, unlike an earlier one stemming from the 1966 massacres, was so easily deflated that one must view its propagation as a serious communications blunder.

In any event, the excellent (from a Nigerian standpoint) and consistent findings of the International Observer Team, findings that were reprinted by the Nigerian government in batches of 50,000 and widely quoted by leaders of friendly countries and the world's press, and the care with which the U.K., Poland, Canada, and Sweden were selected as Team members, have led some analysts to see in this the Machiavellian hand of Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It was too brilliant a stroke, they think, for Nigeria to have hit upon itself. Such a conclusion is hardly fair. The Federal Military Government was, throughout the war, better at high-level than widely publicized communications. And besides, even if they were acting on Britain's suggestion, they did at least exhibit a rare capacity for accepting good advice when offered it.

THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS

From the beginning, Biafra was more concerned than Nigeria about the foreign press. Even before secession the Ojukwu regime had issued many booklets and communiques, while the Lagos government sniffed about washing dirty linen in public and retreated into virtual silence. That kind of difference persisted all during the war too. Nigeria rarely welcomed journalists. It was often achingly slow about issuing entry permits; and when it did welcome an occasional reporter or news team, it usually was discouraged by the results and became even less cooperative

in the future. The protracted post-war exclusion of journalists from the former combat areas, and especially from the East-Central State, after a brief period in which barriers to reporting had been removed, strikingly illustrates this persistent Nigerian tendency.

Biafra, by contrast, continually courted outside newsmen. During the first year of the war it leaned heavily on its public relations firms. Robert Goldstein, for example, helped organize a press conference for Ojukwu in Biafra, reporters from Canada, the United States, France, and Britain being in attendance. With great care the Bernhardt staff subsequently arranged for a select group of British journalists to tour the country during the week of April 21, and to dispatch a dramatic drumroll of stories to their papers. As the war continued, however, Biafra got the hang of inviting and squiring reporters by itself, while they in turn resorted to Biafra's special representatives or to church officials with Biafran ties in order to obtain an entry permit.

Throughout the war Biafra was good copy. It was a plucky and determined nation fighting against great odds. Its leadership was articulate and dynamic. An aroma of oil pervaded the whole contest, while the struggle not only saw brave soldiers fighting and dying but civilian installations undergoing wanton and terrorist bombings. In the midst of all this there arose the specter of mass starvation and the cowboy exploits of the international relief operation. The alarming and horrific facts could be handled in a brashly sensational manner by the popular press and in a quietly sensational manner by its quality counterpart. The Biafran government made the filing of stories easier by giving reporters access to its telecommunications link with Geneva on a daily basis, without censorship, and at standard rates. Biafra's success with newsmen sometimes induced Nigeria to follow suit, as when it had its public relations firm arrange for British journalists to tour its domain a month after Bernhardt's master stroke. But because Nigeria's efforts were half-hearted and its story less interesting to relate, the results usually discouraged it from sustaining a receptive attitude.

Nigerians could take solace from the sympathy accorded them by crucial portions of the press, even though most reporting proceeded otherwise. Thus, it received constant editorial support from the New York Times, despite the often hostile war coverage in its news sections. It obtained favorably balanced coverage in the establishment weekly West Africa, and insightful analysis by the Financial Times correspondent... . An occasional defection in the ranks of Catholic journalism... also gave Lagos reason to rejoice.

While the bulk of press commentary unquestionably favored the Biafran side, the breadth and dependability of the commitment should not be exaggerated. Biafra was lauded as a brave country, valiantly fighting against insuperable odds and struggling to retain semblances of normalcy even under wartime chaos. Its dead and dying, and especially its displaced and starving civilians, evoked great cries of sympathy. Such facts

moved humanitarian organizations to prodigious labors and caused common folk to dig deep into their pockets. Yet, these same facts neither convinced governments to come to Biafra's political aid nor induced their mass citizenry to insist upon that choice. Valor and decimation, after all, cut both ways. If they furnished reasons for Nigeria to relent, they also furnished reasons for Biafra to surrender. As Ibo leaders like Asika and Azikiwe, who came over to the Federal cause kept remarking: "Enough is enough." To many Ojukwu's determination to continue resistance eventually suggested a callous disregard of his people's survival; and when, for alleged military and security reasons, he rejected the daylight relief flights into Uli that the FMG announced it would permit, nearly all his friends in the press began deserting him. Biafra's genocide-starvation theme thus revealed itself as doubly unwise. It comported poorly with elite-centered Realpolitik, for it was an argument from dire weakness. It was also a dubious choice for broad-scale communication, since its logic required that the Biafran regime appear morally superior to its opponent. Once that was no longer so evident, the theme in fact became a serious obstacle to sustained public support for Biafra's separate existence.

NEWS BROADCASTING ON SOVIET RADIO AND TELEVISION*

BY F. GAYLE DURHAM

Domestic news broadcasting in the Soviet Union serves to generate political support for governmental policies and programs and further the development of a Communist society. We may gain a direct insight into the Soviet conception of the functions of radio and television from the following explicit statements made in a resolution by the Party Central Committee:

The main task of Soviet radio broadcasting and television is the mobilization** of our country's working people for the successful implementation of the Seven-Year Plan and the entire program of the comprehensive construction of Communism in the USSR for raising labor productivity and stepping up progress in all branches of the national economy... Radio and television must inculcate in all Soviet people a Communist attitude toward labor and the need for participation of every Soviet person in socially useful work. Radio and television must demonstrate the people's condemnation of loafers and good-for-nothings who try to live at the expense of others and must describe in concrete terms how labor becomes a need of Soviet people.

*Excerpts from "News Broadcasting on Soviet Radio and Television," Research Program on Problems of Communication and International Security, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massaachusetts. June 1965. The research for this paper was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense. Reprinted with the permission of the author, copyright holder.

**Italics are author's.

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.

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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