Ojukwu Unveils New Biafran Currency as he Announces the Aims of the Secession | January 1968 скачать в хорошем качестве

Ojukwu Unveils New Biafran Currency as he Announces the Aims of the Secession | January 1968

Saturday 27th January 1968. Silent footage of Odumegwu Ojukwu at a news conference at which he unveiled the new currency for the breakaway state of Biafra. He also outlined the broad aims of the secessionist state. Ojukwu, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Nigerian Army, was speaking in the city of Owerri, 130 miles (209 KM) south of Enugu, where he had called a meeting of the Biafran Consultative Assembly and Council of Chiefs. The issuance of the currency followed the introduction by the Nigerian government of new currency notes in an effort to render as worthless old currency notes being held by was Nigeria's Eastern Region. Ojukwu described the Nigerian action as one which had "finally pushed the Eastern Region out of the Nigerian federation. (In Port Harcourt a few days later, visiting foreign news men would be told by a Biafran government spokesman that Biafra had enough foreign reserves to keep going "for a long time". He said that the main Biafran imports since the beginning of the conflict had been war materials). The next day, Ojukwu told newsmen in Umuahia that he believed the only answer to the conflict with federal forces lay in negotiations, but that Biafra was prepared to continue the war if the federal side insisted on settling the issue by force. Transcript of Ojukwu's words: "The tragedy of the present situation is that an indifferent world has chosen to appear ignorant of the true position and facts about the Nigeria-Biafra conflict, while at the same time allowing itself to be fed with tendentious propaganda from Nigeria. Our enemy are of course afraid terribly afraid because they know that their case cannot stand the searchlights of truth and morality. It is for this reason that they have been doing everything, even before the start of hostilities, to scare away impartial observers from this republic. We have often repeated that we are looking for nothing more than a negotiated settlement of the present bloody conflict. We are prepared to state our case before any impartial body, confident that our case and cause are just. Our case is so clear that even a child in the street can present it convincingly." Source: Reuters News.