By Pini Jason
There is something eerie and surreal about the rationalisation by Awo and General Gowon that the use of mass starvation was a means of quickly ending the war.

So the quickest way to end the war was to starve Biafran children, women and the vulnerable to death? It sounds to me as haunting as the argument about the most humane way to execute human beings! Use lethal injection! Or lethal gas!

Even war has rules of engagement. You can kill as many of your enemy soldiers as possible to win the war, but you cannot levy war on un-armed innocent civilians or even kill a wounded enemy soldier or prisoner.

That was the principle on which the Swiss-born Henri Dunant founded the Red Cross in 1863 after the battle of Solferino!  You cannot bomb or strafe churches and hospitals, refugee camps or those engaged in humanitarian duties as medics.  But Nigeria did all these!

You can fight all you want with all the arsenals at your disposal but one arsenal that is not available to you, according to conventions, is to deliberately mass starve civilian population, especially in a war touted as a war of unity!

That is the lesson of Kosovo and the trial of Serbian Radovan Karadzic at The Hague today. That is simply an immoral way to win a war of unity or to quicken the end of the war! The same logic would have been used if Biafran civilian population had been gassed!

One thing that holds this country down is that Nigeria has never been honest with itself and has never accepted responsibility for its failings.

One of the most debilitating burdens we carry is that we cannot even speak the truth about our country without fragmenting it into pallets of ethnicity.

We are never going to realistically deal with our problems as a nation if we continue to obfuscate the debate about our country by hauling abuses across ethnic divides or if we believe that once we manage to stridently deny a fact, the truth would change.

That is simply like the illusory denial of a kid who covers a wound with sand to deceive his parents, believing that by so doing the wound would heal. Unfortunately it doesn