Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has described the
Biafrans as "people who'd been abused, who'd undergone genocide, and who
felt completely rejected by the rest of the community, and therefore decided to
break away and form a nation of its own." Soyinka who disclosed this in an
interview published in The Telegraph of London on Wednesday, said, the Igbos were victims of genocide during the
three-year civil war.
He also used the opportunity to condemn militant sect
Boko Haram, the insurgent group that has visited terror on the North, killing
over 1,500 since 2009, describing their actions not as religion, but criminality.
He said: "All religions accept that there is
something called criminality. And criminality cannot be excused by religious
fervour…you cannot hold the world to ransom simply because some idiots chose to
insult a religion in some far-off place which most of the world has never even heard
of. This for me is a kind of fundamentalist tyranny that should be totally
unacceptable. "So a group calls itself the Boko Haram, literally: 'Book is
taboo', the book is anathema, the book is a product of Western civilization, and
therefore it must be rejected.
