Grim Anniversary

On walls and in buildings, visitors to Nigeria abruptly encounter the image of the leader of black Africa's most pop ulous nation. From posters the boyishly handsome face of Major General Yakubu Gowon, 34, peers at passersby.

Below his face is a couplet: "To keep Nigeria one is the cause that must be won." The rhyme is meant to encourage Nigerians in their war with break away Biafra, but the poster paper has begun to tatter. The war, which Gow on originally predicted would be "a surgical police action," next week enters its third bloody year.

Little in Lagos mirrors the war be cause Nigeria so far has fought only a limited action. Open-air markets operate as usual, and military-age students hur ry blithely to classes. Foreign vessels crowd the port of Lagos. Palm oil, pea nut and cocoa exports are thriving and the economy is strong. Within earshot of Biafran guns, oil wells are pumping so robustly that Nigerian production this year will reach a record 255 mil lion barrels. Asked why they were pro testing the higher taxes needed for the army, participants in recent tax riots in outlying districts were stunned. They had not known that a war was on.

Nigerian Pressure. For all its low visibility, the conflict is brutally real. The Nigerian army in two years has expanded to 90,000 men. In the process, nearly 20,000 soldiers have been killed or wounded; many died because of in adequate medical care. In the Lagos sub urb of Yaba, a military hospital de signed for 120 patients is overwhelmed with 1,100 wounded.

Despite such casualties, Gowon pro fesses affection for his rebellious enemies and avoids vindictive condemnations (see box, page 32). Even so, with in his administration the strident sound of approaching triumph is noticeable.

It is based, perhaps falsely, on Nigeria's new tactics in the air. Since 1967, landlocked Biafra has received guns, food and medicine by air chiefly through a section of highway at Uli that has been converted into a landing strip. Except for spasmodic harassment, Nigeria did little to stem the nightly flow of planes. As Biafra's General Odumegwu Ojukwu, 35, continued to hold out and at times take the offensive, Gowon and his aides became convinced that the Red Cross and church relief groups were supplying guns to him as well as proteins.* When Sweden's Count Carl von Rosen last month introduced his six-plane instant Biafran air force and at tacked Nigerian fighters on the ground, Nigeria finally reacted. A Swedish relief DC-7 flying for the Red Cross to Uli was shot down by a federal MIG, and its crew of four was killed.

The action produced exactly the effect that the Nigerians had anticipated. Most food flights flown by civilian crews have been grounded until flight rules can be worked out that are agreeable to both combatants. Planes that do make the flight are targets for the newly unleashed MIGs or for antiaircraft fire that appears to be directed by five radar-equipped Russian trawlers lying off the coast. Flying into Uli aboard one such flight last week, TIME Correspondent James Wilde found Biafrans grim. The struggling country had a good harvest recently, but supplies will last no longer than three months. Food rationing has already begun.

Unlike Nigeria, Biafra is totally mobilized, and everywhere the effects of war show. When the conflict began, the Ibo tribesmen of Biafra were a nation of 15 million people occupying 40,000 square miles of land. They are now, by their government's estimate, reduced to 7,000,000 in an island of 9,000 square miles. In contrast to the prosperity of Lagos, Biafra's economy is strained: a tin of salt costs $20, a tin of rice $2. Biafra holds only two towns, Orlu and Owerri. Owerri last week came under daylight attack from Nigerian jets, and Wilde helped tend a casualty, an eleven-year-old girl who had been walking home from school. "I really tried to hide from the plane," she whispered as nursing nuns prayed at her request. "I went behind a tree, but it found me all the same. I'm sorry." She died, and was covered with one of the few bedsheets in Owerri.

When It Is Over. In spite of the pressure of such hardships, the Biafran army continues to fight, indeed to take the offensive. Armed with captured Nigerian weapons, the army has moved southwestward toward Port Harcourt. Ojukwu's strategy is to threaten the oilfields there that provide the largest part of Nigerian revenues, in the hope that the Western nations whose companies operate the fields might decide to force Gowon to negotiate a peace. Militarily, Ojukwu has the advantage of shorter supply lines and better communications.

Few outside Biafra give it much long-run chance, though the Biafrans' ingenuity and resilience have proved surprising at almost every turn in the war. Should the war end soon (which seems unlikely) and with an outright Nigerian victory (which may be impossible), Nigeria's troubles would not be over. "As long as Ojukwu's threat is there," says a Lagos businessman, "the federation will remain together. But I really don't know what will happen when it is over." Put together by the British on geographic rather than ethnic lines, Nigeria consists of 15 major tribes who find common ground against the Ibos. In his first broadcast after assuming power three years ago, Gowon himself admitted that "the basis for unity is not there." Persuasive arguments of the British and U.S., among others, convinced him at last to go to work for nationhood.

* The aid groups maintain that gunrunning was a separate operation by other sources.

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