Human rights lawyer and lead counsel for the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Ifeanyi Ejiofor, has cautioned criminal elements in the South-East against turning the region’s liberation struggle into a criminal enterprise.
Ejiofor gave the warning in a statement titled: The South-East Must Never Bleed Again: The Peril of False Labels, Criminal Impunity, and the Collective Duty to Defend Peace, released on Saturday.
He said he has over the years warned against those who had transformed the legitimate aspirations for self-determination into a thriving industry of violence, extortion, fear, and death.
He said that, at enormous personal risk, he devoted countless public interventions to exposing the dangerous contradictions, falsehoods, and destructive tendencies of individuals whose stock-in-trade had become the merchandising of blood under the seductive banner of liberation.
“For daring to challenge this dangerous deception, I was vilified. I was declared persona non grata in certain quarters. I received threats. Yet I deliberately continued travelling throughout Alaigbo because no freeborn son should be intimidated into abandoning the land of his ancestors by merchants of violence masquerading as liberators.
“Recent disturbing developments, however, deserve our immediate attention. Videos allegedly showing certain criminal elements issuing threats to make Alaigbo ungovernable once more, together with disturbing incidents reportedly emerging from communities such as Umulolo and Arondizuogu, should concern every conscientious Igbo son and daughter.”
Ejiofor was reacting to recent videos severally posted on social media by different armed groups, purporting to be followers of jailed leader of Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu who have been threatening to commence violence in Igboland if he is not released.
He said: “Equally disturbing are what appear to be desperate attempts in some quarters to indiscriminately classify every criminal actor as an IPOB member, irrespective of the available facts.
“There is perhaps no greater tragedy than a people who survive one season of terror only to watch, in silence, the ominous clouds of another gathering on their horizon.
“History, if honestly interrogated, teaches one immutable lesson: societies rarely perish because they lacked warnings; they perish because they ignored them. It is therefore in the spirit of civic responsibility, not sensationalism, that I once again raise this solemn alarm.
“Insecurity has never worn a single face. It constantly reinvents itself, borrows new identities, appropriates noble causes, manipulates public emotions, and recruits the unsuspecting through carefully manufactured propaganda. Criminality thrives most where truth is deliberately obscured.” Ejiofor added.
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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