Chief emeka anyaoku biography of martin

June-August, ;mm. African Centre,London, ;mm. The Racial Factor in International Politics. Anyaoku by Phillips Johnson; sc. Okpuno Ire,Obosi, AnambraState. Gender: Male. Marital Status Married. Name of Spouse Ebunola Olubunmi. State of Origin: Anambra State. Father's Name Emmanuel Anyaoku. Father's Status Deceased. Mother's Name Cecilia Anyaoku. Mother's Status Deceased.

Number of Male Children 3. Number of Female Children 1. Adiba, Oluyemisi, Obiechina, and Emenike. Profession DiplomatAdministratorElder statesman. Kindly share this story:. All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.

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Emeka Anyaoku. In office 1 July — 31 March Thabo Mbeki South Africa. Sir Shridath Ramphal. EA: [Laughter]. Well, I mean Trudeau must have had his own reasons for his extraordinary sensitivity towards liberation fighters. SO: Connected to that, and please excuse me for interrupting, but were there ever Quebequois delegations around the periphery of Commonwealth meetings?

EA: Arnold Smith would never have allowed that. Vive Le Quebec libre! And Canada was on tenterhooks with a growing movement for an independent Quebec. It was the days of Lester Pearson as prime minister. I accompanied Arnold Smith to a meeting with Pearson and some leaders of the Liberal party. You remember that the nature of Canadian politics at the time, was such that Pearson, very boldly, bypassed the stalwarts of the Liberal party, people like John Turner and Paul Martinthe father of the second Paul Martin who subsequently became prime minister.

He bypassed them at the Liberal Party Convention to go and choose Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the Quebequois whose parliamentary experience at the time was not more than three years, and whose ministerial experience was just under 18 months as Minister of Justice, during which time the ministry had had a little scandal. But Pearson wanted him to succeed him in order to save the Canadian union.

And of course Trudeau, when he succeeded Pearson, immediately brought in the legislation that a third of all senior appointments at the level of permanent secretary in the federal civil service had to be French-speaking. The bilingual policy was brought in, that official speeches had to be made in the two official languages. I went with Arnold Smith to Canada then and in fact went with him to Quebec for not an easy meeting with Ronnie Leveque who was then the leader of the Quebecois party.

SO: Can I suggest that, because Quebec was a domestic issue, it was imperative that a Secretary General, albeit a Canadian Secretary General, should not be seen in any way to be interfering in the domestic politics? But was there also a particularly supportive intention of Arnold Smith in meeting Ronnie Leveque? Arnold Smith drew a line between his role as Commonwealth Secretary General and his duty to his native Canada.

And this was the first message he conveyed to his Canadian interlocutors, which made my presence at some of the meetings a little awkward because he was talking with them as a Canadian concerned about the future of his country. He made sure that they regarded his intervention as not being that of the Commonwealth Secretary General, but that of a Canadian who happened to be Commonwealth Secretary General.

SO: So that would place you in an chief emeka anyaoku biography of martin situation, as an international servant. During the crisis in my country in the s, I sought to talk to my Nigerian compatriots as a Nigerian who happened to be Commonwealth Secretary General. SO: But in the late s you were also from the region that was seeking to secede from the Nigerian federation and that placed you in a particular position.

Emeka Ojukwu and I had been friends since our boyhood and I said to Arnold Smith that I would like to go and talk to him. At that time, flights into Biafra were very hazardous. And I remember in October of that year, the flights went chief emeka anyaoku biography of martin once in two weeks and the next flight following my enquiries was on the day after my second son was admitted to hospital.

He was just about three months old and quite ill. I went the next day to Umuahia to see Ojukwu. I told this story in my memoirs. The return flight was even more frightening because the flight again had to take off at midnight and we went to Gabon. These planes had no seats; we had to fly sitting or lying on mats. SO: Ah, yes. Did you have other diplomatic responsibilities in any way, to talk to the French, who of course were particularly supportive of the Biafran government, or to…?

EA: Well before the civil war started in Nigeria, I had come to the Commonwealth Secretariat on secondment as a Nigerian diplomatic officer. So I was still on the books of the Nigerian Foreign Service. I refused and formally resigned from the Nigerian diplomatic service. The Nigerian government then petitioned that I should not remain in the Secretariat, but Arnold Smith took the view that I was a collective servant of the Commonwealth.

He cited the example that when Czechoslovakia went communist after the revolution inthe new communist government in Czechoslovakia had petitioned Trygve Lie, the first UN secretary general, that the Czechoslovakian officials in the UN secretariat should be removed. But the UN Secretary General said no maintaining that all the UN secretariat staff were international civil servants owing allegiance collectively to the international community.

Arnold Smith said to the Nigerian government that Emeka Anyaoku and all his colleagues in the Secretariat were international Commonwealth servants whose allegiance must be owed collectively to the Commonwealth and that he saw no reason to think that I did not owe allegiance to the Commonwealth association. He therefore refused the request. EA: Yes, that was why I told the story in my book of my first meeting with the then Head of State of Nigeria, General Gowonafter the civil war when I went to Nigeria as a special envoy of the Secretary-General to discuss the issue of the admission of the new state of Bangladesh into the Commonwealth.

SO: Yes, and General Gowon asked you about your position during the civil war, and said at the end he respected your honesty. EA: Yes, at the end of our meeting. To start with, the officials in the Foreign Ministry had refused that I should see the Head of State insisting that I should deliver my message to the Foreign Ministry. Ultimately, the officials of the Foreign Ministry accompanied me to the meeting with the Head of State.

At the end of the meeting, the Head of State asked to talk to me alone and that was when the conversation that I recorded in my book took place. SO: Yes, General Gowon said that he respected your honesty because you had declared yourself to be a Nigerian patriot, and you did not deny your particular position as an Igbo. You talked of your house here in London being a venue for both the Biafra visitors, but also visitors of the Nigerian government.

EA: Well, because my wife is Yoruba, and we naturally had contacts on both sides of the conflict. SO: Yes. Achebe makes particular reference to the cohort of university students at Ibadan and he mentions you quite specifically. So was that part of your network? SO: Were you in any way delegated to observe the discussions in Kampala between the warring sides which Arnold Smith tried to mediate?

EA: No, because from the word go, Arnold Smith said to me, and I agreed, that he would keep me completely out of the talks on Nigeria. This was to ensure that any suggestion by the Nigerian government that I was using my position to interfere would be unfounded. My trip to Biafra was the only intervention that I undertook with his knowledge.

I know you were very much part of a drive to provide Commonwealth technical assistance to Mozambique from for a variety of reasons. I was just wondering whether there had been any prior moves towards Nigeria? EA: No, not really. Nigerians did not ask for it, nor did Arnold Smith wish to impose that on them. The conclusion of the Biafran war was in ?

SO: In that crisis, Arnold Smith was one of the facilitators of international recognition of Bangladesh because of his acute concern of the humanitarian crisis of 4 million refugees in neighbouring India an echo of the earlier Biafran humanitarian disaster. SO: Again, was there a particular Commonwealth dimension to support nation-state construction in Bangladesh after independence?

EA: Oh yes. Arnold Smith was keen that Bangladesh should be recognised as a sovereign state and he sought to achieve that through the admission of Bangladesh to Commonwealth membership. That was why he sent me on a mission to West Africa. SO: And you write about that in your book, and your particular approach of ensuring that two of the Commonwealth members you visited were supportive while one would not object.

The one that would not object, of course, was Nigeria. EA: Oh yes, he talked to the Indians about what he was doing and Indians, having spent quite a fortune on the war, were not in a position to provide additional help. EA: India had helped the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, and I think it was William Shakespeare, who said that only the brave have the strength to bear the burden of gratitude.

SO: One of the Commonwealth crises which Arnold Smith was required to deal with, surely inwas the invasion of Cyprus, of course a Commonwealth member. And this is not looked at in terms of the Commonwealth dimension. EA: Well, to some extent, that is correct. Maybe I should have told part of the story in my book because I happened to be with Arnold Smith on a trip to Africa at the time.

We had had a meeting with Jomo Kenyatta at his Gatundu farm a couple of miles from Nairobi. I have never forgotten that meeting because it was the first time I realised how young Archbishop Markarios was seeing him without his customary head gear; my image of him had been that of an old man. EA: Yes, Arnold Smith talked with him and said what you would expect him to say in such circumstances.

EA: Yes, there was a committee of senior officials on Cyprus that were set up. Kipranu was then the president. To get there, the UN took me to a border post and then escorted me across to the Turkish side, where I was met by Denktash. Denktash having learned that I was a Nigerian, I think assumed that I was a Muslim, because he drove me himself.

We were just two of us in his car to show me parts of the Turkish occupied Cyprus. I was careful not to tell him bluntly that I was not a Muslim. To lend international diplomatic support to Archbishop Markarios? Was the Commonwealth Secretariat trying to coordinate humanitarian assistance going into Cyprus because of internally displaced people?

EA: It was absolute political support because the Commonwealth recognised only one Cyprus state. SO: Right, and was this in close collaboration with the British government? Did Britain have a particular responsibility? Were you coordinating with Malta? EA: We consulted closely with the British government, but without involving it in our own initiatives.

The British government, in my view, was cautious, a lot more cautious than the Commonwealth Secretariat was. So they were more cautious than we in the Commonwealth Secretariat who saw our duty as that of propping up the Cyprus government, a member of the Commonwealth. SO: Indeed. So this was supportive diplomacy? EA: Well, the Commonwealth Secretariat was not exactly popular with the Turkish Government, because the Turks had consistently written to the Secretary General asking to be allowed into Commonwealth meetings, claiming that Cyprus was a divided country and even asking to be allowed to come to Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting to present their case.

SO: And there would seem to be a determined refusal to allow a separatist entity of Cyprus to attend —. EA: Yes indeed, African liberation movements were liberation movements seeking to liberate their countries from colonialism or racism and the Commonwealth supported them. EA: That is a view that I would reject outright.

Chief emeka anyaoku biography of martin

In a divided society, that phraseology could possibly apply, but in an oppressed society, externally oppressed or internally oppressed by a racist minority, liberation struggle cannot and should not be described as terrorism. SO: So taking the Cyprus story forward: the Turkish occupied northern part is only recognised by a few members of the international community.

Was that a continuing issue during your time as Secretary General, the question of how to resolve the Cyprus issue, or were you effectively having to deal with the status quo? EA: Yes, in my time as Secretary General, I had a settled view that had long been established before my time, and that was that there was only one recognised government of Cyprus, hence we had a Heads of Government meeting in Cyprus.

Was he a face-to-face person? Was he a telephone person? Was he an emissary person? Arnold Smith was a seasoned diplomat, and as such, observed the constraints of diplomacy both in his pronouncements and in his dealings with Heads of Government. Sonny, on the other hand, had been a very outspoken politician, seasoned in Non-Aligned Movement diplomacy and so brought to his office some Non-Aligned perspectives which Arnold Smith was clearly not in a position to reflect.

There was no difference between the two in their commitment to the concept of one common humanity. Both were equally committed to the concept of one common humanity, which means that they were equally committed to non-racism, equally committed to ending colonialism, equally committed to removing all the obstacles in the way of common humanity.

But Sonny Ramphalcoming from the Third World and Non-Aligned Movementclearly demonstrated the adage that the wearer of the shoes knows where it pinches the most. SO: An excellent analogy! Sonny Ramphal was remarkable in his ability to use the policy space provided by his authority of office as Secretary General, but also the Commonwealth as an association.

It seems to me that Arnold Smith used the policy space in a different way, although he was equally determined to emphasise the autonomy and the authority of this new international servant. EA: Well, you see, the reason for that was that Arnold Smith built the Secretariat and established its independence. By the time Sonny came, there was no longer a challenge to the status of the Secretariat.

SO: You mentioned, that, yes! SO: As my last question before you see Professor Murphy for lunch: you made reference to the preparatory visits that you made, that Arnold Smith made, in the run up to Singapore. The signals that she had sent around suggested possible recognition by her government of Abel Muzorewa as leader of a government in Rhodesia.

That was what prompted us in the Secretariat, particularly Sonny, to see the danger ahead and to endeavour to try and defuse it before it exploded. We would have had people walking away saying we will no longer belong to this organisation. Such as the Nigerian head of state? SO: But there was a degree of, shall we say, encouragement of careful handling to give Thatcher the space to compromise?

EA: Yes of course. Obviously that was why the situation was handled first by setting up a committee, a working group of six Heads of Government in Lusaka to try and find a form of words to resolve the crisis. And the six worked with the Secretary-General to produce the formula that resolved the crisis. As I told you chief emeka anyaoku biography of martin they finished their meeting, Tony Duff, Mark Chona and I were asked to tidy up the statement they were going to make and produce it for consideration by the executive session the following day, which would be a Monday.

We did that, but unfortunately the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser that evening or late afternoon in a briefing that he thought was for only Australian media because of the time difference between Lusaka and Australia, briefed the media on the formula while unknown to him was the fact that there was among them a British-Australian journalist.

SO: Yes, you write of it very vividly in your book, and how you managed it at the barbeque, by the pre-emptive press statement. You talk of your contribution to the personal diplomacy in helping to coordinate particularly stern and outspoken African heads of state, but not just African. Did you have any awareness that in fact in Whitehall there had been an agreement before the Lusaka meeting that Britain had to host an all-party conference?

EA: Well, we had had signals and reports that the new Conservative party government was going that way.