The brutality of nations.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.

The Brutality of Nations.

Dan Jacobs. Knopf, $22.95. In this era of instant history, when one calamity erases the memory of another and tragedies like the Ethiopian famine are already being forgotten, it would seem quixotic to write about the famine in Biafra, which occurred almost 20 years ago. Yet this is relevant. The same malevolent forces that prevented food from reaching the children of Biafra in 1969 were also at work preventing food from reaching the children of northern Ethiopia in 1984. And from what we know so far, the record in Mozambique will be no different.

Jacobs, a speechwriter, political analyst, and United Nations consultant, has a liberal's sense of moral outrage but, thankfully, doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve. He knows that individual men are rarely evil, but when they are part of a bureaucratic framework, they often end up doing evil things. The bad guys in this book are precisely the ones who are most loyal to the narrowly defined needs of the institutions they served be it the U.N., the State Department, the British Foreign Office, the Canadian government, or the International Committee of the Red Cross. The good guys are often those with the least amount of institutional loyalty. That's why, according to this insider's story--Jacobs was a U.N. press officer at the time of the Biafra crisis--men like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger come out of this whole affair looking much better than such lofty personalities as U Thant, Pierre Trudeau, Harold Wilson, and Elliot Richardson.

All these institutions had a vested interest in good relations with Nigeria, a nation that was on the brink of an oil bonanza promising jobs and contracts for many western companies, particularly British ones, with colonial links to draw on. Diplomatically, too, Nigeria was a big fish; the most populous nation in Black Africa and a power in the then-emerging Third World majority at the U.N. On the other hand, Biafra, the break-away province of Nigeria's industrious Ibo tribe, had no such leverage. It had no U.N. lobby. It wasn't even a member of the U.N. It had few friends among the area experts at the State Department and Whitehall. So when Nigeria employed starvation as a weapon of war, the international community --as represented by these institutions --basically collaborated. The British Labor government even pumped arms into Lagos, rationalizing that a quick Nigerian victory would be followed by an opening of the air and land routes...