Nigerian Civil War and Biafra
Biafra's famine is the first beamed into living rooms worldwide
On 30 May 1967 Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the independence of the Igbo-majority Republic of Biafra. Federal forces blockaded it and a terrible famine set in. By various estimates 500,000 to 2 million civilians died, mostly of starvation. Images of dying children shocked the world, and doctors who served in Biafra later founded Médecins Sans Frontières.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1945 Founding of the United Nations — 22 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 20 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 19 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 18 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 13 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 14 years earlier
- 1961 Berlin Wall built — 6 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 1 year later
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 22 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 22 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 22 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 10 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 6 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 18 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 22 years later
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 19 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 12 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 13 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 23 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 22 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 14 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 3 years earlier
- 1970 Bhola cyclone — 3 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 8 years later
Americas
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 5 years earlier
- 1969 Moon landing — 2 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 3 years later
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 6 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 16 years later
Oceania
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 25 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 13 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 8 years earlier
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 25 years later
Alive at the time
- Pablo Picasso (aged 86)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 78)
- Mao Zedong (aged 74)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 49)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 38)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 37)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 33)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 83)
- Ho Chi Minh (aged 77)
- Dwight D. Eisenhower (aged 77)