By MICHELE ALPERIN Special Writer
Posted: Thursday, October 23, 2008 6:01 PM EDT
Robert P. Criso of Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski
By
July 1967, however, Bob Criso found himself huddled in his house with two
fellow Peace Corps volunteers, awaiting evacuation orders as a mob gathered
outside.
Mr.
Criso and his colleagues did make it out, barely. “The able- bodied men
eventually fled from certain death and the women from rape,” he says. He
assumes that his students, of conscription age, were probably all killed during
the war.
Mr.
Criso has always wanted to return to the village but was told it was too
dangerous. So when he heard about a trip with armed guards, organized through a
group of former volunteers, he signed up, then added an escorted side trip to
Ishiagu. Through his November trip Mr. Criso hopes to reclaim and confront the
tragedy he lived through.
The
civil war that engulfed Nigeria was also a tribal conflict between the Hausa in
the north and the Igbo in the east, where Mr. Criso lived. A democratic
government had been installed after independence in 1960, but it was soon
followed by a series of military and tribal coups.
After
an Igbo coup, riots broke out in northern Nigeria, and stories filtered back to
Ishiagu of Igbos being hacked to death. Refugees flooded back, creating a
panic. “People returned with horrific stories,” says Mr. Criso. “We never knew
what to believe. Even with shortwave radios and newspapers, we never knew what
was reliably the truth.”
Even
after the Hausa students in his school had to be secreted out in the middle of
the night, Mr. Criso did not follow up on the Peace Corps’ offer to leave. “I
stayed because I was happy and felt no immediate threat,” he says. In case of
emergency, though, the Peace Corps gave him a van, with instructions to pick up
five other volunteers if the situation deteriorated.
Biafra seceded from
Nigeria on May 1, 1967, and soon the reality of war hit Mr. Criso’s idyllic
village. Two jeeps filled with Biafran soldiers pulled up to his school,
announcing that it was closed and would be used as barracks and ordering
students to return to their villages within 24 hours. Even the stalwart Mr.
Criso was worried and, having heard nothing from the Peace Corps, decided on
his own to pick up volunteers living in nearby Afikpo. As soon as he hit a
paved road, Mr. Criso noticed that all signs had been removed, in fear of an
invasion, he assumed. At numerous roadblocks he faced distrust and paranoia
from local militia armed with machetes or clubs made from tree branches. “They
had heard rumors of whites serving the federal government as mercenaries and of
white spies posing as missionaries,” says Mr. Criso. Mr. Criso and his fellow volunteers, Tom and
Karen, made it back to his house, but soon a menacing crowd gathered. After Mr.
Criso refused to let people search his house, the three Peace Corps volunteers
watched as two men rolled a 50-pound, rusted blue drum filled with kerosene and
left it directly under Mr. Criso’s wooden house.
Karen
became hysterical: “Bob, they’re going to kill us.” Tom was shaking, unable to
move. Mr. Criso himself was envisioning a headline in his hometown paper, the
Staten Island Advance: “Peace Corps Volunteer Killed in
Luckily
a confluence of two events quieted things down. First a village elder got up on
a tree stump, addressed the crowd, and vouched for Mr. Criso, citing his
contributions to the community. At the same time, what had been a light rain
became a downpour, and for whatever reason, the crowd thinned out.
That
evening three of Mr. Criso’s fellow teachers stopped by to apologize for the
mob’s hysteria, and they agreed to transport Tom and Karen to a train station
so they could apprise the Peace Corps of their predicament. Mr. Criso decided
to stay. “I felt responsible with the van and other people needing to be picked
up,” he recalls. “I didn’t know if it was safer to leave or stay.”
Mr.
Criso remained alone for another day — even the houseboy had taken off — until
two military jeeps arrived, carrying Biafran soldiers and Barbara, the Peace
Corps nurse. She quickly instructed him: “Let’s go — no packing. We have to
pick up Dave. Everyone else is gone. There’s an Italian mail boat waiting at
the coast to evacuate us.”
Getting
to the coast, even under the protection of Biafran officers, was not easy. At
one roadblock they were asked, “How do we know you’re not imposters?” At others
the militia refused to let them pass, and Mr. Criso had to drive around the
roadblocks, once under fire.
They
did manage to pick up Dave and make it to the coast. “The boat was for any
foreign nationals left in the country,” says Mr. Criso. “It was the last boat
out of hell.”
Mr.
Criso finished his Peace Corps commitment in
In
the early years he communicated with Karen and Barbara in hopes of confirming
his own terrible memories, only to find they had seemingly repressed the worst
moments. His experience was later validated, however, by the Peace Corps
director who had been told of their ordeal.
For
Mr. Criso, confronting the reality of those years remains important, and that is
what fueled his upcoming trip.
“I’ve been waiting to
go back,” he says. “After the trauma passes, you begin to introspect. I
couldn’t believe that it had happened, and I wanted to go back, see the school,
my house, what it looked like now, and to see if anyone remembers me or
remembers the story.”