Pensions paid to Nigerian rebels

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Soldiers who fought for a breakaway state during Nigeria's civil war have been given their pensions 40 years after the end of the conflict.

Former Biafran separatist leader Emeka Ojukwu was among those receiving the payments for retired soldiers at a ceremony in the capital, Abuja.

The government said the inclusion of 63 pardoned rebels in the payments showed the country had healed itself.

The eastern region tried to secede in 1967, sparking a bloody three-year war.

Some one million people died in the conflict, mostly from hunger and disease.

"Government has decided to fully integrate our compatriots who fought on the other side of the unfortunate incidence of our civil war, it is the culmination of the healing process that started the very moment the war ended," said Defence Minister Mahmud Yayale Ahmed.

Mr Ojukwu, 74, was pardoned in 1980.

"All I asked in ending the civil war is that everyone live up to the pregnant expectations of the saying that there was no victor and no vanquished," he said at the ceremony.

Payment of all military pensions has been delayed for years.

A squatters camp of retired soldiers, some of them gravely ill, had sprung up in Abuja, and pensioners last year twice blocked roads into the capital with flaming tyres to demand payment.

Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the start of the Biafran war, Emeka Ojukwu told the BBC that the Igbo community, who live in south-east Nigeria, were still marginalised.