Eastern Nigeria hurled scathing personal insults at the supreme military ruler of Nigeria Monday but still kept itself part of the nation, compounding the confusion in the Nigerian upheaval. Some outsiders had predicted that Eastern Nigeria would pick Monday to secede from Nigeria - the first anniversary of a massacre of eastern Ibo tribesmen in the North. Ibo resentment at the north is a root cause of the current crisis. But Lt. Col. C. O. Ojukwu, military governor of the east, confined himself to a verbal torrent against Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon, the head of the federal government, but Nigeria took no action to secede. Ojukwu, in his statement from Enugu, described Gowon's weekend declaration of a state of emergency as "dishonest, cowardly, and farcical." Gowon, when he issued his proclamation, also divided the four regions of Nigeria into 12 states. The east was divided into three...

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