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Andrew Maykuth Online
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A gas flare at an oil well in the Niger Delta. |
Chief Thompson Pabiri was not alarmed
when the helicopter whirred into sight, hovering over his village of Opia.
It was not unusual to see choppers in the Niger
delta, where numberless braids of the river meander through roadless swamps.
This chopper, like many that regularly buzzed over Opia , belonged to a
contractor working for Chevron Nigeria Ltd., one of the international
petroleum companies working in the oil-rich delta. Chevron had just finished
drilling three wells in the swamp adjoining Opia .
The surprise came when Nigerian soldiers poked their
rifles from the chopper's open door, a few feet above the palm trees that
shield the village. They began firing into Opia 's reed-and-thatch huts. As
panicked villagers fled into the surrounding swamp, two boats belonging to a
different Chevron contractor landed. Soldiers jumped out, set off smoke
grenades and began shooting.
"I heard somebody yell out the order to
kill," Pabiri recalled later, speaking in the language of his people,
the Ijaws.
The soldiers set fire to Opia 's two dozen huts and
communal buildings and destroyed most of the village's canoes and fishing
nets. They sank Opia 's motorboat, the only means the villagers had to travel
to the provincial capital, several hours away through a labyrinth of
reptile-infested creeks.
The soldiers then traveled a few miles down river
and burned Ikenyan, a place where villagers walk on plank paths between huts
to keep from sinking into the waterlogged soil. Ikenyan is a sister village
to Opia , and its people are members of the same clan.
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Bonny Terminal, Niger Delta. |
By the end of that day last
January, four people lay dead in the two villages, including an aged Ikenyan
chief. About 50 were missing. Some, like a woman and her five children who
had the misfortune to land their canoe at Ikenyan when the soldiers struck,
are presumed dead.
A few weeks later, community
activists accompanied me and a photographer to the villages, where new huts
were being built. Pabiri, wearing a skirt and carrying a wooden staff,
exchanged drinks with the visitors, as is the tradition. He splashed some gin
on the soil to invoke the blessings of the spirits, saving most of the liquor
for himself and the other village leaders.
Pabiri, a tall man in his
50s whose stained front teeth are sharpened to points, said the Jan. 4 attack
was a mystery.
"We have no trouble
with anybody," he said. "We have no trouble with any company."
After a few more rounds of
drinks, however, it became clear his people have serious problems with
Chevron.
Chevron contractors had come
to Opia to install three wells to tap into a reservoir of oil two miles
beneath the delta. A dredge excavated a lagoon next to the village, where
drillers built platforms for the wells, and the mounding soil created a
landslide of mud that pushed against the walls of Opia 's huts.
The drillers paid the
village about $1,000 for the inconvenience, but the villagers had demanded
more. Meeting with oil company representatives, they said, they asked for
jobs, schools and development projects. The oilmen said they'd get back with
a response.
The attack occurred about a
week later.
"They just wanted to
move us out of this place and be free to do what they want with the
land," said Godspower Sinwah, an Opia chief. "That's the reason
they attacked us."
If only it were so simple.
Nothing in Nigeria is ever as simple as people make it out to be. If only it
were.
In fact, the attack on Opia
- like so much of the turmoil in the delta - seems to have been spawned not
only by oil, but by government corruption, corporate greed and intricate
tribal rivalries. Oil has only raised the stakes to an international level.
An ocean away lies another
village, another river. Where the Schuylkill joins the Delaware, scores of
oil tanks march across the landscape at Sunoco's sprawling refinery. Complex
webs of pipes lattice the acres of the waterfront, and the aroma of petroleum
mingles with the traffic fumes from the Schuylkill Expressway.
This is where Nigeria meets
Philadelphia.
Nigeria is the world's
sixth-largest oil producer. Its sweet, low-sulfur crude is the largest single
source of petroleum for Philadelphia refineries. Nigerian crude makes up more
than 40 percent of the feedstock at Sunoco's refineries in Philadelphia and
Marcus Hook. The Sunoco refineries buy one of every 10 barrels that Nigeria
produces. The Coastal Eagle Point refinery in Westville, N.J., and the Tosco
Corp. refinery in Marcus Hook also buy Nigerian crude.
Sunoco and the other
refiners transform Nigerian crude into the gasoline for American cars, jet
fuel for American planes, and heating oil for American homes.
The oil is pumped out of
Nigeria 's swamps into giant tankers that hold a million barrels each -
enough to supply Philadelphia's five refineries for one day. The supertankers
are so huge they must unload part of their cargo into smaller vessels in
Delaware Bay so they can float high enough to clear the Delaware River
channel and dock outside the refineries without running aground.
From 1,500 wells in the
Niger delta, Nigeria sent $9 billion worth of crude oil last year to
Philadelphia and the rest of the world. But very little of that money finds
its way back to the delta.
In the marshes of the Niger
delta, a rebellion is brewing.Amid sweltering swamps of mangrove and palm,
young men armed with fast boats, hot rhetoric, old weapons and an ancient
warrior tradition have taken on the government of Africa's most populous
nation.
Angered by decades of
exploitation, the rebels have launched a war of sabotage. They have kidnapped
foreign workers, commandeered oil installations and blocked pipelines in an
attempt to force the oil companies and the government to return more of
Nigeria 's wealth to its source.
They have also channeled the
rage against Big Oil into long-standing tribal feuds. Much of the fighting
and violence in the delta is rooted in the ethnic divisions that predate
petroleum exploration.
The uprising has reduced
Nigeria 's 2-million-barrels-per-day production by as much as a third. And it
demonstrates the strife that could lie ahead for the country's new civilian
government under President Olusegun Obasanjo, who took power on May 29,
ending 15 years of repressive and greedy military rule.
As the delta goes, so goes
Nigeria , the nation that could be Africa's economic engine. Violence could
move beyond the delta and even threaten Obasanjo's new government.
Nigeria 's delta contains 10
million people. Like the nation as a whole, they are divided into many ethnic
groups and tribes and further split by language, religion and historical
grievances as subtle as the facial scars that define clan membership. Oil and
oil money have only exacerbated the disharmony.
Since 1956, when oil was
found, four years before the British colony became independent, petrodollars
amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars have paid for modern highways
and high-rises in Lagos, the sprawling financial capital, as well as an
entirely new capital, Abuja, in the center of the country.
But even so, Nigeria is
among the poorest third of African countries - its per capita income has
fallen from a high of nearly $1,000 in the 1970s to $260 a year, about half
that of the average African nation. Delta villages are largely without
schools, clinics, electricity or roads. Most residents drink directly from
the Niger, which also serves as their toilet.
The government's few feeble
attempts to develop the delta have generated more graft than finished
projects. The area is littered with mildew-covered shells of schools and
clinics that were never completed.
The decline in oil prices
since 1980 has exacted a steep toll. Petroleum still accounts for 40 percent
of Nigeria 's gross domestic product. But oil income amounts to only a third
of the $25 billion it generated two decades ago.
And Nigeria has little to
fall back on. It has neglected its traditional economic sectors, such as
agriculture, and accumulated a huge foreign debt. Because more money can be
made by importing fuel and selling it on the black market, Nigeria 's four
refineries have fallen into disrepair. It is practically impossible to find a
gallon of gas in a region that rests atop 22 billion barrels of oil.
In the early days of the oil
business in Nigeria , the government and the oil companies were under little
pressure to develop the communities where they worked.
The result is starkly
evident in the village of Oloibiri, a five-hour drive down a muddy dirt lane
from the nearest paved road. Even a short rain makes the lane impassable. It
was in Oloibiri that the first oil was struck in 1956. The only evidence of
the momentous event is a rusted and faded sign on idle wellhead No. 1. The well
stopped producing in 1976.
"This was the first oil
well in West Africa, but there is nothing here," said Moses Damini, a
passing bicyclist. He was born the year oil was found. "There is no
road, no education. Nothing. That's why we're suffering."
Frustrated with the Nigerian
government, community activists have turned their attention to the oil
companies they view as the government's agents.
"Trickle-down hasn't
worked," said Bronwen Manby, a researcher for Human Rights Watch and the
author of a recent report on repression in the Niger delta. "The youth
are saying it's time for direct action."
In one of the most
significant instances, a delta tribe of about 500,000 people called the Ogoni
organized to protest the practices of Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Cos., which
has the largest oil operations in Nigeria . The Movement for the Survival of
the Ogoni People (MOSOP) demanded a share of royalties, a halt to oil spills
and political autonomy. Shell suspended its operations in Ogoni territory in
1993.
In response to the protests,
the government of Gen. Sani Abacha cracked down brutally: In 1995 playwright
and MOSOP founder Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed
on trumped-up murder charges. International uproar ensued, and many countries,
including the United States, imposed sanctions against Abacha's government.
The recent uprising of
ethnic Ijaws is perhaps even more ominous. The Ijaw area is the heart of the
oil region. After the notorious Abacha died last year, the militant Ijaw Youths
Council stepped up protests.
In December, the Ijaws
issued a proclamation claiming ownership of the oil still in the ground and
insisted the oil companies leave the delta by the end of the 1998.
Nigeria 's outgoing military
government was in no mood to negotiate. It dispatched more than 10,000
soldiers and police to the region. Security forces killed dozens of
protesters in December and early this year. The mysterious attacks on the
villages of Opia and Ikenyan occurred at that time.
Now, fighting between
Itsekiri and Ijaw tribes has accelerated. Arms are flowing into the region,
and there have been frequent bloody clashes, deaths numbering in the
hundreds, razed homes and a shoot-on-sight curfew imposed by the government.
Angry young Ijaws have revived the mystical cult of Egbesu, the god of war.
Warriors wear charms that they believe make them impervious to bullets.
"Armed struggle is a
difficult choice to make," said Oronto Douglas, the 32-year-old
spokesman for Ijaw Youths Council, whose office in the city of Port Harcourt
is adorned with posters commemorating Saro-Wiwa and Martin Luther King Jr.
"It is the oppressor who determines which method the people use to
defend themselves."
Since independence, Nigeria
's army has stepped in repeatedly to govern a nation that is more a
confederation of rival tribes than a unified state.
And many people think that
the country's ruling interests arranged February's election of President
Obasanjo, a former military ruler and political prisoner, as a comfortable
way to shift to civilian rule. Now Obasanjo must balance the interests of
Nigeria 's rival ethnic groups. It's the same problem facing many African
rulers who govern nations whose borders were created by colonial powers
without regard for tribal boundaries.
Nigeria has about 250
different tribes and ethnic groups competing for resources. Some rivalries
date back hundreds of years, to a time when victorious tribes sold their
prisoners to American and European slave traders.
The British governed Nigeria
as separate regions, each controlled by a dominant ethnic group: the
Hausa-Fulani, the Muslim tribes from the north; the predominantly Christian
Yoruba in the southwest; and in the east, the Ibo, whose domain includes part
of the Niger delta.
Tribal rivalries have played
themselves out continuously since independence. In 1967, the Ibo declared
themselves the independent Republic of Biafra. It took the Nigerian
government three years to put down the Biafrans, and more than a million
died, mostly from starvation.
That civil war set the stage
for the current struggle by concentrating more power in the hands of the
federal government. The federal government claimed ownership of all the oil
in the ground, and agreed to share a percentage of the income with the states
and local governments. With each successive military dictatorship, a greater
percentage disappeared into the hands of the larger northern tribes - those
controlling the military government.
"All the money has been
seized by the national government and used to develop the north," said
Mofia T. Akobo, a former oil minister who lives in Port Harcourt.
There are echoes in today's
uprising of a rebellion a century ago, when the Royal Niger Co. came to
establish palm oil plantations. Nigerians in 1895 rebelled, demanding more in
return than the bowler hats the British traders handed out.
"Whatever is happening
now has happened before," said Douglas, the Ijaw Youth Council
spokesman, who studied law in England under a British scholarship. "It's
the same issue - corporate dominance, military dictatorship. Then it was palm
oil. Now it's crude oil."
Shell was the first and
remains the dominant oil company in Nigeria , and many Nigerians use the term
Shell generically for all the oil companies. Concessions are also controlled
by Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Agip of Italy and Elf-Aquitaine, the French
national oil company.
The oil companies initially
shared profits 50-50 with the government. In the 1970s, the Nigerians forced
the oil companies into partnership with the Nigerian National Petroleum
Corp., the state-owned oil company. The state oil company owns between 55 and
60 percent of the joint ventures. After the international oil companies pay
taxes on their share of the profits, the Nigerian government ends up with
about 85 percent of oil revenue.
The oil companies, though
they are minority partners, control day-to-day operations. They are deemed
responsible for oil spills, for the boats that cut fishing lines and the salt
water that infiltrates freshwater streams when dredges dig canals across the
delta.
It costs little to extract a
barrel of oil from the Niger delta largely because there are few
environmental laws - or few that are enforced. The oil companies don't bury
many pipelines; they simply lay them across the earth's surface. When they
install a pipeline, the oil companies have to compensate the residents only
for that season's lost crops.
When an oil spill occurs,
the oil companies decide how much compensation is due - there is no independent
compensatory agency.
As discontent grew in the
delta, especially in the 1990s, the oil companies attempted to buy peace by
paying off local leaders. Some chiefs now have nice houses in the cities,
where they govern the villages from a distance.
"It was like bribe
money," said Akobo, the former oil minister. "They just gave it
hoping they could control the youths."
The oil companies say there
is nothing wrong with this. "You want to work in a local community, you
look for a central authority to deal with," said Shell spokesman Bobo
Brown, an Ijaw.
Many young people, however,
had a different agenda: They began challenging the authority of the tribal
leaders. Community organizations emerged, demanding attention. Militant
youths sabotaged pipelines to create oil spills. Then the oil companies
stopped paying for damage that sabotage had caused, which led to more
disputes.
The petroleum companies say
they are caught between warring tribes and a government that has so
mismanaged its fortunes that it owes the oil partnerships $1.6 billion for
its share of the cost of extracting the crude.
Shell complained about the
growth of a "compensation culture syndrome." The oil business was
seen "as a way of making easy money," Brown said.
Yet the oil companies are
not neutral players. They encouraged the government to protect their
interests by making reprisals against protesters, and Shell once even
acquired weapons for government security forces. But as international
pressure mounted on the companies to distance themselves from the harsh
government, Big Oil hired professional public relations officers like Brown,
who began talking about "building relationships."
Brown acknowledges "the
wealth is not going back to the delta the way it should, given the impact of
the industry."
The oil companies now watch
environmental damage more closely and are putting more money into community
outreach programs. Shell is organizing development projects to bring roads,
electricity and communications into villages. It spent $36 million last year
on such projects.
But Brown said the oil
companies cannot take on responsibilities best left to the government. So, he
said, Shell is quietly putting pressure on the Nigerian government to address
the region's political problems. "We're doing it," he said,
"but it's not something you talk about with the media."
Shell's attempts to do
things right sometimes go wrong. Communities that receive few benefits
begrudge those that get more. Sometimes the animosities cleave single
communities.
Take the town of Nembe.
Nembe has perhaps 10,000 people - all Ijaws - and is two hours from the rest
of the world by speedboat. Nembe is divided by a 40-foot-wide creek. One side
of town, populated by a clan called the Ogbolomabiri, has four Shell
installations. Its residents have forged a close relationship with the oil
company.
The other side of town, home
to the Bassambiri clan, has only one oil facility and believes it has been
slighted by its neighbors and by Shell.
Fighting broke out two years
ago over local government issues. The fracas became ugly - 15 people died -
and now nobody crosses the pedestrian bridge that joins the two sides of
town. The Ogbolomabiri cut off the power going to the other side of town, so
Shell gave the Bassambiri a diesel generator. Not even sick and dead
Bassambiri are welcome in the other side of Nembe, so the Bassambiri had to
build their own clinic and mortuary.
It's hard for Shell, or any
company, to work in such an environment. A Shell helicopter pilot once
mistakenly flew an Ogbolomabiri chief and his wife to the Bassambiri side of
town. A angry mob chased the royal couple back into the helicopter. Shell had
to apologize profusely.
Walter Numomikari, 32, a
Bassambiri political leader, has participated in protests at Shell
facilities; he has a deep scar in his thigh from a police bullet. Some days,
he gets so angry he is tempted to go to the flow station near Nembe and shut
it down.
"If you go out there
and turn a valve, you could shut down the whole Shell operation," he
said.
He knows that such an act
would provoke a fight with the military, not to mention the Ogbolomabiri, who
work as guards at several Shell flow stations.
Some activists like
Numomikari say the oil companies deliberately inflame tribal divisions to prevent
the delta clans from uniting against Big Oil. That's ridiculous, say the oil
companies; it is not in their business interests to create chaos.
"The situation is more
complicated than a simple case of divide and rule," said Brown, the
Shell spokesman. "What we are seeing is interethnic competition arising
from diminished opportunities and resources."
There was not much to the
fishing village of Opia even before the soldiers came in Chevron's
helicopters and destroyed it.
Opia now looks more like a camp.
New houses are being framed from poles, and most people sleep at night on the
ground under makeshift huts. Catfish are smoked on twigs above a smoldering
fire. Smoked fish heads lie discarded on the ground, among bits of plastic
litter and fishing apparatus.
The arrival of the
photographer and me a few weeks after the attack provided the town's leaders
an opportunity to communicate their message. As Chief Thompson Pabiri spilled
gin on the soil and called to the spirits, Godwin Miebi, a teacher and community
activist, busily scratched out a poster for the demonstration the community
planned.
He held up the poster as the
villagers lined up behind him for a photo opportunity: "Criminal
destruction of Opia and Ikenyan village communities by Chevron's military
agents. Save Our Souls."
There is much disagreement
about what happened in Opia in early January - who provoked the attack,
whether the villagers had weapons. But one undisputed casualty was Chevron's
public image.
It did not take long for
news of Chevron's involvement to reach the network of international
activists. In February, Human Rights Watch, the international monitoring
group, denounced the use of the Chevron-contracted helicopter and boats in
the attack. "The oil companies can't pretend they don't know what's
happening all around them," said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of
the organization.
A few weeks later,
environmental activists in San Francisco pelted Chevron chief executive
Kenneth Derr with pies.
Chevron officials, irritated
by the wave of bad publicity, did not deny that the Nigerian military used
Chevron-leased equipment in the attack. (Shell no longer lends its
helicopters for military operations, to avoid being associated with
human-rights violations).
But Chevron said there was
more to the story. It argued that the military assault was a counterattack
for a confrontation between armed local youths and soldiers posted to the
drilling rig that had installed the wells next to Opia .
According to Chevron, the
area around Opia was seething with angry youths in December, when the Ijaw
Youth Council had demanded the oil companies vacate the delta. On Dec. 30,
armed youths took 17 oil employees hostage as they departed the rig near Opia
, Chevron said.
Four days later, Chevron
said, youths approached soldiers guarding the drilling rig and attempted to
extort money by threatening to vandalize the rig. The next day, on the
morning of Jan. 4, some youths returned and fired at the soldiers. The
soldiers called in reinforcements from a support group in a nearby town.
"We understand that it
was this support group's counterattack that led to the incidents at Opia and
Ikenyan," Chevron said in a statement.
The villagers deny any
confrontation took place.
Yet conversation with the
Ijaws over several days suggests another aspect to the situation. For as long
as anyone can remember, the villagers say, they have been fighting over land
and fishing rights with a smaller ethnic group, the Itsekiri. The Itsekiri moved
into the delta several hundred years ago, which makes them recent arrivals to
the Ijaw.
The Itsekiri are known as a
more politically shrewd tribe. Their chiefs are said to offer their daughters
as wives to powerful leaders of other tribes, insinuating the Itsekiri into
royal houses.
Three years ago the Itsekiri
persuaded the national government to move the local governmental seat from an
Ijaw community to one of their own, and with it went a great deal of
patronage. The move outraged the Ijaws. The two groups have been exchanging
revenge attacks ever since.
Last October, Ijaw warriors
raided an Itsekiri market in the provincial capital, Warri. The warriors
gunned down 30 people, burned homes and sacked a police station.
A few days later, 35 Ijaws died
in an a counterattack on one of their towns.
On Jan. 4, 1998, a year to
the day before the soldiers came and burned Opia , Itsekiri commandos raided
and incinerated Opia .
"As men, we could not
let such an act go unanswered," said Anthony Lawuru, an Opia official.
"Let's just say one or
two Itsekiri villages disappeared," said Benson Edekou, Opia 's public
relations officer.
And so Opia 's leaders were
not entirely surprised when Nigerian soldiers attacked their communities on
Jan. 4 this year. And despite the Chevron helicopters, they have an idea who
was behind it. They say the Itsekiri masterminded the attack with their
allies in the army.
On June 5 militant Ijaw
youths attacked Arunton, a predominantly Itsekiri village, and two days later
they attacked again. At least 200 people were killed. Homes and schools were
burned. Soldiers were sent to the area, and security was tightened. The price
of bread tripled.
Since the attack in Opia ,
villagers say soldiers occasionally pass in speedboats, firing their rifles
over the village with menace. Young Ijaws ply the same waters, wearing white
headbands and raising their fists in signs of support to their tribesmen.
It is a story without an
end. The tales are as braided and intertwined as the Niger delta, where
creeks cut paths every which way, changing from freshwater to saltwater with
the tides.
Oronto Douglas, the activist
lawyer who heads the Ijaw Youth Council, sometimes wonders what might happen
if the youths' dream comes true and the oil companies pack up and pull out.
"If the oil companies
went away, the oil companies would lose and the government would lose,"
he said. "The only people who would be better off are the people who
actually live here."
Perhaps. But the ethnic
divisions that cleave the Niger delta may well persist long after the last
drop of oil is sucked out of the ground. Without petrodollars, there still
may not be peace. But without petrodollars, would the rest of the world
care?