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Is Nigeria The Next Persian Gulf?

By Andy Rowell, AlterNet
Posted on November 10, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/27997/

Visit www.remembersarowiwa.com

This week there will be ceremonies in over 30
countries from India to Ireland, Pakistan to
Bangladesh, from the UK to the US in memory of the
activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his compatriots
who were executed by the Nigerian military 10 years
ago.

On November 10, 1995, Saro-Wiwa and the others were
hung after a sham trial condemned as "judicial murder"
by Britain's then Prime Minister John Major. Their
real crime had been to take on the might of the oil
giant Shell and one of the world's most brutal
military dictatorships.

Saro-Wiwa and the others were from Ogoniland, a small
densely populated region of the Niger Delta, where
Shell had found oil in the '50s. While the company had
grown rich from the profits extracted from the Delta,
the communities lived in poverty, lacking basic
facilities such as health care and clean water. In the
early '90s, Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni mobilized, holding
a rally in January 1993, where some 300,000 Ogoni
protested against Shell.

"The march is against the devastation of the
environment," said Saro-Wiwa. "It is against the
non-payment of royalties. It is anti-Shell. It is
anti-federal government, because as far as we are
concerned the two are in league to destroy the Ogoni
people."

Views like these set him and the Ogoni on a collision
course with the authorities that would lead to his
repeated detention, torture and murder.

In the 10 years since their deaths, little has changed
in the Niger Delta. Oil remains its curse. The
communities are still locked into a cycle of extreme
poverty, widespread unemployment, environmental
pollution, and social injustice that has increasingly
manifested itself in violent conflict.

The spiral of violence has intensified in the last few
years with the "bunkering" or siphoning of oil from
pipelines, which is then sold onto the black market.
This generates vast sums of cash with which rival
groups have been able to buy arms. When one of those
involved, Alhaji Dobuko Asari, leader of the Niger
Delta People's Volunteer Force, threatened all-out war
in September 2004, the international oil price
rocketed to $50 per barrel for the first time.
Although a peace deal was signed, Asari was later
arrested and charged with five counts of treason last
month. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The oil-fueled violence continues. Just last week,
Amnesty International issued another damning report.
"Today, the exploitation of oil in the Niger Delta
continues to result in injustice, violence and
deprivation" it concluded. Amnesty highlighted how in
February this year, soldiers from the Nigerian
military fired on protesters at Chevron's Escravos oil
terminal. One demonstrator was shot and later died
from his injuries, and at least 30 others were
injured.

"It is like paradise and hell. They have everything.
We have nothing" argues Eghare Ojhogar, the chief of
the local community. "If we protest, they send
soldiers. They sign agreements with us and then ignore
us."

That same month, February, at least 17 people were
reported to have been killed and two women raped when
the military raided the community of Odioma in Bayelsa
State in gunboats. Although the military had been
ostensibly sent to arrest members of an armed
vigilante group, the roots of the violence lay in a
dispute between communities over control of land
planned for oil exploration by Shell Nigeria. Oil
remains at the heart of the conflict. Oil is the
conflict of the Delta.

But another dangerous ingredient is being added to the
tinderbox of the Niger Delta. It is the gas-guzzling
requirements of the United States and its unstoppable
thirst for oil and gas. Within the next few years some
25-30 percent of American oil will come from Africa,
primarily West Africa and Nigeria.

While the U.S.'s response to 9/11 has been to wage
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the banner of
protecting national security, the U.S. has also sought
new ways of protecting economic security. This means
protecting energy diversity, and getting your oil from
as many places as possible, especially outside of the
troublesome Persian Gulf. America now sees Nigeria and
the other countries in the Gulf of Guinea as the "Next
Gulf" -- a counterweight to the Middle East.
Increasingly Nigeria will play a strategic role in
America's energy needs, whether the communities of the
Delta want it or not.

There have been repeated calls from a variety of
influential right-wing and neo-conservative
think-tanks in Washington to declare the Gulf of
Guinea an area of "vital interest" to the U.S., which
needs to be protected by American military might.
Among those calling for greater U.S. intervention are
the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise
Institute and Center for Strategic and International
Studies.

In July this year, CSIS recommended that the U.S.
should "make security and governance in the Gulf of
Guinea an explicit priority in U.S. foreign policy."
To this end, it recommended a "special assistant to
the President and Secretary of State to coordinate
U.S. policy in the region." It also recommended that
the Gulf of Guinea should become a regular item on the
agenda at G8 meetings.

"EUCOM can play a leading role in regional
stabilization," David Goldwyn from CSIS's Energy
Program says, "and their British and French
equivalents can help too." Britain and the U.S.
already have a close working relationship called the
UK-US Energy Dialogue where they have agreed to
cooperate on "promoting the security and diversity of
future international energy supplies." This includes
Nigeria.

America is becoming more dependent on Nigeria as every
day passes; not just for oil but for imported natural
gas. The country's vast gas reserves are just
beginning to be developed after decades of being
flared; a process that caused huge ecological and
social problems. As U.S. imports of imported natural
gas rocket, Nigeria will become a key supplier.
Chevron calls Nigerian gas "very, very important for
the U.S.," offering "powerful reasons to strengthen
U.S. relationships with Africa."

These strategic reserves need to be protected. Over
the last few years, EUCOM, the U.S. European Command
has become increasingly interested in Africa, both
from an energy and terrorism perspective. Earlier this
year in June, General Wald from EUCOM spoke at a major
oil and gas conference in London on "measures to
protect oil operations in the Gulf of Guinea." Three
months later Wald's boss, General Jones, the head of
EUCOM, told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee that
because 25 percent of America's oil coming would
becoming from Africa within the next few years
"security cooperation is more important now than
ever."

Slowly but surely America is intensifying its military
operations on the continent. Last month, Pentagon
officials secured agreements with eight to 10 African
nations to allow the U.S. military to utilize air
fields and other suitable sites to establish
"cooperative security locations," from which it can
launch military strikes.

America is also quietly increasing its military
presence in Nigeria -- indeed one of the people killed
in the recent plane crash near Lagos was a U.S. Army
officer assigned to EUCOM and stationed in Nigeria to
provide security assistance between the U.S. and
Nigerian military. One manifestation of this
cooperation is the emergence of American weapons in
the Delta. "There is clearly an increase in U.S.
weapons in the hands of the Nigerian army and navy,"
argues Patrick Naagbanton, Director of the Niger Delta
Project for Environment, Human Rights and Development.

Many in the Niger Delta worry about increasing
American military intervention. What is best for
American energy security is not best for the millions
of people who live in the Delta. It can only heighten
tensions and in all probability lead to more violent
conflict.

Ledum Mitee is the current President of MOSOP -- the
Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, the
organization that Saro-Wiwa once led. He was
imprisoned along with Saro-Wiwa, but later freed. "The
American policies that have had a doubtful effect in
the Middle East, have therefore focused their
attention around the Gulf of Guinea," he says. "It is
not people-centered. It is just barrel-centered. It
could become so bad that in five year's time it will
be very difficult to get a barrel of oil without a
life."

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Andy Rowell is co-author with James Marriott and Lorne
Stockman of "The Next Gulf: London, Washington and Oil
Conflict in Nigeria," published this week by
Constable. For more on events, visit
www.remembersarowiwa.com

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© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/27997/



Aggo Akyea
http://www.tribalpages.com/tribes/akyea

"Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets,
I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau – 1854

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