Repression escalates as Shell returns to Ogoniland

By Norm Dixon

Sept. 9— The sheer quantity of rhetoric about promoting the noble ideals of democracy, human rights and government transparency notwithstanding, US President Bill Clinton’s three-day visit to Nigeria, which began on August 26, was all about strengthening Nigeria’s discredited military and boosting the capacity of Nigeria’s strategic export oil industry. That is bad news for the people of the Niger River delta.

The media posse that accompanied Clinton studiously avoided mention of the fact that his visit comes at a time when Nigeria’s military and police are escalating their attacks on the people who inhabit the oil-rich Niger delta in the south. The escalation coincides with Shell’s announcement that it intends to resume operations in Ogoniland in the Niger delta, home to the 500,000-strong Ogoni ethnic group.

Shell was forced to halt its activities in Ogoniland in 1993 following massive opposition led by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. The Nigerian military’s attempts to defeat the Ogoni people and allow the return of Shell led to the deaths of thousands of Ogoni. This culminated in the infamous hanging of MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine other Ogoni leaders in 1995.

Military dictator Olusegu Obasanjo was elected president of Nigeria in February 1999, ending the military’s rule, which had been almost continuous since independence. Before Obasanjo’s election, the Western media and his admirers in Washington made much of his “democratic” credentials, which rested on his 1979 decision to hand power to a civilian government and his 1995 imprisonment by dictator General Sani Abacha. Obasanjo’s own three-year reign as dictator was usually glossed over.

Obasanjo’s presidential campaign was openly supported and bankrolled by “retired” army generals, former dictators, wealthy businesspeople and prominent politicians. Nigeria’s ruling class is dominated by fabulously rich serving and retired military officers and their business cronies, mainly from the north, whose wealth has been accumulated from decades of corruption, kickbacks, and embezzlement of the country’s enormous oil revenue (worth $17 billion in 1999).

Washington

The US government has adopted Obasanjo as its man in West Africa. Since his election, US economic and military aid to Nigeria has topped US$170 million a year (up from $7 million), the largest amount given to any country in sub-Saharan Africa by a wide margin.

During his brief visit to Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, Clinton declared Nigeria “a pivot point on which all Africa’s future turns.” Reflecting Washington’s anointment of Nigeria as imperialism’s regional cop, Clinton’s visit was preceded by an announcement that up to 200 US military advisors would be deployed to train and equip five Nigerian army battalions for “peacekeeping” duties in the region. The value of the military aid project is estimated at $42 million.

Clinton also pledged to help develop Nigeria’s oil and natural gas infrastructure and boost the country’s oil and gas exports. Obasanjo promised Clinton that Nigeria, as a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, would use its influence to “bring an element of stability” to rocketing oil prices.

During the visit, officials of the US Export-Import Bank and the US Trade and Development Agency signed $1.2 billion worth of export agreements with Nigeria that will buttress increased Western investment in Nigeria’s energy export industry.

The US presently imports about 16% of its oil supply from Nigeria and Angola. It expects this figure to steadily rise to 25% in the next 10 years. The US is Nigeria’s largest crude oil market. Oil accounts for more than 90% of Nigeria’s export income.

The Nigerian government recently announced that it intends to increase Nigeria’s crude oil reserves to 30 billion barrels, from 25 billion barrels, and that daily production will be increased from 2 million to 3 million barrels per day by 2003. To achieve this, annual investment in the industry must be, from 2001, about $8 billion, much of which will come from the Western oil corporations operating in Nigeria. Part of this massive sum will be spent on opening new oil fields in the Niger delta and the waters off-shore.

Blind eye

Obasanjo’s close ties to Nigeria’s oil-soaked ruling class and his new role as Washington’s regional enforcer and as the pliable manager of one of the West’s increasingly important sources of crude oil explains why Clinton turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses being inflicted on the people of the Niger delta. It also explains why Nigeria’s “democratic” government is stepping up its attacks on behalf of the giant Western oil companies, without so much as a murmur from Western governments and the mass media.

The 70,000-square kilometer Niger delta region, home to more than 6 million of Nigeria’s 120 million people, is the source of most of Nigeria’s oil output. Shell, US-owned Chevron, Mobil and Texaco, Italian Agip and French Elf operate, In partnership with the state oil company, under the protection of armed troops.

Shell produces 50% of Nigeria’s oil. Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest oil producer, accounts for almost 14% of Shell’s global oil production.

In the Niger River delta, Shell’s oil fields have yielded an estimated $30 billion since 1958, yet the 6 million people who live in the region remain desperately poor. There is no electricity, no running water, no adequate hospitals and few schools.

It costs Shell between $3 and $5 to produce one barrel of Ogoni oil, which is sold at around $30 a barrel on the world market. This is one reason why Shell is one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies.

Drinking water in the delta contains levels of petroleum hydrocarbons 350 times that allowed in the European Union. Between 1976 and 1991 there was an average of four oil spills a week in the delta. Shell operates in 100 countries, but 40% of its oil spills have occurred in Nigeria.

Shell admits to 3000 polluted sites affected by oil operations on Ogoni soil. Shell also admits to flaring 1.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day (many flares have burned continuously for 35 years), causing acid rain that destroys crops and sickens residents.

Protests and repression

A January 17 report in the British Financial Times caused an uproar. It claimed that Shell “appears to be on the verge of the first ‘significant breakthrough’ in its estranged relations with the Ogoni tribe since the execution in 1995 of Ken Saro-Wiwa” and that “the company says ‘real reconciliation (with the Ogonis) may not be far away”’ after a series of meetings with “Ogoni representatives.”

In response, MOSOP issued a statement that “the Ogonis have neither authorized nor attended meetings with Shell officials either in Nigeria or elsewhere” and that those who Shell claimed to be Ogoni representatives are “a handful of corrupt, greedy and selfish individuals” who “continue to betray the people.” “Any secret negotiations between these persons and Shell is not binding on the Ogoni people,” the statement said.

Police and military forces swept into K. Dere, an Ogoni village, on April 11, in response to peaceful protests against Shell’s efforts to restart its operations. According to residents, security forces killed five people and burned 20 homes.

In late March, Shell contractors had begun the construction of a road. The K. Dere protests highlighted the contractors’ failure to hire local labor for the project.

According to Peter Ndonake, a leader of the National Youth Council of the Ogoni People (NYCOP), MOSOP’s youth wing, around 2000 young people on August 7 prevented Shell personnel from resuming work at Korokoro. However, at around 2am on August 8, mobile police and “thugs sponsored by Shell” attacked Korokoro, destroying houses, stealing property, and beating and raping people. Many villagers fled to the bush and refused to come out.

On August 10, more than 5,000 Ogonis from all over Ogoniland converged in Tai, Rivers State, to demonstrate against the local government’s use of force to allow Shell to resume operations. Their banners and placards read: “No to Shell, no oil for blood”; “Shell, stop drilling our blood”; “Shell’s agents, repent and join the people of Ogoni in their just struggle.” The protesters marched to Shell’s Korokoro flow station. According to MOSOP’s Emmanuel Aluzim, “Some forces trained and loyal to Shell” attacked the marchers with machetes and axes.

On August 14, 3,000 people were mobilized by NYCOP outside the Rivers State House of Assembly in Port Harcourt to protest against Shell’s return.

In other parts of the delta, opposition to Shell continues. Following an oil spill on August 13, angry villagers in the Ughelli area of Delta State prevented Shell workers from gaining access. Five oil pumping stations have been shut down. Around 500 police were sent to “beef up security and keep peace,” reported the Lagos Comet. Communities staged a peaceful demonstration to demand that Shell “stop coming to the area.”

In the most serious human rights outrage during Obasanjo’s rule, Nigerian troops razed an entire town, Odi, in Bayelsa State, on November 19, 1999. More than 42 people were killed in the attack by 2,000 federal troops to quell militant protests by young people from the Ijaw ethnic group against Shell and other Western oil companies. Soon after, on November 22, Obasanjo met with oil company executives to reassure them that the government was “very much aware of the concerns of the oil-producing companies for law and order”.

In January of this year, the US-based Global Exchange and Essential Action issued a report — “Oil for Nothing” — that accused “Big Oil” of continuing to closely collaborate with the Nigerian military in the Niger delta and of destroying the environment, livelihoods and public health. The report’s authors, who visited the Niger delta in September 1999, noted: “Everywhere we visited, we witnessed the destruction of the local environment, and the oppression of communities affected by what can accurately be described as an outlaw oil industry.”

Source: Greenleft Weekly:

Wide net in Argentine torture case

By Tim Weiner and Ginger Thompson

Mexico City, Mexico, Sept. 10— When the local daily newspaper Reforma ran a front-page picture of Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, director of Mexico’s national motor vehicle bureau, a shock of recognition ran halfway round the world.

The face — thin, almost fragile, silver hair, icy eyes, a half-smile — was familiar in Buenos Aires, in Barcelona, in Mexico City. Scores of survivors of Argentina’s military junta, which killed tens of thousands a generation ago, said they knew Mr. Cavallo as “Serpico.” They remembered him from the torture chamber inside the mechanics’ school of the Argentine Navy. Under the junta, from 1976 to 1983, more than 5,000 people disappeared into that chamber. Most were never seen again.

Susana Burgos, who had lived through two years of captivity, knew that face: “Older, but with the same look, the same eyes,” she said. She had faint hope of seeing her tormentor punished. But when the newspaper stories ran, so did Mr. Cavallo — for a plane back to his native Argentina, where officers who served the junta have official amnesty. The flight stopped in Cancún, Mexico, where Mr. Cavallo was arrested, just before midnight on Aug. 24, on charges of terrorism and torture.

The warrant came from across the Atlantic, in the name of Spanish citizens who suffered and died in Argentina. It was signed by the same judge, Baltasar Garzón, who tried last year to extradite Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, on charges of genocide.

Now Mr. Cavallo’s case appears likely to create a precedent that General Pinochet’s did not: the principle that the law knows no borders, that a person can reach across frontiers and back through time to seek justice for crimes against humanity.

Mexico must now decide whether Mr. Cavallo should be sent to Spain to stand trial for crimes committed 20 years ago in Argentina. And if Mexico extradites him, it would be unprecedented in the annals of international law, human rights experts say.

“There will be no refuge for torturers, even in a country that used to be a paradise of corruption and impunity,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.

“When you arrest Pinochet, it sends a chill through the tyrants,” said Reed Brody, the group’s advocacy director. “When you arrest Cavallo, it sends tremors through the ranks, and tells them they have fewer places to hide. It says to the ranks of police officers and soldiers that if they commit torture today, they could be prosecuted tomorrow, and not only in Spain.”

Mexico, like many other nations, has long placed the principle of its sovereignty above the ideals of human rights. It became a kind of haven for Latin American military officers suspected of cold-war crimes, just as Argentina once was a refuge for Nazis.

Mexican officials have given no indication how they will decide the case of Mr. Cavallo. But Mr. Brody said he expected Mexico to comply with the Spanish judge’s extradition request, a decision that appeared more likely after Mexico agreed on Thursday to the United Nations’ plan for an international criminal court. The United States, saying it wants to protect its own sovereignty, has so far refused to go along with the idea of the international criminal court.

Mexico’s Commerce Department set up a new national motor vehicle registry bureau last year, ostensibly to fight auto theft, and Mr. Cavallo won a 10-year concession to run it. He had helped his brother set up a similar service, a national data base of automobile serial numbers and titles, in El Salvador. Mr. Cavallo is listed as a director and part owner of that company.

Popular opposition and allegations of incompetence hounded the Mexican bureau. On Thursday, an under secretary of commerce, Raúl Ramos Tercero, was found dead on a highway outside Mexico City, his throat and wrists slashed. Mexican officials linked his death, which has officially been called a suicide, to the Cavallo case.

Source: New York Times

Colombia paramilitary chief says businesses back him

Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 13— The head of the outlawed right-wing paramilitary forces, who has conceded that most of his financing comes from the drug trade, said today that he also received support from businesses.

The leader of the group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, Carlos Castano, spoke of his ties to businessmen in an open letter to Congress a day after Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez had urged lawmakers to investigate private financing sources for the paramilitary militias that attack leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers.

“Why shouldn’t national and international companies support us when they see their investments limited by the terrorism and barbarity of the guerrillas?” Mr. Castano asked in his letter. “The growing support of the business sector is an urgent necessity in our case. Either they defend themselves from our national enemy or they will disappear.”

Mocking Mr. Ramirez and his call for a crackdown on people who secretly back the paramilitaries, Mr. Castano said, “The crime of antisubversion or of pro-capitalism” was something that could not exist in a “civilized universe.”

“We don’t believe the country will advance toward peace by pursuing businessmen, civic leaders and defenseless citizens or by preventing them from adopting an antisubversive stance,” he said.

Local and international human rights groups said the paramilitary group, which is responsible for many peasant massacres and other abuses, operates with the support of state security forces.

The government has been fighting an increasingly dirty war with Marxist rebels that has taken more than 35,000 lives since 1990.

In a rare television interview in March, Mr. Castano said that drug trafficking and drug traffickers probably financed 70 percent of his organization’s operations.

He did not elaborate on his ties to businesses and business leaders in his letter today.

But Mr. Castano and his private army, which is made up of an estimated 5,000 mostly working-class fighters, have long been seen as important defenders of the economic and political interests of the conservative financial elite.

“We have always proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom and of the national and international industrial sectors,” Mr. Castano wrote. “We have said over and over again that Colombian subversives are preventing the adequate development of productive forces.”

Source: Colombian Labor Monitor: xx738@prairienet.org

22 million signatures back debt cancellation

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Sept. 7 (IPS)— Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the Group of 77, presented a petition Thursday with an unprecedented 22 million signatures to the United Nations calling for the cancellation of debts of the world’s poorest nations.

Obasanjo, who heads the largest single coalition of mostly debt-ridden developing nations, was sending a strong message to Western donors that the least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the world’s poor, are urgently in need of debt relief.

“It was a world record breaking petition,’’ Jamie Drummond of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, the primary sponsor of the petition, told IPS. “It was the largest number of signatures ever collected on one single issue.’’

The 22 million signatures, which ranged from thumbprints to emails, were from people in 155 countries. Nigeria was asked to present the petition, he said, not only because it was head of the Group of 77, but also because it was a country urgently in need of debt relief.

The petition was presented to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan who in a report to the Millennium Summit, currently underway here, has called upon donor countries and international financial institutions to consider wiping off their books all official debts of the 40 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) in return for demonstrable commitments to poverty reduction.

The 40 HIPCs, including Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Ghana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan, Yemen and Zambia, have a total debt stock of over 215 billion dollars. Drummond said 12 other countries - Nigeria, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Morocco, Jamaica, Haiti, Nepal, Gambia and Zimbabwe - also qualify for HIPC status.

The United States has expressed resistance to canceling the debt.

Jose Bove jailed for attack on McDonald’s

Millau, France, Sept 13— A French court sentenced anti-corporate globalization activist Jose Bove on Wednesday to three months in prison for ransacking a McDonald’s restaurant last year in a protest at US tariffs on European food imports.

The sentence was more severe than the token one-month prison sentence, with another nine months suspended, sought by the state prosecutor at the trial in July.

Bove, a 47-year-old sheep farmer, is the hero of a protest movement which hit the headlines last year when talks on trade liberalization in the US city of Seattle were abandoned in the face of protests.

He was accused of leading a commando operation in which he and nine others “dismantled” a McDonald’s fast-food outlet under construction.

Bove, who spent three weeks behind bars before release on bail, said he would appeal to avoid going to jail.

“I am not at all surprised by the sentence,” he said. “It shows the judges don’t have a clue about what’s going on around them in France and in the world.”

Millau is the home of the pungent blue-veined Roquefort cheese which is on a list of goods subject to punitive US tariffs imposed in retaliation for the European Union’s ban on imports of North American hormone-treated beef.

Some 200 demonstrators attended the reading of the verdict, a far cry from the 100,000 people who invaded Millau for the trial in a carnival-style protest against corporate globalization.

Source: Reuters

Guatemalan human rights group attacked

Guatemala City, Guatemala, Sept. 5— Assailants wielding machine guns burst into the headquarters of a leading Guatemalan human rights group and threatened to kill the organization’s leaders before stealing a truck, computers and files, group members said.

Monday’s attack targeted the Guatemalan Association of Families of the Disappeared and Detained. The group assists the families of the more than 200,000 mostly Indian peasants who were killed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war. It also is listed as a plaintiff on a criminal complaint filed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu that charges the country’s former military leaders with genocide and state torture, a case being investigated by Spain’s National Court.

Director Aura Elena Farfan said she believes the attack was not just street crime.

“Those responsible knew the names of some of our most important leaders,” Farfan said. “They didn’t seem to be common criminals.”

The four men robbed everyone in the downtown Guatemala City office and slashed phone lines before making off with the group’s truck, four computers, a fax machine and a large number of files, Farfan said. The organization was still cleaning up and would not know for days exactly which files were taken, she said.

Source: Associated Press

Protests slam IMF-led plans for Brazil

Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sept. 8— Nearly 85,000 people protested in São Paulo on September 7— Brazil’s independence day— against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the government’s economic policies. The São Paulo protest was one of some 1,200 demonstrations held in 23 Brazilian states as part of a national campaign organized by the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), unions and grassroots organizations under the name “The Cry of the Excluded,” to protest the social exclusion of a large segment of Brazil’s population. The protests have been held each year on Brazil’s independence day since 1995.

The day also marked the culmination of a grassroots plebiscite on the foreign debt, organized by the same groups. More than a million people in some 3,000 municipalities took part in the plebiscite.

MST coordinator Joao Pedro Stédile said that on October 12, the Cry of the Excluded would hold a continental protest, with actions in countries throughout the Americas. On that day, protesters will deliver to the United Nations headquarters in New York a grassroots manifesto against the foreign debt and the IMF.

Source: La Republica, Agence France Press, CNN, Associated Press