| last
updated: September 14, 2004
Ideology One
In Action
Naomi
Klein’s No Logo
Here is a section quote from page 383 of her 2000
award-winning book.
From the
Ocean as Trash Pit to the land as Oil Slick
Since the 1950s, Shell Nigeria has extracted $30 billion worth of oil
from the land of the Ogoni people, in the Niger Delta. Oil revenue makes
up 80 per-cent of the Nigerian economy - $10 billion annually - and,
of that, more than half comes from Shell. But not only have the Ogoni
people been deprived of the profits from their rich natural resource,
many still live with-out running water or electricity, and their land
and water have been poisoned by open pipelines, oil spills and gas fires.
Under the leadership
of the writer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Movement
for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) campaigned for reform,
and demanded compensation from Shell. In response, and in order to keep
the oil profits flowing into the government's coffers, General Sani
Abacha directed the Nigerian military to take aim at the Ogoni. They
killed and tortured thousands. The Ogoni not only blamed Abacha for
the attacks, they also accused Shell of treating the Nigerian military
as a private police force, paying it to quash peaceful protest on Ogoni
land, in addition to giving financial support and legitimacy to the
Abacha regime.
Facing mounting
protests within Nigeria, Shell withdrew from Ogoni land in 1993 - a
move that only put further pressure on the military to remove the Ogoni
threat. A leaked memo from the head of the Rivers State internal Security
Force of the Nigerian Army was quite explicit: "Shell operations
still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken
for smooth economic activities to commence. ... Recommendations: Wasting
operations during MOSOP and other gatherings making constant military
presence justifiable. Wasting targets cutting across communities and
leadership cadres especially vocal individuals of various groups
On May 10, 1994
- five days after the memo was written - Ken Saro-Wiwa said, "This
is it. They [the Nigerian military] are going to arrest us all and execute
us. All for Shell.” Twelve days later, he was arrested and tried
for murder. Before receiving his sentence, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal,
"I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here
on trial. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but
its day will surely come." Then, on November 10, 1995 - despite
pressure from the international community, including the Canadian and
Australian governments, and to a lesser extent the governments of Germany
and France - the Nigerian military government executed Saro-Wiwa along
with eight other Ogoni leaders who had protested against Shell. It became
an international incident and, once again, people took their protests
to their Shell stations, widely boycotting the company. In San Francisco
Greenpeaceniks staged a re-enact- ment of Saro-Wiwa's murder, with the
noose fastened around the towering Shell sign (see image, page 364).
As Reclaim the
Streets' John Jordan said of multinationals: "Inadvertently, they
have helped us see the whole problem as one system." And here was
that interconnected system in action: Shell, intent on sinking a monstrous
oil platform off the coast of Britain, was simultaneously entangled
in a human-rights debacle in Nigeria, in the same year that it laid
off workers (despite earning huge profits), all so that it could pump
gas into the cars of London - the very issue that had launched Reclaim
the Streets. Because Ken Saro-Wiwa was a poet and playwright, his case
was also claimed by the inter-national freedom-of-expression group,
PEN. Writers, including the English playwright Harold Pinter and the
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, took up the cause of Saro-Wiwa's
right to express his views against Shell, and turned his persecution
into the highest-profile free- expression case since the government
of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, offering a bounty on
his head. In an article for The New York Times, Gordimer wrote that
"to buy Nigeria's oil under the conditions that prevail is to buy
oil in exchange for blood. Other people's blood; the exaction of the
death penalty on Nigerians."
The convergence
of social-justice, labor and environmental issues in the two Shell campaigns
was not a fluke - it goes to the very heart of the emerging spirit of
global activism. Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed for fighting to protect his
environment, but an environment that encompassed more than the physical
landscape that was being ravaged and despoiled by Shell's invasion of
the delta. Shell's mistreatment of Ogoni land is both an environmental
and a social issue, because natural-resource companies are notorious
for lowering their standards when they drill and mine in third world
counties. Shell’s opponents readily draw parallels between the
company’s actions in Nigeria, its history of collaborating with
the former apartheid governments in South Africa, its ongoing presents
in the Timor Gap in Indonesian occupied East Timor and its violent clashes
with the Nahau people of the Peruvian Amazon.
and
on and on!
But
in Nigeria blood for the oil to drive the global economy has never stopped.
The next example is from Sept 2004
Villagers
flee troops, militia fighting near Nigerian oil city
By Dulue Mbachu, Associated Press
September 10, 2004
PORT HARCOURT,
Nigeria — Nigerian troops battled militia forces Thursday in the
creeks and mangrove swamps of Africa's leading oil region, the Niger
Delta, pressing an offensive that has forced thousands of villagers
to flee their homes for this petroleum hub.
Burned houses
and twisted corrugated iron roofs, strewn flat over an area of a football
field, bore witness Thursday to the savagery of militia attacks on one
slum district in Port Harcourt, a city of 3 million and Nigeria's most
important oil center.
A few refugees
made their way through the streets, carrying bundles of belongings.
Most of the people killed here had no known tie to any militia faction,
said Daniel Wogu, a resident.
The crackdown,
with soldiers sealing off river approaches to Port Harcourt and helicopter
gunships patrolling overhead, is the latest in yearlong clashes between
Nigeria's military and criminal gangs and ethnic militias for control
of oil wealth from the Niger Delta.
Violence in the
Niger Delta over the past year has killed more than 1,000 people and
at times shut down up to 40 percent of oil production in Nigeria, the
world's No. 7 oil-producing country. One U.S. oil company alone, ChevronTexaco,
is estimated to have lost at least $1.75 billion in production losses
and sabotaged equipment since March 2003.
The army and navy
launched their latest offensive last week in response to deadly militia
raids in August into Port Harcourt. Militia leaders and Nigeria's military
said fighting continued Thursday outside the city.
The military is
aiming to keep the waterways around Port Harcourt safe and open and
to "stop the fighters from coming into the city," said a military
official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Authorities have
given no casualty figures in the current military offensive.
Asari Dokubo,
a militia leader whose movement is the main target of the crackdown
in the districts outside Port Harcourt, said he expected civilian casualties
to be light since many villagers in targeted areas already have fled.
Thousands of villagers
have abandoned their homes since last week, streaming into Port Harcourt
to take shelter with relatives and friends.
"I fled from
Tombia two days ago when the army began bombing the place again and
killed two people," one refugee, Dagogo Harry, said Thursday. Harry
said he was among the last to leave his town of more than 5,000. Most
others fled after the first army raids in April.
President Olusegun
Obasanjo's government accuses Dokubo's group, the Niger Delta People's
Volunteer Force, in a series of attacks on Port Harcourt in the past
month that have killed at least 50 people.
The attacks were
aimed at members of a rival militia group that Dokubo says is supported
by the government. The government denies the charge.
Dokubo, who claims
to have 2,000 armed fighters, also admits illegally tapping and selling
crude oil from pipelines.
Troops have been
called in to maintain a 24-hour patrol in the Port Harcourt, a base
for international oil companies, which pump Nigeria's 2.5 mil | 
