NIGERIAN security forces often gun down unarmed civilians while protecting foreign oil majors in the Niger Delta, rights group Amnesty International said in a just released report, calling on US and British firms to investigate two recent violent incidents.
The pressure group’s report comes one week before the anniversary of the execution of minority rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in 1995 along with eight of his comrades following a controversial show trial conducted by the Abacha regime. Saro-Wiwa had campaigned against the Anglo-Dutch oil major Shell, which he said had brought pollution to the land of the Ogoni minority without contributing to local development.
“Ten years after ... new evidence shows that the people of Nigeria’s oil producing Niger Delta continue to face death and devastation at the hands of the security forces,” Kolawole Olaniyan, director of Amnesty International’s Africa programme, said in a statement.
Amnesty’s report focuses on two recent incidents in which deadly force was used by troops after local communities had challenged the rights of two oil majors -- Shell and the US giant Chevron -- to operate in their area.
On February 4, soldiers shot one protester dead and injured 30 more when villagers from the Ugborodo community invaded Chevron’s Escravos oil terminal, the report alleges.
Two weeks later, on February 19, at least 17 people were killed when soldiers from the same Joint Task Force -- which has been deployed to protect the oil industry -- raided Odioma, burning much of the town to the ground in a fruitless search for an armed vigilante group, the report says.
“Amnesty International is calling on the Nigerian Federal Government to conduct thorough and independent inquiries into allegations that the security forces killed, injured and raped civilians, and destroyed their property,” the statement said.
Amnesty “also demands Chevron commission an independent and impartial investigation into the company’s role during the incidents at Escravos terminal ... and Shell investigates allegations of a security arrangement between a Shell Nigeria subcontractor and a criminal group in Odioma.” Following the February’s incidents, spokesmen for both oil firms said that they had no control over the soldiers and sailors of the Joint Task Force (JTF), which is largely housed in oil plants and receives logistical and communications support from the oil companies.
The Nigerian government deployed the force in response to the threat to oil production -- the source of 95 of the country’s foreign revenue -- from pirates and separatist ethnic groups in the delta, a Scotland-sized swathe of wetlands and mangrove forest on the Atlantic coast.
In the case of the Odioma raid, which was launched after a local gang was accused of killing councillors from a nearby community, JTF commander Brigadier-General Elias Zamani told AFP that the town had caught fire after stray rounds hit jerry cans of fuel stored among the houses. But a reporter who visited Odioma saw evidence of more systematic and widespread destruction, with scores of homes and shops burned to the ground and most of the town destroyed.
The once busy fishing port was almost deserted following the attack, while local chiefs said that 16 people had been killed and that town leaders had been trussed-up on the beach and beaten.
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