In this guest blog post, Professor Anna Zalik of York University Canada explores how governments and multinationals criminalise protest and gloss over the environmental injustices of oil extraction.

Q: What does the Canadian Government’s fury at opponents of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline have to do with the Nigerian ‘legaloil’ campaign?

A: Both positions are about justifying private profits and criminalizing protest.

The Nigerian government raised fuel prices on 1 January 2012, an act that led to a national strike and widespread protest among a mass movement, at times identifying as Occupy Nigeria. For about a decade the oil multinationals in Nigeria have tacitly endorsed a campaign, supported through industry consultants, to describe their production as “legal”. This use of the term ‘legal’ aimed  to counter the call for ‘resource control’ among a youth insurgency movement which partly supported itself off the trade in contraband oil. Like a range of social and environmental rights organizations in Nigeria and internationally, the youth insurgency in the Delta rose from opposition to the social and ecological  injustices that secured private-industry contracts to lift Nigerian oil.  During the height of the Ogoni movement and following Ken Saro Wiwa’s judicial murder in 1995, there was widespread consensus that the partnership between the Nigerian State and the multinational oil industry was ‘unjust’ regardless of whether or not it was ‘legal’.

In the aftermath of the Saro Wiwa’s execution, the Niger Deltan movements became increasingly militant. Escalations in the ‘oil war’ in the Niger Delta from 2004 onward were accompanied by a campaign by the oil industry operating in Nigeria to reframe their activities as socially-responsible and to label resistance movements criminal. In contrast to the sympathetic portrayal of the Ogoni uprising in the 1990s, or the 2002 “Women’s sit-in” against Chevron (in which a group of women threatened to disrobe on a platform), armed militia activity in the Delta came to be depicted internationally as a kind of ‘competitive thuggery’.

Part of the strategy for criminalizing protest involved the transnational oil companies pathologizing Niger Deltan unarmed protest not only externally and internationally, but also in the minds of those most subject to the ravages of oil extraction. Some residents of the Delta’s riverine region would refer to any facility takeover or shutdown as ‘violence’, a view promoted by industry in its emphasis on avoiding work stoppages and outlawing demonstrations. Mainstream media and policy analysts played a role in this criminalization, through the use of terms like terrorism to describe the deepening ungovernability of the region. Ultimately, if a key tactic of unarmed resistance movements – like blockades – became known as ‘violent’ protest, civil disobedience – which garnered international sympathy -would become an ineffective strategy: it is unsurprising that the Niger Deltan resistance movements became increasingly radicalised.

The web site Legaloil.com promotes the discursive and material criminalization of the oil bunkering trade in the Nigerian context – equating it with conflict diamonds. The legaloil website was established in 2002-3 when control of the contraband trade was said to have slipped increasingly out of the hands of the military and oil industry employees that previously directed it, into those of the armed youth that formerly served as their henchmen. Legaloil.com functions as a directly ‘global’ intervention that presents data concerning bunkered shipments (the source of which is hard to verify or monitor, but becomes ‘real’ once presented as graphs and tables), tracks threats and attacks on installations, and endorses chemical fingerprinting as means to distinguish between licit and ‘illicit’ oil. The site also seeks to present its data, and its proposals, as legitimated by Nigerian sources. Indeed, to be successful internationally, the ‘legal oil’ label requires reshaping the way exploitation in the Niger Delta is understood locally and globally so that ‘abusive’ relations of extraction come to be associated with bunkering activities, rather than the (state-sanctioned) operations of multinational oil companies so criticized in the 1990s.

Yet despite such efforts, the armed strategy of the Niger Deltan insurgency was partially successful in transferring resources to its leadership, although not to the average Niger Deltan or Nigerian.  The Deltan insurgency has been subdued since the  rise to the presidency of a Niger Deltan, Goodluck Jonathan, an outcome that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. But as international attention to resistance in the Delta waned, so has international attention to corporate malpractice there. In the past month, Shell and Chevron operations in Nigeria have seen two major ‘accidents’, neither of which have received much attention in the global media.  Unfortunately, despite such business-as-usual in terms of the oil industry’s effects, some former insurgent leaders in fact supported Jonathan in critiquing the mass protests against the removal of fuel subsidies. Key Niger Deltan activists have endorsed Occupy Nigeria, however.

The Canadian government has endorsed a parallel campaign to Legaloil.com so as to whitewash the tar sands, in reaction to a transnational movement opposing its social and ecological impacts. The Harper government has relied on Ezra Levant (Canada’s answer to Rush Limbaugh) and his poorly informed, orientalist book to try to rebrand the tar sands as Ethical Oil. This campaign persists despite serious accidents whose costs are absorbed by Canada’s Indigenous people. A recent example is the oil spill on Lubicon territory in Alberta last May which was hushed up in the national media just days before the federal election.

Opposition to Canadian tar sands expansion, as in the case of support for Niger Deltan environmental rights groups in the 1990s, is both domestic and international. Western Canadian aboriginal groups, social justice and environmental movements have come out in droves to speak against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline in hearings, acts that Canada’s government has labeled tainted by ‘foreign money’.  This week, a staff person of a far-from-radical Canadian environmental NGO signed a sworn affidavit concerning how the Canadian Prime Minister’s Office had described them as an ‘enemy of the people’ to their main funder. Opponents to tar sands expansion, it would seem, are increasingly “illegal”, according to Harper’s government.

Ultimately the protesters in Canada, like the Nigerian mass movement calling for a repeal of the fuel price hikes, call for a combination of resource and ecological sovereignty. They demand that restrictions on, and distribution of, oil and gas industry profits are made in the name of the public justice. They protest the ‘legally’ mandated extractive profiteering, of private industry-state partnerships in oil, gas and mining – profiteering which is increasingly understood as corporate theft of common property.

Watch the video by you and i films here:

The protest coincides with the 16th anniversary of the execution of writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists for their campaign against the environmental and social devastation caused by Shell and the Nigerian military regime. In response to peaceful protests by the minority Ogoni people in Nigeria, Shell collaborated with the military in a series of brutal crackdowns in the 1990s that claimed the lives of thousands. In October 2011, Platform released a new report on Shell’s role in recent human rights abuses perpetrated by the Nigerian military. The report also reveals how Shell has fuelled conflict through payments to armed gangs in the Delta region.

Events like the Shell Live Wire are used by the company to dissociate itself from human rights abuses and environmental devastation that results from its activities in Nigeria and elsewhere. The protest in London seeks to challenge Shell’s “social licence to operate”, thereby weakening its ability to commit abuses with impunity. The protest was organised by London Rising Tide and according to Indymedia encountered limited resistance from security:

Centrepoint security at first overstepped the mark, pushing people and trying to snatch the banner, but they retreated indoors and closed off the entrance when they realised they were being filmed, allowing the protest to continue right outside.

Hundreds of leaflets were handed out to interested passers-by, and police, who arrived after around 40 minutes, waited for instruction up the command chain before deciding to leave the protest alone.

Buying a copy of the report enables Platform to do more campaigning for human rights and corporate accountability in Nigeria. Your support is already having a real impact:

• In the last 10 days, over 13,900 of you signed a petition demanding that Shell is held accountable for its human rights abuses in Nigeria.
• Following the public outrage and media generated by the report, on Wednesday 5 October, the House of Representatives, part of Nigeria’s legislative body ordered an official investigation into the allegations that Shell fuelled violence in the Niger Delta by paying armed militant gangs.

The campaign is long and hard, but your ongoing support is vital. Please take a moment to support the campaign by getting yourself a copy (or two!) of the new report. Thank you in advance, and extra thanks go to our friends at New Internationalist for hosting the report in their inspiring shop!

PS. If you can’t afford to buy a copy now, the report is also available in pdf.

The action has collected over 14,900 signatures since Wednesday 19 October. Let’s see if we can hit 20,000 by the end of the week! Please sign the petition now.

That’s how filmmaker Sandi Cioffi describes Nigerian oil, known as ‘sweet crude’ because it is low in sulphur and therefore cheaper and easier to refine.

The trailer below is for Sweet Crude, the film. An amazing and insightful documentary by Sandi Cioffi, it looks at the appalling legacy of oil companies, in particular Shell and Chevron in the Niger Delta. The film features accounts of brutal military repression of protesters, including women, in the Delta, the role of oil companies in the conflict, and local forms of resistance.

“We’re looking at a time-bomb, and when it blows, it will blow us all away…”

Ofehe was arrested on 22 February 2011, originally on “suspicion of people smuggling and forgery” and has been in detention since then. The Dutch authorities later altered the charges and accused Ofehe of plotting to blow up Shell pipelines in the oil-rich Niger Delta. His arrest follows what appears to be an elaborate year-long surveillance operation during which

his phones and computers were allegedly tapped and a camera placed in front of his office for three weeks.

Friends of the Earth Nigeria have raised concerns about the process of Ofehe’s arrest and the charges against him. A Dutch media channel reported:

Ofehe’s lawyers are sceptical about the motives in the case against their client. They are convinced that the Dutch authorities are complicit in a campaign to silence a vocal critic of the multinational oil companies and alleged misappropriation of oil revenues by the Nigerian government. “There’s something funny going on, that’s all I can say for now,” says Ed Manders.

Ofehe has played a central role in recent campaigning against the oil giant in Holland. In January 2011, Ofehe took Dutch parliamentarians on a tour of the Niger Delta on 26 January he appeared to give testimony before the Dutch Parliament’s inquiry into Shell’s environmental and social impact in Nigeria.

PLATFORM is concerned that the timing of Ofehe’s arrest and the charges against him could be politically motivated, and we urge the Dutch authorities to guarantee due process and a fair hearing. Follow the live blog at Radio Netherlands Worldwide here.

Picture credit: ERA/FoE Nigeria - Morris Alagoa

On Thursday 7 July, shortly after 6am, women and youth from communities in the Kolo Creek area of the Niger Delta protested against more than a decade of broken promises, oil spills and gas flaring from Shell.

With only placards and palm fronds, peaceful protestors confronted heavily armed military soldiers and succeeded in breaching the gates of the Shell Base, temporarily disrupting its operations. Shell has a long and shameful history in Kolo Creek, as Mrs Beauty James, a woman leader from Oruma, recounted:

We are not coming to make new demands from Shell, but that they fulfil the agreement they reached with us [in 1999]. We want our communities to be connected to the source of power that supplies them electricity twenty four hours every day.

Picture credit: ERA/FoE Nigeria - Morris Alagoa

Another protester summed up the communities’ sense of deep exploitation:

Can you imagine a situation where Shell prefers giving light to mosquitoes in the bush than human beings; even when the oil and gas they use on the plant that supplies them light is from our soil?

You can read a stirring report on how the protestors broke through the military blockade to reach the Shell Base, and find out about the protester’s demands here, as recorded by colleagues at Environmental Rights Action/FoE Nigeria. Pictures by ERA field reporter, Morris Alagoa, are reproduced here and have also been posted on facebook.

Picture credit: ERA/FoE Nigeria - Morris Alagoa

I met with community members when I visited Kolo Creek in late 2010 with ERA and SDN. Then I was told that poverty, neglect and  military repression had turned the local community into “a slave to Shell”. As Shell continues to break its promises and systematically abuse human rights in Kolo Creek, more protests are likely until the company and authorities prioritise the basic human rights of communities.

Platform stands in solidarity with the communities protesting and we will be holding Shell and the Nigerian authorities to account in a forthcoming report & campaign this Autumn.

Introduction:

Episode I: Fifteen Years of Not Getting Justice

Episode II: Patrick’s Podcast

Episode III: “Comrade Che”

Amnesty International on Friday called on the Nigerian authorities to launch immediate investigations into the assault and detention of three human rights activists by police in the city of Port Harcourt.

Isaac Asume Osuoka, AkpoBari Celestine and Ken Henshaw from non-governmental organization Social Action, which campaigns for environmental justice and human rights in Nigeria, were stopped and detained by police on 5 April after leaving their office.

AkpoBari Celestine said he was repeatedly hit with the butt of a gun, poked with a barrel in his arms and legs and slapped in the face, as at least six armed men, including at least three uniformed police officers, forced the activists out of their car and into a white van without asking the victims for any form of identification.
The three men were not told why they were stopped and detained but were taken to Olu Obasanjo police station in Port Harcourt.

“They knew who we were,” said Isaac Asume Osuoka.

“When we were stopped they didn’t ask for our names, they didn’t ask to see a driver’s licence, they didn’t ask for any car documents.”

At the police station, the activists were refused access to legal counsel.

AkpoBari Celestine said he was denied medical treatment for the injuries sustained while being detained.

The activists were released without charge around midnight, after alerting friends and colleagues in the city who intervened on their behalf.

“The excessive use of force and arbitrary detention suffered by these men must be fully investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice,” said Erwin van der Borght, director of Amnesty International’s Africa programme.

The clinic where AkboBari Celestine sought treatment following his release later refused to give him the medical report that detailed his injuries, the activists believe staff at the clinic may have been intimidated by the police.

A Medical report carried out in Austria, where the activist is holding talks about human rights in the Niger Delta, found that he sustained several bruises on his arms and legs from the beating he received from the police.

“The government must ensure that human rights defenders can carry out their work without interference, obstacles, discrimination or fear of retaliation,” said Erwin van der Borght.

“These activists have a right to an independent, impartial and competent review of complaints and, where violations are found to have taken place, to obtain redress.”

The Nigeria Police Force (NPF) continues to commit a wide range of human rights violations with impunity, including unlawful killings, torture, other ill-treatment and enforced disappearances.

Some people are targeted for failing to pay bribes and several have been tortured to death in police detention.