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.

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…”

Last night, CBC Radio, a national station in Canada broadcast an interview with Ben Amunwa, author of Platform’s new report, Counting the Cost, on Shell’s human rights abuses in Nigeria.

Listen to more Platform podcasts here.

Counting the Cost implicates Shell in cases of serious violence in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region from 2000 to 2010. The report uncovers how Shell’s routine payments to armed militants exacerbated conflicts, in one case leading to the destruction of Rumuekpe town where it is estimated that at least 60 people were killed. According to Platform’s report, Shell continues to rely on Nigerian government forces who have perpetrated systematic human rights abuses against local residents, including unlawful killings, torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. A summary of the report is available here.

Guy Hibbert’s tense thriller (starring Naomi Harris (28 Days Later), Johdi May (Defiance) Patterson Joseph and David Oyelowo) follows two women as they investigate the  circumstances that led to the deaths of four hostage oil workers and their militant captors in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

A fictitious oil company, ‘Krielson International’, stands in as a thinly veiled corporate giant, whose corrupt deals and failed development projects infuriate local communities.

Without giving too much away, the oil company, Krielson, and the Nigerian military are profiting hugely from illegal practice of oil bunkering, at the expense of local communities and ultimately risking the lives of their own workers.

It may sound like a thriller plotline, but it bears a striking resemblance to real life events in the Delta, and in particular one of the darker chapters of former President Obasanjo’s repressive rule of Nigeria.

As scholar and author Ike Okonta writes:

20th August 2006. On that afternoon, soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in the creeks of western delta and murdered them. The dead men had gone to negotiate the release of a Shell Oil worker kidnapped by youth in Letugbene, a neighbouring community. The Shell staff also died in the massacre.

Spokesmen of the Nigerian government had sought to represent the fifteen militias as ‘irresponsible hostage-takers’ in the wake of the slaughter. But those massed at the hospital that morning spoke only of heroes who had fallen in the battle for ‘Ijaw liberation.’

Okonta interviewed Oboko Bello, an Ijaw civil-society leader who traced a clear chain of command between Shell and the soldiers who murdered the boatful of MEND insurgents and Shell workers:

“Shell was in direct communication with the commanders of the Joint Task Force, even up to the time our young men set out in their boats to rescue the Shell worker in Letugbene. These young men were not hostage takers. They were Ijaw patriots, selflessly working to repair the damaged peace between the oil company and our people. For this they were ambushed and murdered by soldiers in the service of Shell.”

Then, as now, the Delta is betrayed by broken promises and military violence. With no end in sight to the devastation of the ecosystem and the ongoing exploitation of Nigeria’s oil, it is unlikely that the wider drama of the Delta’s will end as upliftingly as Hibbert’s movie.

For the past few months, the Nigerian military has waged war on the Niger Delta in a desperate attempt to restore Nigeria’s faltering oil production, which has almost halved due to security concerns.

Tuesday 15th September is due to be the last day of the ceasefire observed by MEND, the main group of insurgents in the oil-rich Niger Delta. The Federal Government’s amnesty for militants expires on 4^th October, and beyond it the prospects for a peaceful resolution to the crisis will be remote unless the long-standing grievances of the region are addressed.

Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project writes in a new blog, Niger Delta Rising:

It is clear, that the Nigerian government is getting ready to mount a massive military offensive in the Niger Delta…Despite all the firepower and sophisticated weaponry that it has acquired in recent months, there is no reason to believe that this offensive will be any more successful in bringing the insurgency to an end than any of its previous military operations.

Evidence of the Nigerian government stockpiling arms includes recent international deals with Israeli, Malaysian, Singaporean, Dutch, and Russian companies. And some of these lethal imports have been paid for by Shell Nigeria’s largest business partner and shareholder, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation:

The Nigerian Navy also recently procured 35 new machine-gun equipped fast patrol boats in a deal that was paid for by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, reportedly on the instructions of President Yar’adua.

Yar’adua appears to be preparing for a major civil conflict, despite admissions from retired Nigerian General Victor Malu, that there is no military solution to the Niger Delta crisis.

While the crisis is complex, much of the blame falls on the multinational oil companies and their accomplices, the Nigerian Government. Village communities are infuriated by the many broken promises and ongoing neglect and undevelopment of the Niger Delta region, which provides the bulk of the nation’s wealth. As Volman points out:

Most members of MEND say that the government’s amnesty was not made in good faith and that they have no confidence that that the government will honor its promises to improve the lives of the Delta impoverished residents or to fix the massive environmental damage caused by decades of unregulated oil production.

Decades of pollution and gas flaring by oil companies like Shell, aided by a succession of corrupt Nigerian regimes has left the once fertile Niger Delta one of the worst oil-affected ecosystems on the planet, according to a 2006 report by WWF.

The ongoing Nigerian military offensive in the Delta confirms the unacceptable human cost of Nigerian oil. It means extra-judicial killings, routine human rights abuses, torture and imprisonment for any person the Joint Task Force labels a ‘militant’. The military’s objective is to increase oil production. But military crackdowns do not make the region more secure, nor do they address the injustices of decades of pollution and neglect.

Any oil companies with a serious commitment to human rights would refuse to operate behind such a brutal military shield. The Nigerian government must stop its lethal spending spree, and instead invest in protecting its people from the impact of the oil industry by stopping the gas flares and oil spills that are destroying the Delta region.

The government estimates as many as 20,000 militants could participate in the programme… Under the plan, the screening of gunmen and collecting of weapons will begin on Aug. 6 at 15 amnesty camps located in Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and other southern states in the Niger Delta. [President] Yar’Adua was expected to ask state governments in the Niger Delta, oil companies and international organisations to share the costs of the amnesty programme. It was not clear how much money was needed.

The cracks have already begun to show, and the unclarity of the government’s message was met with consternation by the Ijaw Elders and Leaders Forum. The Nigerian news service, NEXT, reported that:

Ijaw leaders have queried the offer of amnesty to Niger Delta militants, pointing attention to section 175 (1) (a) of the 1999 Constitution. According to them: “there has been no conviction against any of the alleged militants to warrant the granting of amnesty.”… The forum noted that that seven months after the submission of the report of the Technical Committee on Niger Delta, the Federal Government had taken no concrete step to implement any of its recommendations.

Despite the fact that the Nigerian army still occupies the region, militants have retaliated by blowing up pipelines and oil infrastructure belonging to Shell, Chevron, Agip and Exxon, a move which helped push the world oil price up to $69. Come 6th August, the government may be less optimistic that insurgents from the main militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) will be getting in line to handover their weapons.

Urgent action is needed from all sides to halt the killing of innocent civilians. The conflict is exacerbated by the joint failure of multinational oil companies and the government to respect the rights of local communities, many of whom suffer the daily impacts of gas flaring and oil spills on their land and health. A better way to fight the cycle of violent conflict is to address people’s long-standing grievances: invest urgently in local development and povery alleviation, compensate communities for violations of their rights and enforce protection of the environment.