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.

Saharareporter’s investigations revealed that trouble started today, following the relentless protests in the wake of the Bori camp proposal. Chiefs, elders and youths of the Sogho community convened at the request of Mr. Nkpai [a government official], to try to convince the villagers to accept the relocating of the controversial military facility in their community.

When the meeting commenced and Nkpai introduced the topic and the irate villagers in attendance started shouting at the top of their voices, telling him to keep quiet, as he had not done anything to help their community. Some of them argued that in spite of his high position in the government and despite the contracts given to him to provide services for the community, he had failed to do so and instead, embezzled their money.

In the uproar, the police attached to [Nkpai] fired their guns at two of the youths, killing them instantly.
Angered by the arbitrary shooting of the helpless youths, some of them attacked Mr. Nkpai’s regal country home in the community, and with the man inside it, set fire to the property.

In recent weeks, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) stepped up its campaign  against the military base, mobilising protestors across the region. Ogoni activists condemned Sunday’s violence and affirmed their committment to peaceful protest.

The planned military base is a highly controversial move by the Rivers State Government. Ogoniland is already under heavy security. On a typical journey from Port Harcourt villagers will be stopped by at least five or six police checkpoints and subjected to a routine of harrassment, extortion and intimidation. Increasing the level of security forces is widely seen as unnecessary and is deeply unpopular. Legborsi Pygbara of MOSOP argues:

It is illegal to site a military base in Ogoniland. Ogoni is an indigenous territory… If the government attempts to do this, it means it will fight the UN, which it can’t afford to.

Many Ogoni people lived through the brutal military crackdowns of the 1990s and are strongly opposed to the plan. During the 1990s, Shell collaborated with military operations that led to crimes against humanity and gross human rights abuses in Ogoniland.

The escalation in repression coincides with Shell’s plans to resume oil production in Ogoni, which ceased in 1993. Earlier this year, it was announced that Shell plans to work in partnership with Nigeria’s National oil company NNPC to re-develop its lucrative assets in Ogoniland.

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.

London activists label Shell Guilty before the Shell AGM, May 19th

The same week that Shell are on trial for complicity in brutal crackdowns against the Ogoni people, including the murder of non-violent activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian military has launched a large offensive against the people of the Niger Delta, in an attempt to crush armed insurgent groups. All the while, Shell, the largest oil company in the region, continue to flare gas at record levels, aggravating local communities and contributing to the latest round of an increasingly bloody conflict.

Brutal military attacks have rained down on the Western Delta from the air, sea and land since last Wednesday. Despite attempts by the military to cover up the massacres, the Ijaw National Congress, which represents the region’s largest ethnic group, has said that the attacks have “resulted in over a thousand deaths, because we dared to ask for our rights,” in the mostly Ijaw communities of Gbaramatu, Okerenkoko, and Oporoza.” According to Amnesty International they have received reports that indicate hundreds of civilians have already been killed. The military presence has made independent access to the communities difficult and claims impossible to verify.

Shell has a responsibility for creating the crisis that engulfs the entire region. While the Nigerian military burn entire villages in their assaults, Shell is burning gas in those same villages on an unimaginable scale. Gas flaring poisons all communities, and angers all ethnicities across the Delta. Flaring releases toxins such as benzene, linked to cancer and other serious illnesses. For over 30 years, Shell have continually broken their promise to end gas flaring, pushing a number of desperate youth down the path of militancy. The conflict in the Niger Delta has changed dramatically since the 1990s, but the injustices remain the same.

Ogoni people protesting against Shell’s gas flaring in the 1990s
The recent violence echoes the crackdowns against the Ogoni people, who led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, rose up to peacefully demand environmental and social justice in the 1990s. As the Wiwa v Shell trial charges Shell with complicity in murder next Wednesday, Shell continue to collaborate with the Nigerian authorities and abuse the human rights of local communities on a daily basis.

We demand that Shell end gas flaring as one of the essential conditions to defusing the current conflict. Even the highest level of the Nigerian military have admitted that the solution cannot be military, but must address the local grievances that Shell and other oil companies have ignored for so long. We condemn Shell’s ongoing collusion with the Nigerian authorities against the interests and human rights of Deltan communities. We stand together in denouncing the recent acts of violence and urge both the Nigerian military and insurgents to allow food and medical aid to reach those in need.