Local Nigerian leaders were on Tuesday seeking a political end to a bloody uprising in the Niger Delta which has crippled the region’s oil industry and cut crude exports by more than a third.
Armed militants from the Ijaw ethnic group are locked in a standoff with a joint army and navy taskforce in the swamps south and west of the oil city of Warri after ten days of clashes that have left at least 13 dead.
The fighting has driven many hundreds of refugees from the Delta and forced three oil multinationals to evacuate facilities and shut down wells that would normally produce 767 500 barrels of oil per day.
Ijaw youth gangs have threatened to destroy the abandoned plants if their demands for greater political representation are not met in time for next month’s national legislative and presidential elections.
The army says it is now in control of the situation, having sent hundreds of additional troops into the Delta and blockaded rivers leading into Ijaw territory with navy patrol boats.
But tension is still high in the area, and in the city of Warri itself, 320 kilometres southeast of Lagos, where Ijaw live side-by-side with their rivals from the Itsekiri and Urhobo communities. Residents said that troops and armoured vehicles have been deployed in the city, where ethnic clashes last month claimed dozens of lives, and an Ijaw militant leader said there had been gunfire.
”There were some gunshots this morning on the waterfront, we don’t know of any casualties,” said Oboko Bello, president of the Federation of Ijaw Delta Communities.
”The military men have the whole area cordoned off. There is no market, no business life at all. But we are getting used to this, we are suffering in silence,” he said.
Bello said that his group had received a delegation from Delta State governor James Ibori on Monday, and that it expected to hold a meeting with him soon to seek his support for its cause.
Delta State’s information commissioner, Judith Enamuotor, could not confirm a meeting was planned, but said that Ibori was looking into the situation and would ask the national electoral commission to respond.
”I think the Independent National Electoral Commission has a role to play in the dispute,” she said.
The Ijaw claim to be a majority in the Warri South West local government area, a district of dense coastal swamp dotted with Ijaw and Itsekiri fishing villages and oil wells.
But currently Itsekiri communities have six seats on the local council, to the Ijaw’s four. The dispute has triggered a number of clashes between the groups, including a conflict in 1999 which claimed 200 lives.
Ijaw frustration boiled over on March 13 when local youths clashed with a naval patrol in a gunbattle that left five militants dead — according to the Ijaw — and three soldiers dead — according to the army.
”Until there is majority rule under democracy in Warri South West all anti-democratic forces must watch out for an Ijaw Mass Action,” the militants warned in a letter to Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo.
In the clashes that followed at least 13 people have died — six soldiers, two navy sailors and five civilians — according to the army. Refugees fleeing the area claim that navy gunboats and Ijaw raiders have fired indiscriminately into villages, killing scores of people.
Since the start of the violence Anglo-Dutch producer Shell, US-based ChevronTexaco and France’s TotalFinaElf have shut down all the facilities in the crisis area, evacuated staff and cut production.
Coming at a time when the war in Iraq already has world oil markets on edge, the crisis has increased nervousness among oil traders. Nigeria, a socially impoverished but oil-rich country of 120-million people, depends on crude exports for 97% of its export revenue.
With an Opec quota of just over two million barrels per day it is the world’s sixth-largest exporter. – Sapa-AFP