A Nigerian militant group responsible for most of the attacks that have crippled the country’s oil industry has called off a one-month truce, the group’s spokesperson said on Wednesday.
Gunmen attacked an oil rig and kidnapped five expatriates overnight, police said. It was not immediately clear if the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), which called off its truce, was involved.
Security sources said the rig, located at Soku in Rivers state, is operated by Royal Dutch Shell. A Shell spokesperson declined to comment. The nationalities of the people abducted were not known and it was not clear if there was any impact on oil output.
The rebels wants to hold direct talks with the Nigerian government on its demand for local communities in the impoverished delta to control oil revenues, the spokesperson said.
”Whenever the Nigerian government is willing to dialogue directly with militia groups, we will be willing to make ourselves available,” said the spokesperson, who uses the pseudonym Jomo Gbomo, in an email to Reuters.
”We have called off our truce. It is ridiculous for our guns to remain silent while the military murders our civilians with impunity,” he said.
The rebels had declared a truce until July 3 and had previously said that when that expired, it would assess efforts by the new government to resolve the crisis in the Niger Delta and decide whether to extend the truce or not.
The end of the truce is a blow to President Umaru Yar’Adua, who came to power on May 29 promising urgent action to bring peace to the oil-producing region.
”It appears the Nigerian government believes we will be pacified with the building of schools and clinics while they ignore the serious issue of resource control. We will not,” said Gbomo.
”We seek to dialogue with the Nigerian government, through a neutral arbiter, on the issue of the return of the resources of the people of the Niger Delta, to their rightful owners.”
Nigeria is the world’s eighth-biggest exporter of crude oil, but production is currently down by more than 700 000 barrels per day, or a quarter of total capacity. The outages are mostly due to attacks on oil facilities by the MEND over the past year and a half. – Reuters