Ethnic clash roils Nigeria -- Tribal fighting in oil-rich country could threaten world supplies

seattlepi.nwsource.com Saturday, March 22, 2003 SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NEWS SERVICES

OGBE-IJOH, Nigeria -- Exhausted, hungry villagers -- who were fleeing days of fighting in the oil-rich Niger Delta -- told yesterday of Nigerian soldiers and ethnic militants firing indiscriminately, leaving scores dead.

Meanwhile, officials signaled that the ethnic conflict could also threaten world oil supplies as the fighting has begun to limit oil shipments from the country, the fifth-largest exporter of oil to the United States in 2002, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Royal Dutch-Shell, the largest oil producer in Nigeria, invoked force majeure yesterday afternoon, effectively warning customers that events outside the company's control could delay oil deliveries by up to two weeks from its Bonny and Forcados terminals.

ChevronTexaco made a similar announcement Thursday, though the company did not specify the potential duration of delays.

Officials with both companies sought to play down the effect of the violence, but both have removed their employees from their facilities in the Niger Delta.

The fighting between Ijaw and Itsekiri tribes began March 12 and has since drawn in Nigerian military troops who, witnesses say, have launched retaliatory attacks against Ijaw villages in the swampy region.

Ijaw militants say 50 of their fighters were killed in fighting with soldiers in the village of Okorenkoko on Thursday. Ten soldiers were killed in an Ijaw ambush near the village of Oporoza, Nigerian newspapers reported yesterday.

Dozens of deaths have been reported in fighting elsewhere.

The fighting is taking place in a remote warren of creeks and swamps where roads and telephones are practically non-existent, despite the region's oil wealth.

The Niger Delta is the source of nearly all the 2 million barrels of oil Nigeria produces daily.

Some oil-industry analysts and traders cautioned that with so many problems bedeviling world oil markets, a prolonged reduction in Nigerian oil shipments could send prices higher once again.

"This has been building for months, but it has been tremendously overshadowed by events in Venezuela, then Iraq and the cold winter we've had," said John Kilduff, senior vice president of energy risk management at the New York office of Fimat USA, a unit of the French bank Societe Generale. "Nigeria is a key source of supply, and in this kind of situation, we need every barrel."

Nigerian military officials have denied attacking civilians, but as word of fighting spread, villagers were abandoning their communities as soon as they heard gunfire in the distance.

They fear a repeat of the military massacres in 1999 and 2001 that left hundreds of unarmed villagers dead. The conflict is rooted in a longstanding grievance by Ijaws, the region's largest ethnic group. They accuse President Olusegun Obasanjo's government of colluding with minority Itsekiris to draw up unfavorable voting boundaries before April elections. More than 10,000 people have been killed since Obasanjo's election in 1999.