Ethnic Dispute Stills Nigeria's Mighty Oil Wells

April 1, 2003 By SOMINI SENGUPTA <a href=www.nytimes.com>The new York Times

ESCRAVOS, Nigeria, March 29 — Across the river from a freshly razed village, the ChevronTexaco Oil Export Terminal sits like a ghost town at the edge of the vast Niger Delta.

The oil wellheads planted all along these rivers stand idle, like so many stiff, shadeless trees. The riverine villages are mostly deserted, the waterways mostly empty.

The technicolor oil spills that gloss miles of river and creek are one of the only reminders of the sweet, rich crude beneath these riverbeds that has made Nigeria the world's sixth-largest oil producer and the fifth-ranking supplier to the United States.

For two weeks, an intense spasm of political violence has shut down oil production here in the western Delta. Normally tenacious multinational companies like ChevronTexaco and Shell have evacuated all staff members and shut their facilities, even those more than 30 miles offshore.

All told, the uprising by a well-armed ethnic militia seeking to wrest power from the local government has stanched the flow of 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day, or 40 percent of this country's daily yield.

With stocks of crude oil and gasoline in the United States at their lowest in years, the shutdown could hardly come at a worse moment for Washington, which has increasingly turned to West Africa to diversify its oil supply beyond the Persian Gulf.

The disruption has set off already twitchy global oil markets, which jumped 12 percent last week on the prospect of having to absorb the shock from Nigeria as war roils Iraq and strikes and political tensions have hobbled another major supplier, Venezuela. It also explains why, for the oil industry, offshore oil exploration has become increasingly alluring, far from the glare of deprived Africans.

The oil installations here sit next door to some of the most destitute patches of this country, where villagers with no running water bathe, fish and defecate in rivers polluted by oil spills, either from the wellheads or the widespread illegal siphoning that enriches local gangsters.

Such vast wealth being drained from so poor a region has long been a volatile source of resentment for local people, who have occupied platforms and forced negotiations for profit-sharing in the past.

But this time, the conflict is between two local tribes, the Ijaw and the Itsekiri — one fishermen, the others farmers, who had lived peaceably for generations.

Neither disputes that the people of the Delta should profit from the wealth of this land. Rather, barely a month before elections, they are locked in a violent struggle over who should control the local government and the millions of dollars in patronage — and returned oil profits — that accrue from such dominion.

Even an Itsekiri partisan acknowledged the obvious. "Maybe if there had been no oil, these tensions would not have been created," said S. A. Ajuyah, 78, a retired state court judge.

The oil companies take pains to point out that, as far as they are concerned, they have no role to play in the dispute. "It's not community versus Shell," said Frank Efeduma, the spokesman for Shell Petroleum Development Company in Warri. "It's community versus community."

But the Ijaw see the oil companies as working hand in glove with their ethnic rivals, and vow to continue disrupting their operations. They decry the Itsekiri as part of a "triumvirate conspiracy" — along with the government and the oil multinationals — who have siphoned off a disproportionate share of oil company largesse.

"The Itsekiris enjoy employment more, they enjoy projects more," said Samson Y. Mamamu, a contractor by trade and a feisty Ijaw chief. "Why? They are the minority."

The Itsekiri, for their part, call themselves indigenes and accuse marauding Ijaw of trying to exterminate them as a way to gain control of the oil country.

"You cannot push us out of this homeland of ours," said Isaac Jemide, a lawyer and an Itsekiri chief. "If a percentage of the resources should come back to the owners of the area, the Itsekiris should be the beneficiaries, not the Ijaws."

The consequences of this tension have been unusually vicious. Ijaw militants have set upon Itsekiri villages, decapitating their residents, spraying them with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, according to refugees who have fled to the port city of Warri. Itsekiri leaders estimate at least 200 casualties.

The Nigerian military, in turn, has attacked the Ijaw, pulling up to their villages in gunboats and opening fire, according to Ijaw leaders. Ijaw say up to 50 of their people were killed, forcing them to fire back with what they describe, with a wry smile, as their "spiritual stones and pebbles." The military reported 11 casualties in its ranks.

A cease-fire declared earlier this week seems to have brought a tense standstill. The Nigerian Navy maintains its blockade of the waterways. With fresh attacks reported this week, refugees are not flooding back home. Oil company officials say they will not resume operations until the safety of their workers can be assured. That is unlikely to happen until after the elections, scheduled to begin April 19.

The violence has not left the oil facilities untouched. Part of at least one property was set afire. A Shell helicopter, trying to evacuate employees, was shot at. A caterer who served the ChevronTexaco tank farm was killed. Two navy gunboats were docked in front of the Chevron terminal today, and soldiers bicycled through the sealed compound.

The competing claims of the groups are virtually impossible to verify, because waterways remain impassable. Journalists who flew by helicopter to the ChevronTexaco terminal, in an attempt to visit a razed Itsekiri village, were detained before being flown back to Warri in a company helicopter.

No ChevronTexaco representatives appeared before the journalists. A group of men in civilian dress, who refused to identify themselves except to say they worked for the government, angrily said the company would not allow any visitors to pass.

The Delta State governor, James Ibori, a veteran politician running for reelection and with legal troubles of his own, has offered to help address the Ijaw's grievances; he is widely perceived to be their favored candidate. But the Ijaw are hardly ready to call it quits.

Escorting foreign journalists this week to their headquarters, in a small fishing village called Okeronkoko, Ijaw militia leaders vowed to boycott the coming elections.

They also promised to keep up the agitation against big oil if their demands for greater political power are not met. "We will paralyze them," declared Kingsley Otuaro, the secretary general of the Federation of Niger Delta Ijaw Communities. "Even if everyone is killed, one or two will survive and create havoc on the oil industry."