Reminder of Shell's Recent History before Rossport.

mayo | environment | other press Sunday January 01, 2006 20:56 by Niall Harnett - Shell to Sea / Rossport Solidarity Camp / Gluaiseacht

From the Ocean as Trash Pit to the land as Oil Slick.

This piece is a nice synopsis by Naomi Klein who summed up well Shell's recent history in her book 'No Logo'. I think it's worth reminding ourselves constantly why Shell are Hell.

Dempsey pumps for Shell.

Since the 1950s, Shell Nigeria has extracted $30 billion worth of oil from the land of the Ogoni people, in the Niger Delta. Oil revenue makes up 80 per-cent of the Nigerian economy - $10 billion annually - and, of that, more than half comes from Shell. But not only have the Ogoni people been deprived of the profits from their rich natural resource, many still live with-out running water or electricity, and their land and water have been poisoned by open pipelines, oil spills and gas fires.

Under the leadership of the writer and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) campaigned for reform, and demanded compensation from Shell. In response, and in order to keep the oil profits flowing into the government's coffers, General Sani Abacha directed the Nigerian military to take aim at the Ogoni. They killed and tortured thousands. The Ogoni not only blamed Abacha for the attacks, they also accused Shell of treating the Nigerian military as a private police force, paying it to quash peaceful protest on Ogoni land, in addition to giving financial support and legitimacy to the Abacha regime.

Facing mounting protests within Nigeria, Shell withdrew from Ogoni land in 1993 - a move that only put further pressure on the military to remove the Ogoni threat. A leaked memo from the head of the Rivers State internal Security Force of the Nigerian Army was quite explicit: "Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence. ... Recommendations: Wasting operations during MOSOP and other gatherings making constant military presence justifiable. Wasting targets cutting across communities and leadership cadres especially vocal individuals of various groups.

On May 10, 1994 - five days after the memo was written - Ken Saro-Wiwa said, "This is it. They [the Nigerian military] are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.” Twelve days later, he was arrested and tried for murder. Before receiving his sentence, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal, "I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial. The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come." Then, on November 10, 1995 - despite pressure from the international community, including the Canadian and Australian governments, and to a lesser extent the governments of Germany and France - the Nigerian military government executed Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni leaders who had protested against Shell. It became an international incident and, once again, people took their protests to their Shell stations, widely boycotting the company. In San Francisco Greenpeaceniks staged a re-enact- ment of Saro-Wiwa's murder, with the noose fastened around the towering Shell sign.

As Reclaim the Streets' John Jordan said of multinationals: "Inadvertently, they have helped us see the whole problem as one system." And here was that interconnected system in action: Shell, intent on sinking a monstrous oil platform off the coast of Britain, was simultaneously entangled in a human-rights debacle in Nigeria, in the same year that it laid off workers (despite earning huge profits), all so that it could pump gas into the cars of London - the very issue that had launched Reclaim the Streets. Because Ken Saro-Wiwa was a poet and playwright, his case was also claimed by the inter-national freedom-of-expression group, PEN. Writers, including the English playwright Harold Pinter and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer, took up the cause of Saro-Wiwa's right to express his views against Shell, and turned his persecution into the highest-profile free- expression case since the government of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, offering a bounty on his head. In an article for The New York Times, Gordimer wrote that "to buy Nigeria's oil under the conditions that prevail is to buy oil in exchange for blood. Other people's blood; the exaction of the death penalty on Nigerians."

The convergence of social-justice, labor and environmental issues in the two Shell campaigns was not a fluke - it goes to the very heart of the emerging spirit of global activism. Ken Saro-Wiwa was killed for fighting to protect his environment, but an environment that encompassed more than the physical landscape that was being ravaged and despoiled by Shell's invasion of the delta. Shell's mistreatment of Ogoni land is both an environmental and a social issue, because natural-resource companies are notorious for lowering their standards when they drill and mine in third world counties. Shell’s opponents readily draw parallels between the company’s actions in Nigeria, its history of collaborating with the former apartheid governments in South Africa, its presence in the Timor Gap in Indonesian occupied East Timor and its violent clashes with the Nahau people of the Peruvian Amazon.

... (And then they came to Rossport. As the banner, held by the Rossport Five, at the front of the National Shell to sea rally in Dublin on Saturday October 1st, said ... 'DEMPSEY PUMPS FOR SHELL'. - Niall)