State-sponsored massacre deepens Delta insecurity

The Niger Delta Civil Society Coalition (NDCSC) is shocked beyond belief learning of the latest massacre of people and razing to ground zero, communities of the Niger Delta by the President Yar’ Adua-led regime in a ‘democracy’.

The very sick, impotent and illegitimate government of President Ya’Adua – that has hardly moved Nigeria an inch forward in terms of any visible human development – has shown, by its authorisation of the latest massacre and orphaning of further thousands of children in the Gbaranmatu kingdom in the latest inferno, that there is a well-written script and strategy for regimes in Nigeria. They will go to any length, genocide inclusive, to expend the peoples of the region and wipe out their livelihoods, to enable oil that fed their primitive accumulation of wealth, flow without let or hindrance.

The indiscriminate shelling and slaughtering of women, children and helpless seniors in the communities by federal soldiers of fortune, has no doubt put a lid on the mockery public relation exercise, flagged off recently by the president, in the name of amnesty and peaceful settlement in the region.

The cleansing strategy adopted in the wasting of Odi, Odioma, Agge, Umuechem has been repeated in the Gbaranmatu kingdom. All the time, the military makes sure that the number of the raped, slaughtered, maimed and abused are never fully known in order not to horrify a conscious humane world.

The level of human rights abuses in the region by the government and military task forces has assumed a very high level proportion, that merits international attention for necessary action, by way of bringing pressure to bear on an unresponsive illiberal regime, to humanely deal with the legitimate and just demands of the peoples of the region.

The NDCSC maintains and very strongly too, that the conflict in the Niger Delta is about age-long gross and attested violations of cultural, social, economic, political and environmental rights of the minority citizens. It is therefore, beyond the orchestration of criminality and oil bunkering that deflates from the fundamentality and community support for the genuine struggle for social justice.

The orchestration of criminality and greed theory, leaving out friends and members of the regime who drive the arms proliferation and oil bunkering industrial complex for punishment, continue to make the federal government and oil multinationals look good internationally, in the face of human depredation in the region.

Let it not be forgotten that structural violence of the state, linked with inhuman standards of operations of oil multinationals, began the current cycle of violence. The criminal response of the state to what was a peaceful agitation by the Ogoni social movement, led by late Ken Saro-Wiwa, led to a change of strategy by peoples who now genuinely believe that an imposed government holds no measure of security to their livelihood. This has inevitably led to the growing secondary forms of violence, such as hostage taking and destruction of oil facilities.

The NDCSC wishes to strongly draw the attention of the international community and sister democracy movements, to the fact that human needs are continually being frustrated on a large scale by illegitimate federal and state regimes in the Niger Delta. Experience over the decades has shown that the more arbitrary law and order is enforced in the region to control helplessness and frustration, in the midst of abundance and evil governance, the more the helplessness and frustration.

Our genuine fear and concern is that, rather than military massacre to put a lid on demand for just peace; from the humiliation and further loss will spring some other forms of extreme agitation, to continue to emphasise and demonstrate to the world that continues to tolerate competititve authoritarian regimes in Nigeria, that there are features of the regimes in the Niger Delta that are repugnant to justice and human dignity, that are unacceptable to the peoples, and that are worth dying for.

The NDCSC therefore, wishes to renew the demand of the peoples of the region for just peace to mean: demand for sustainable development that has been deliberately kept away from them. They ask that the poor and vulnerable be at the centre of the development process in their communities – also the protection of the life opportunities of future generations and the natural systems on which all life depends.

The NDCSC once again calls on the global civilised nations and democracy movements to take their responsibility to protect human subjects anywhere in the world, including democratic principles seriously, by calling on the illiberal regimes in Nigeria, who are intent on destroying the enormous investment in democracy-building by democracy defenders, to urgently respond to the just demands of the peoples of the Niger Delta, as forced peace will surely compound the avoidable catastrophe waiting to happen in that part of the world.

Signed:

Anyakwee Nsirimovu
Chair, NDCSC

* The Niger Delta Civil Society Coalition (NDCSC)is an umbrella organisation for 300 civil society and community-based organisations in the Niger Delta.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/