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| Africa Subsaharan | |
| Nigerian Militants Threaten Oil Tankers | |
| 2006-02-20 | |
| WARRI, Nigeria (AP) - Militants who kidnapped nine foreign oil workers in a flurry of attacks that forced a 20 percent cut in Nigerian crude exports vowed Sunday to escalate the violence, threatening for the first time to fire rockets at international oil tankers. While the military said tankers in Nigerian waters were safe, the West African nation is reeling from militant attacks that blasted oil and gas pipelines Saturday, damaged a key oil loading terminal and halted the flow of more than 500,000 barrels a day. Nigeria is Africa's leading oil exporter and the United States' fifth-largest supplier, usually exporting 2.5 million barrels daily. Efie Alari, who identified himself as commander of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, told The Associated Press by telephone Sunday his group was poised to attack foreign oil tankers offshore. We'll use our rockets on the ships to stop them from taking our oil," Alari said. His identity could not be independently verified, but the call came from a number used previously by the group based in the oil region of the Niger River delta. The military said it would do whatever was necessary to ensure the safety of tankers. "I don't know their capabilities, but we're not leaving anything to chance," said Maj. Said Hammed, a spokesman for the military task force in the delta. "The assurance has been given at the highest level of government that oil tankers are safe in Nigerian waters. That assurance remains."
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #4 The group responsible for most of these attacks is the Coalition for Militant Action in the Niger Delta (COMA), aka the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which appears to be the main group active in the region and is led by the now-imprisoned Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, which is almost certainly a pseudonym that was adopted either when he took up Armed Struggle(TM) or converted to Islam, whichever came first. Debka claims that they have contacts with Abu Musab Zarqawi, but God only knows if that's true. The Ijaw (who call themselves the Izon) are a primarily Catholic ethnic group of about 14,000,000 people who live mostly in the Ondo, Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states of Nigeria and were one of the first Nigerian ethnic groups to make contact with European missionaries from Spain and Portugal during the 1600s who converted them to Catholicism. Because of their location along the Niger Delta, most of them are fishermen and they are organized into a series of "boat clans" called Houses, members of which elect leaders called House Lords to represent the interests of the House to the Nigerian central government, protect the House's trade interests, and lead them in war. After oil was discovered in Nigeria in 1958, English, Dutch, Italian, French, and US companies have set up agreements with successive Nigerian governments to operate oil facilities there. Because of the Nigerian government's domination by the country's Muslim minority, many Ijaw believe that they are not receiving a fair share of the oil money being made off resources in their regions and hence have taken to forming groups like the Egbesu Boys, the Ijaw National Congress (INC), the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Movement for Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEN), and the Niger Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF), of which COMA is an evolutionary descendant of. A lot of these groups, despite their name, seem to be little more than bandit gangs who justify their activities using political rhetoric. In December 1998, 4,000 members of the Egbesu Boys and the IYC issued a list of demands known as the Kaiama Declaration that called for the creation of "Ijawland" and warned foreign oil companies to cease operations by December 30 and not to do business with the Nigerian government. In response to the Declaration, the Nigeria government sent 2 warships and 10-15,000 to Bayelsa state, placing it under martial law until January 4 and killing at least 20 Ijaw (the government claims these were rebels, the Ijaw claim they were civilians). Helicopter gunships killed 35 additional Ijaw on January 6, 1999 leading to a reimposition of martial law in Bayelsa until January 11. It should be noted that whatever view one takes concerning the Ijaw rebels, their people have been rather badly oppressed by the Nigerian government. For instance, in May 2003 the Nigerian military killed 12 Ijaw House Lords after they announced that their Houses were boycotting the upcoming parliamentary elections. Moujahid Dokubo-Asari is the leader of COMA and despite being a convert to Islam along with most of his group has the support of a number of powerful House Lords that enables him to operate among the Ijaw with relatively little interference. It seems that ethnicity trumps religion in this regard, since COMA is both the largest and most effective Ijaw group still in active with 10,000 and it protects the House Lords who support it from their traditional enemies, the neighboring Itsekiri, who control the oil facilities around Warri. They don't have any ties that I can determine to either the Nigeria Taliban that came into being in Yobe state back in December 2003 or former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who is alleged by the UN war crimes tribunal to have worked with al-Qaeda and is apparently still planning some kind of comeback in Liberia. Asari is on record as having praised bin Laden after 9/11 and was captured by Nigerian authorities in September 2005 and is now charged with treason. Interestingly, London police told the Nigerian Independent newspaper that Depriye Alamieyeseigha, the former Bayelsa governor (now on trial for laundering millions of dollars to COMA) was involved with senior al-Qaeda leaders in London as part of an elaborate plot interdict world oil supply by using COMA to attack Nigeria's oil facilities. If true, it seems that Alamieyeseigha was Asari's superior within al-Qaeda and formalized the plan together with Abu Qatada, bin Laden's top representative in Europe. |
| Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-02-20 03:10 |
| #3 Nigerian Civil War - Essentially Muslim versus Christian and the Muslims won due to support by Europe (primarily. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-20 01:34 |
| #2 I dunno. My understanding was the most of the Muslims were in the north, not the delta. This is a country that has seen a couple of civil wars in its time, so having a bunch of armed thugs running around under a polysyllable name isn't unusual. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2006-02-20 00:36 |
| #1 It's not about liberation or locals. It's all about allen. Just more "global jihad. |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet O' Doom 2006-02-20 00:33 |