November 11, 2001	Sunday	Shaba’an 24, 1422

LAGOS, Nov 10: The people of Nigeria’s Ogoniland cannot be reconciled with the local unit of Royal/Dutch Shell because the oil multinational has not changed its ways, Ogoni leaders said in newspaper interviews published on Saturday.

It is difficult to reconcile with something that is bad, Ledum Mitee, President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) said in an interview published by the independent Punch newspaper.

Nigeria’s special human rights commission, which ended public hearing of petitions about human rights abuses last month, said in September after a series of meetings with the Ogonis and Shell that it hoped to reconcile the two parties.

The prospects for reconciliation are high, commission chairman Chukwudifu Oputa said then.

However, Mitee, in an interview with another newspaper, the independent Guardian, published on Saturday, said Shell is still acting in the same irresponsible way as it used to do.

In fact, the relationship between Ogoni people and Shell could not have been worse. It is almost as it was prior to the issues of 1994, he said.

The same elements, the same style of using economic blackmail to prompt government into using brute force to deal with the communities are still being practised, Mitee told the Guardian.

Reuters was unable to obtain comment from Shell Nigeria.

Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoniland in the oil-rich Niger Delta in 1993 after a violent campaign against it.

It was producing just under 30,000 barrels daily from Ogoniland when it quit the area. It accounts for roughly half of Nigeria’s total daily output of over two million barrels.

Shell owns some 14 oil wells in Ogoniland, now abandoned, that the Ogonis say are damaging the environment.

The interviews were published to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the hanging of writer Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists in 1995 by the then military dictatorship of the late Sani Abacha.

They were convicted by a military court after charges of murdering four moderate chiefs.

The hangings led to the isolation of the Abacha military government and worldwide protests against Shell. Military rule ended in Nigeria in 1999.

The families of the Ogoni Nine have sued Shell in a New York court, accusing the company of recruiting police and the military to attack villages and suppress organised opposition.—Reuters