By Jill Goetz
Ten years ago, when the U.S. Congress passed the Anti-Apartheid Act imposing sanctions on South Africa, that country's black majority was unified in its support of the move. But opinion regarding sanctions against Nigeria, both inside and outside the West African nation, is divided -- making such penalties harder to enact, according to U.S. Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.), head of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Payne spoke at a Saturday evening banquet, the capstone event of a Cornell conference Feb. 23-25 titled "Minority Rights and Environmental Justice in Africa: The Agony of the Ogonis in Nigeria." Many Ogonis, an ethnic group living in south eastern Nigeria, have been harassed, imprisoned and even killed since they began protesting human rights abuses at the hands of the Nigerian military and environmental damage wrought by Royal Dutch/Shell, which has been extracting billions of dollars' worth of oil from Ogoni land since discovering it there in 1958. At the conference, human rights and environmental ac tivists from around the world discussed how to pressure the Nigerian government and Shell into cleaning up their acts.
"When the Anti-Apartheid Act was passed in 1986, it was because there was a unified
voice from black South Africans that said South Africa's government must come down,"
Payne said. "But Nigerians speak from different positions. We have some pretty prominent
Nigerian Americans -- including one in my
own district -- who have told me that I have no right to interfere in their country. They say, 'What right does the Black Caucus have in telling Nigeria what to do?'"
Payne has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives, the Nigerian Democracy Act (H.R. 2697), that would pressure the government of Gen. Sani Abacha to make more progress on his purported road to democracy. Co-sponsored by 55 House colleagues, in cluding New York Democrats Gary Ackerman and Charles Rangel and Republican Amo Houghton, the bill would restrict assistance to
Nigerian government agencies, ban new loans by the World Bank and U.S. firms and prevent Nigerian teams from participating in the Olympics. Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R -Kan.) has introduced a similar bill in the U.S. Senate.
The House bill falls short of endorsing an embargo of Nigerian oil, the fourth largest supplier to the United States, or a boycott of Royal Dutch/Shell, which produces nearly half of Nigerian oil.
Embargoes "are not a very easy thing for countries to do," Payne said. "It is especially difficult when you have multinational companies, because if the United States imposes a sanction, [Shell] can still come around the back door. To achieve a total embargo, you have to consider naval blockades of ports, including Port Harcourt [in Ogoni land]. But if this legislation does not work -- if the government of Nigeria continues to behave in a pariah fashion -- then perhaps the only final thing we can do to try and restore democracy is have an oil embargo."
Panelists at the Cornell conference from such environmental groups as Greenpeace,
Sierra Club and Rainforest Action Network described the impact of 96 oil wells spread
across the Ogonis' 650 square kilometers of fertile agricultural land, where networks of
above-ground pipelines lie within meters of Ogonis' huts and oil spills have contaminated their drinking water. Human rights activists from Movement for the Survival of
the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and Amnesty International denounced Shell as well as the
military, which has plundered Ogoni villages and continues to imprison activists.
The Ogonis received worldwide attention last November when poet, playwright
and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, a founder of MOSOP and a leading critic of
the government and of Shell, was hanged along with eight other Ogoni activists. Honoring him at the Cornell conference were his brother, Dr. Owens Wiwa, and son, Ken Wiwa Jr., both living in London.
"You will forgive me if I am somewhat straightforward in my speech," said Owens Wiwa, "for I speak with the accumulated pain of the Ogoni people. We don't want to be objects of pity by anyone. We just want our environment back, so that we can plant our food, eat our fish, drink our water."
At one Saturday panel, Wiwa challenged Purificacion V. Quisumbing, representative of the U.N. high commissioner for human rights (and a former Fulbright scholar at Cornell), to defend the U.N.'s position and explain why it hasn't come down harder on the Abacha regime.
"I think you can very safely say that the United Nations has thrown the book on the human rights situation in Nigeria," Quisumbing said. She noted the resolution passed by the General Assembly in December 1995 calling to suspend Nigeria from the Commonwealth and condemning the execution of the nine Ogoni activists.
"I will not apologize for the United Nations," said Quisumbing, who joined the organization in November after working for UNICEF and in her native Philippines. "But yes, we can do much more; and now that I'm on board, I hope we will."
Owens' nephew Ken, a 27-year-old journalist with The Guardian in London, said, "Shell bears at the very least some responsibility for my father's murder" and called for a worldwide boycott of the company's products.
"Will a boycott of Shell be enough?" he said. "I don't know. But it is a starting place."
Sponsors of the Cornell conference included the Rose Goldsen Fund, Institute for African Development, Office of Minority Educational Affairs, International Students Programming Board and the Cornell and Ithaca chapters of Amnesty International.