Renewed ethnic clashes kill 20 in southern oil town

A new outbreak of ethnic fighting has left at least 20 people dead in Nigeria's southern oil city of Warri, residents and police said on Sunday. The violence broke out on Friday night in the MaCiver area of the city and continued overnight as ethnic Ijaw and Itsekiri militias armed with automatic weapons exchanged fire on the streets. The lull which followed the heavy deployment of security forces in armoured tanks and the imposition of a dusk-to-dawn curfew on Saturday, was shattered in the early hours of Sunday as fresh gun battles erupted. By Sunday afternoon the fighting had intensified despite the heavy security presence, residents said. "By Saturday afternoon I had counted no less than 20 bodies on the streets," Tuoyo Ine, a Warri resident, told IRIN. "With the latest violence the figures can only go up." Joseph Abiona, the police commander in charge of Warri, confirmed the latest eruption of violence in the troubled town but refused to give any details. "It's the usual Ijaw/Itsekiri trouble and we're trying to deal with it," he said. Warri, a sprawling city of one million people set amid the swamps of the Niger delta, is a major base for the oil companies that pump the crude oil that is the lifeline of the Nigerian economy from nearby oil platforms. Fighting between Ijaws and Itsekiris in March had left at least 100 people dead and forced oil transationals operating in the area to shut down facilities producing 40 percent of Nigeria's daily export of two million barrels. At the heart of the violence are claims and counter-claims to the ownership of oil-rich land. The individuals and communities who control the land mop up the many benefits that can be extracted from the oil companies whose wells have been drilled there. Ijaws accuse President Olusegun Obasanjo's government of abetting an Itsekiri ascendancy over their neighbours, giving them the best of government patronage and most of the few amenities that come to the impoverished region. There is also deep-rooted resentment against the foreign oil companies, perceived as filling the government coffers with petro-dollars and repatriating fat profits to their shareholders while leaving the inhabitants of the delta in miserable poverty.