Focus on efforts to remove small arms from Niger Delta

In Okrika, a small town near Nigeria's oil industry capital, Port Harcourt, two local chieftains had by inconvenient coincidence scheduled funerals of relatives on the same day in September. When efforts to get one or the other to move his event to another date failed, their rival supporters engaged in a shootout, using automatic rifles that included AK-47s. Three people died. Earlier in August, a disagreement between Ijaw communities in the same Niger Delta region had resulted in gunmen from Ogbodobiri and Oboro raiding the Ekeremor community, razing scores of buildings and shooting dead at least 10 people. Rights activists and security agencies worry that the Niger Delta - for long a centre of discontent among impoverished communities feeling cheated out of the region's oil wealth by government and oil companies - is awash with small weapons. Residents in the area resort to the gun even over minor communal disputes, leading to ever increasing insecurity that manifests as armed robbery and piracy on the regions innumerable waterways. A favourite pastime of the criminals is theft of crude oil by tapping into any of the thousands of kilometres of pipelines that criss-cross the region. The illicit trade on oil is believed by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government to be funded by influential businessmen and politicians, who arrange to sell the stolen crude - usually transferred from barges that operate in the creeks to ships offshore – either in the region or in the international oil market. Security agencies believe proceeds from the trade are eventually used to procure more arms that are funneled back into the region towards, fuelling further unrest and criminality. "The situation we have now was largely a fall-out of the (April) general elections," Azibaola Robert, rights activist and president of Niger Delta Human and Environmental Rescue Organisation (ND-HERO), told IRIN. "We discovered that the politicians had armed youths who acted as thugs for them during the elections with promises of financial rewards," he said. "The politicians have failed to fulfil the promises and these youths now use the guns to cause serious insecurity in the Niger Delta." Robert is the secretary of a coalition of non-governmental organisations which in June launched the Mop up the Arms Campaign (MAC), aimed not only at halting the proliferation but also ridding the Niger Delta of small arms and light weapons used in growing political violence and criminal activities in the region. The MAC coalition is headed by Ledum Mitee, president of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), the minority ethnic group campaigning for more access to the region’s oil wealth. Concerned that the rule of the gun will deflect attention from genuine political demands of the inhabitants of the region, the coalition has embarked on an enlightenment campaign to make local communities, opinion leaders, students, government officials and security agencies aware of the dangers posed by the proliferation of small weapons and light arms in the region. Apart mass media campaigns using radio, television and newspapers, the group has also undertaken advocacy visits to the governors and police authorities in three key Niger Delta states: Rivers, Cross River and Bayelsa. Next on the MAC coalition's programme are advocacy visits to Obasanjo, leaders of the federal legislative houses, heads of the police and other security agencies. During these visits, coalition members will be seeking to convince the Nigerian authorities not only to declare amnesty for those who surrender their weapons but also promise them financial rewards ranging between 10,000-20,000 naira (US $77.5-155) for each returned gun. After a successful advocacy campaign, the MAC coalition is hoping that an amnesty will be declared in January 2004 for all who surrender their weapons. "If the youths are encouraged to return the illegal arms with good financial reward, they can abandon their restiveness and invest the money in useful ventures," said Robert. "One gun retrieved means several lives saved and property protected." While the government is yet to accept the guns-for-cash proposal, it appears to agree that a solution to the Niger Delta violence could be found in ridding the region of the easily available guns. Government conviction on this was apparently strengthened by the surge in ethnic and criminal violence in the western delta, near the oil town of Warri, which at a point this year disrupted the flow of about 40 percent of the country’s entire oil output of about two million barrels daily. Security sources said more than 500 undercover security agents have been sent into the Niger Delta in recent times to identify sources of weapons used by ethnic militants and criminals in the region and where they are stocked. Nigerian army spokesman Colonel Chukwuemeka Onwuamaegbu, has called on members of the public to come forward with information that will help the authorities retrieve weapons and disarm the armed youths of Niger Delta. Onwuamaegbu told reporters he was skeptical about the likelihood of voluntary surrender of weapons, pointing out that after ethnic clashes in March the army had urged surrender of weapons with only "few retrieved". Cutting off the perceived sources of weapons supply appears to be one of the key objectives of the military task force sent to pacify the region after the fighting in Warri in August between ethnic Ijaw and Itsekiri militias that killed more than 100 people. Named "Operation Restore Hope" and headed by Maj-Gen Elias Zamani, the force drawn from the army, navy and air force recently reported the arrest of 35 vessels and the arrest of more than 200 people involved in oil theft in the region. "We aim to cut off the source of funds for all those weapons," a senior military official told IRIN. But activists involved in the effort to mop up the weapons believe that even if the security agencies succeed in curbing the inflow of weapons into the region, a major concern will remain what to do about arms already in the area. "That is where I believe the mop up the arms initiative comes in," a MAC official told IRIN. "The youths need some incentive other than coercion to give up the guns. Force will tend to drive them further underground."