Militants threaten to cripple oil exports if demands not met

Ethnic Ijaw militants claiming responsibility for a spate of attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria’s Niger Delta have threatened new raids to cripple the country’s oil exports if demands to free detained leaders are not met within 48 hours. Speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location on Tuesday, a spokesman for a militant group told IRIN they would hold on to four foreign oil workers taken hostage last week failing the release of militia leader Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, who is in government custody pending trial for treason. The oil workers were kidnapped last Wednesday in a raid on an offshore oil platform run by Royal Dutch Shell in the Niger Delta region. In addition to recent attacks on pipelines that triggered cuts in Nigeria’s oil exports, the militants claimed Sunday’s attack of Shell’s Benisede flow station in which one oil worker was killed. The assault forced the company to evacuate four platforms in the delta swamps. “We maintain our demands that they should free Dokubo-Asari and other Ijaw leaders in detention in 48 hours,” Brutus Ebipadei, who claims leadership of the new Movement for Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), told IRIN by phone. “Otherwise we’re going to attack oil installations and stop oil exports from Nigeria,” he added. Ebipadei last week allowed IRIN to speak to the hostages by phone. He said the group was offering to free the four captives in exchange for the release of the Ijaw leaders, but warned that MEND's long-term aim was local control of the delta region's oil wealth. “We have embarked on Operation Climate Change, to take over our oil and show the Nigerian government that the Niger Delta people are not fools,” he said. Tensions have been particularly high in the delta since the Nigerian government arrested Dokubo-Asari, the delta’s most influential militia leader, in September and charged him with treason. Dokubo-Asari’s Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force took up arms in 2004 to fight for the interests of the region's majority Ijaw ethnic group, alleging that successive governments had cheated their impoverished communities of the oil wealth produced in the region. Dokubo-Asari suspended armed struggle later that year after world oil prices soared and President Olusegun Obasanjo granted his group amnesty. But the milita leader was arrested late last year after saying in an interview that he would fight for the disintegration of Nigeria – Africa’s most populous country with more than 126 million people. During a court appearance in the capital Abuja on Tuesday, Dokubo-Asari said he supported the actions of MEND even though he did not know those leading the group. “If it’s the decision of Ijaw people to go back to armed struggle, I’m in total support,” he told reporters. “Oil has brought a lot of misery to the Ijaw and Niger Delta. Shell and the other oil conglomerates should leave the Niger Delta or the Ijaw people will make them leave whether Dokubo-Asari is in prison or not,” he said. Officials of Bayelsa State, where the recent attacks have occurred, said on Tuesday that contact had been made with the kidnappers and there were hopes that they would release the hostages soon. “From initial reports there are positive signals that the matter will soon be resolved amicably,” state government spokesman Ekiyor Welson said in a statement. Inhabitants of the Niger Delta remain largely impoverished despite the region’s being the source of nearly all the crude oil that is the lifeblood of Nigeria’s economy.