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July 11, 2003

Drilling and Killing: As President Bush Meets with the CEO of Chevron Texaco in Nigeria, a Look at Chevron’s Role in the Killing of Two Nigerian Villagers

Nigeria

President Bush arrives in Nigeria today.

As he wraps up his five-day Africa tour, he is accompanied by a large entourage of corporate executives. Front and center are the oil executives. Bush is set to meet with Chevron Texaco CEO and chairman Dave O’Reilly. Other transnational corporations attending include Exxon-Mobil and Shell Petroleum.

Bush is joined by his National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice. Rice is a former board member of Chevron. The company named an oil tanker after her, the Condoleezza Rice.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, cranking out more than 2 million barrels a day. Nearly 750,000 barrels of Nigeria’s oil go to the United States every day. That is 8 percent of total U.S. crude oil imports.

A former U.S. diplomat in Africa, Vincent Farley told Cox News Service: “If the U.S. intervention in Iraq does not bring peace in the Middle East, then the U.S. may have to look to other sources of oil.” He said, “And Africa is at the top of the list.”

Today, we spend the hour with the Democracy Now! documentary “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship.”

On the ground in Nigeria, there is an oil war raging. Villagers in the oil-rich Niger Delta are rising up, demanding an end to a system that keeps them in poverty as their government pumps Nigeria’s natural resources to Western nations, enriching itself and oil executives. In unprecedented acts of resistance, villagers have seized oil rigs, barges and helicopters belonging to transnational oil corporations.

The oil companies are fighting back. Today, we’re going to take an in-depth look at one of these cases.

In 1998, Democracy Now! revealed for the first time that Chevron played a role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers.

The San Francisco-based oil company helped facilitate an attack by the feared Nigerian Navy and notorious Mobile Police (MOPOL).

In a interview with Democracy Now!, a Chevron official acknowledged that on May 28, 1998, the company transported Nigerian soldiers to their Parabe oil platform and barge in the Niger Delta, which dozens of community activists had occupied. The protestors were demanding that Chevron contribute more to the development of the impoverished oil region where they live. In the interview, Chevron spokesperson Sola Omole was asked:

Q: Who took them in, on Thursday morning, the Mobile Police, the Navy?

A: We did. We did. Chevron did. We took them there.

Q: By how? A: Helicopters, yes, we took them in.

Q: Who authorized the call for the military to come in?

A: That’s Chevron’s management.

Soon after landing in Chevron-leased helicopters, the Nigerian military shot to death two protesters, Jola Ogungbeje and Aroleka Irowaninu, and wounded several others. The eleven activists were detained for three weeks.

During their imprisonment, one activist said he was handcuffed and hung from a ceiling fan hook for hours for refusing to sign a statement written by Nigerian federal authorities.

Nigerian activists charge that Chevron’s oil operations pollute their land, severely hampering fishing and farming, their only means of livelihood. The U.S. multinational Chevron Texaco is the third largest oil producer in Nigeria. Oil money provides roughly 80 percent of the dictatorship’s revenue.

“It is very clear that Chevron, just like Shell, uses the military to protect its oil activities. They drill and they kill,” Nigerian environmental attorney Oronto Douglas told Democracy Now!.

In May 1999, family members of those killed in the attack, along with one of those injured, filed a landmark lawsuit against Chevron Texaco. The lawsuit was filed in a U.S. court using the Alien Tort Claims Settlement Act. Chevron Texaco has repeatedly attempted to have the suit thrown out, without success.

Just two months ago, a court in San Francisco heard oral arguments to decide whether the victims can sue the parent company, Chevron Texaco, rather its Nigerian subsidiary, Chevron Texaco Nigeria Limited. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, if the court backs the victims it will greatly aid several other human rights cases currently pending in U.S. courts that seek to hold multinational corporations responsible for their involvement in human rights abuses abroad.

Today, as Bush arrives in Nigeria with oil at the top of his agenda, we play an excerpt of an interview with Ogoni activist Ken Sarowiwa,, and the Democracy Now! expose, is “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship.”

  • Interview with Ogoni activist Ken Sarowiwa, who led the movement against Shell Oil in Ogoniland. This interview was conducted months before he was executed by the Nigerian military on November 10th, 1995.
  • “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship,” produced by Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill in 1998 and engineered by Dredd Scott Keys.

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