NEWS May 11 2001

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In the same week as announcing record £2.69bn quarterly profits, oil giant Shell has seen defeat in Pakistan while old crimes come back to haunt it in Nigeria.

Friends of the Earth International and local environment groups have forced Shell to backtrack on plans to explore for gas in Pakistan’s oldest national park. The joint venture with Premier Oil (best known to campaigners for continuing to work with the Burmese military junta in the face of international condemnation), was to be part of a planned major expansion of Shell’s exploration activities, but on 9th May the company announced it was swapping its stake in the project for a share of another exploration project in a less environmentally sensitive area, leaving Premier in control of the Kirthar National Park project. FoE International is taking the companies to court over possible damage to the park if exploration goes ahead.

Kirthar National Park, in Sindh province, is home to a number of threatened species and, under the law, should be protected from intervention. Section 15 of the Sindh Wildlife Protection Ordinance clearly states that the ‘...clearing or breaking up of any land for cultivation, mining or for any other purpose" is prohibited. However, under the current military regime in Pakistan, laws can be amended without reference to Parliament; also, the Governor of Sindh province, Mohammed Mian Soomro is a former director of Shell-Pakistan, while the oil minister in the federal military Government, Usman Aminuddin, is a former director of a Shell subsidiary. Not too much of a surprise, then, that Sindh recently amended the wildlife laws to allow pipeline construction in the Kirthar park. Attention has now shifted to Premier, with the aim of getting them to drop the project altogether.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the company has been struggling to sort out problems left behind when it pulled out of Ogoniland in 1993. The company admitted recently that 14 of its wells in Ogoniland were not properly sealed after operations stopped and could be a dnager. On 29th April, a well in the Yorla oil field was reported to be leaking oil and clouds of gas over farmland and nearby villages, posing a high risk of fire as well as polluting crops and fish stocks. After sending in a team of engineers to cap the well Shell alleged the spill had been caused by vandalism to the well-head, which did not go down well locally. Ledum Mitee, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) noted, ‘In the past two days Shell has alternated between blaming the local people for this disaster, by accusing them of vandalisation and, in a contradictory position, declaring that all the abandoned oil wells in Ogoni are a "time bomb" due to lack of maintenance,’ Human rights lawyer Oronto Douglas also dismissed Shell's statements. ‘In Nigeria, when a pipeline explodes or an oil well leaks, the oil companies are quick to point accusing fingers in the direction of vandals. The numerous cases of pipeline explosions in the United States, for example, are not so described. The truth of the matter is that Shell pipelines are old and rusty.’ It is not yet clear how – or whether – Shell intends to clean up the spill; its past policy has been that it does not undertake to clean up after spills if it suspects sabotage, which rather adds insult to injury for innocent local people who then have to deal with both the danger from the abandoned uncapped wells and the long-term consequences of what may be either accidents or the actions of oil-greedy outsiders.