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Community Relations Shannon Wright (Rainforest Action Network) Steve Kretzman (Project Underground) SHANNON - I’m going to draw most of the examples from Ecuador and Peru because they’re the cases that I know about best. Back when oil development really got going in Ecuador and Peru, about three decades ago, there was no community consultation. The way that oil companies interacted with local Indian communities, on whose land most of this was taking place, was basically that they showed up, and they built roads, and they built airstrips, and they erected huge oil projects throughout indigenous lands, and there was no form of consultation, and no real interaction. Throughout the seventies and eighties and early nineties we saw a real mobilisation, starting at the local community level of indigenous groups, and then linking up regionally, nationally, and even internationally throughout the Amazon basin. The companies just can’t waltz in and start up shop on their traditional homelands without any sort of interaction, or taking into account any of the community concerns. There’s still a real spectrum of how companies interact with local communities. A lot of them just began with at least paying the communities, or offering them some sort of services - putting in a well, providing some sort of medicines where needed, trying to keep them at bay to a certain degree. In the early nineties you saw an interesting case that they said has really set the scene for what’s happening now in Ecuador, with a community development programme that Maxis actually ended up implementing. It was going to be all-inclusive - health, education, sustainable development - whatever that term means - and organisational development - work with the Waorani people in this case, which was mentioned earlier today, which is a group of fairly traditional people, numbering about maybe a thousand, fifteen hundred, in Ecuador and Amazon. The trouble is that the sort of form of health and education extension and services that you’re seeing, are often coming - they’re just a blueprint that are being handed down from other areas - from, you know, the Andes, from Mestizo areas that really don’t necessarily have that much - they’re not that meaningful within the context of a much more rural, traditional, indigenous area, where very few people speak Spanish. But it looks really good on paper, and it can convince a lot of people. What we’ve really seen with this Maxis model is that the company has really almost become a government out there - they’re the ones providing schooling, in many cases. In some cases with the Government, sometimes on their own. Providing health care, bi-lingual education, agricultural extension, and perhaps actually the most significant is that they’re actually funding, and providing direct logistical support, for the Waorani’s representative organisation - their government, so to speak. This was actually the same group of people that were very adamantly opposed to any oil and gas activity there on their land, and through a scenario that we’ve seen place after place after place, they somehow became - agreements were signed and then Maxis moved forward on their operations. One the one hand people can come up and say, ‘well, at least someone is providing these services - better the oil company than no one else’. But unfortunately what happened is that the Waorani representative organisation - Oni, as it’s called - has in my opinion been put in a situation where they feel very hesitant to denounce some of the problems that they’re seeing on their land now with this oil development - they’ve been producing oil for about three years now - everything from oil spills, to cutting too much land for drill sites, to colonisation moving in from a road that was cut into a national park area, and in our personal communications, as well as other groups, we’ve seen that Oni feels, and says quite clearly, ‘yeah, we’re not happy with this situation, but if we denounce this, then what about this educational programme, what about the trips which we get to here and there, what about this and that?’ So it’s effectively undermined the political autonomy, and the ability of the local group to denounce what has happened, as the oil company has come in with this full package - this community development package. That same package has then been taken, and Shell is refining it - even with a larger sophistication I think - what we’re seeing early on in Peru. Almost every new oil and gas concession in the Amazon right now, comes with a community liaison office, or officers, whose sole purpose is to work with the communities and make sure that consultation takes place, that participation takes place, that if nothing else, that there are not conflicts on the ground between oil workers and the communities. And you see it evolving into something that, in many cases, might look green - on paper looks quite good - Shell sends out all sorts of publications explaining this process of consultation - as has Maxis, as has Occidental, and several other companies - but when you scratch a little bit below the surface and see what it’s meant in terms of local community development and meaningful participation, it really doesn’t hold up. So that’s what we’re seeing right now in the Amazon basin - and it brings us back to the basic question though - at the end of the day, even with these improved community relations, so to speak, is the final product twenty years down the line, or ten years down the line, going to be the same, where these cultures have been quite devastated, local people have lost control, and that area is still quite contaminated and deforested. Q - I think this is a highly sensitive and difficult area we’re talking about, because if Shell and other oil companies are doing these community development projects, and people in the first instance seem to be satisfied, then we have no grounds for saying that people are not satisfied - I mean it’s very difficult to say that this is not a real community development, this is not how it should be. We don’t have a right to say that this is not the right development, because if you ask people, they are satisfied. SHANNON - Yes and no. It’s an extremely sensitive area, and I think that’s why a lot of people are afraid to touch it, because, you know, what is consultation? And, aren’t they at least doing something better than they did ten years ago? But one of the things that we are seeing is that local organisations ARE concerned, that local indigenous communities are continually saying, they really feel themselves to be between a rock and a hard place, this is not necessarily what they wanted. On the one hand there are demands for improved education and health care, and on the other hand it is now an oil company that is providing it for them, but they really don’t think they have another recourse. And what does that mean for a population - it’s a very sensitive question. But that’s really the model that in Ecuador and Peru is moving forward, so really I think it’s quite important to take the risk and talk about it. Q - One of the basic questions we have to ask - how to operate in these groups and how to provide them with information that counteracts what the oil companies are doing. SHANNON - There have definitely been different efforts like that - that’s another sticky area. The pace with which the companies move is one of the biggest problems - in a lot of these areas the communities don’t really have an understanding of what their rights are and what their options are, even some of the national level indigenous leaders don’t. I mean, Shell is a perfect example: they signed a lease, a license, less than a year ago - they’re about to drill their second well, and they’ve already invested $250 million into the project. The communities operate in a very different way - many of them don’t even speak Spanish, and don’t have an understanding of their rights, and everything else - so a lot of it is playing catch-up the whole time. So the question of “is this what they want or not” - sometimes they don’t even get to that - it’s like, “what’s going on?”. Q - This seems to me like an inevitably finite process - what happens when an oil company, and then ups sticks and goes - presumably there is then nothing to sustain the initiative, and the initiative falls down, and these people are then left with a decaying infrastructure and no ongoing process? SHANNON - I think that’s a question for development everywhere. On that point - I left two videos on that - one is called ‘Trinkets and beads’, which focuses on the Maxis situation - it’s quite good - Cinemax, United states - 52 minutes. And the other one is 15 minutes on Texaco’s operations in Ecuador, which is exactly that - when a company pulls out - what happens. And if you look at any of the communities in the United States, like in Oklahoma or Texas or Louisiana. All these economies were boom-bust economies. The huge boom that happens, with accompanying infrastructure development, as well as prostitution and crime and a variety of other accompanying things that usually go on with oil development locally, and then the wells run dry, the industry runs out, and you get ghost towns, and people are left without any of the economic infrastructure - it’s not a long-term sustainable development prospect to extract oil - it’s a finite resource - and the industry will even admit that, under pressure. Q - Well that seems like the one campaign point that we can make with legitimacy without upsetting indigenous people. SHANNON - But also, you have to understand that in the Amazon basin, even when an indigenous group, as I said earlier, has rights to their land, they don’t have rights to the sub-surface - that is to say in the case of Ecuador, it says in the legal land title, they cannot obstruct oil development. So it’s not like they’re having the choice of “shall we say yes to the company or not?” Oftentimes they feel very obliged, and those sorts of questions - they don’t necessarily get to them. Q - I think that’s a really important point - that the whole process starts out with a fundamental violation of their right to choose the path of their development, or whatever it is that they want - so that that option is taken away, and then from there it’s a sort of slippery slope of bad options down from there, like, are you going to take the school that’s being offered by the oil company, with all the strings that come attached to it, or not? And if not, maybe you don’t go to school. STEVE - I’ve looked at this a lot in the Nigerian case - the relationship between oil companies and traditional leaders, both in Ogoni, and throughout the Niger Delta. And it has truly divisive effects, because what it does, of course, is it buys the local chiefs into Shell, and into supporting Shell, and then any kind of local opposition is therefore undercut. Most of the people that I talked to estimated - and it’s of course impossible to get hard numbers without seeing what Shell’s invoice is - well, before, it was probably 30 to 40 percent of minor spill contracts, and school-building contracts - and that kind of thing, going to local chiefs. Within the last two years, it’s gone up to 90 percent. And that is seen as being, really, the sort of back door that Shell is using to undermine the kind of grassroots resistance that MOSOP and other organisations have built up throughout the delta for years. And it’s definitely having an effect, because many of those leaders who would normally be looked towards as leaders in the movement, are feeling caught. An example of this is - one of the more grievous spill sites in Ogoni, we couldn’t go to, and the reason we couldn’t go to it was because the local chief, who used to allow access to this site, for everyone, is now not allowing access, because Shell gave him what is a piddling contract, to erect a fence, around the spill site. There’s still no commitment to clean up the spill site, on behalf of Shell. They paid him the equivalent of about $150, US, to erect a fence around the entire spill site, thus keeping out external observers, and keeping him happy, and making him not want to co-operate with any kind of international operation at that point. So I think that’s really critical, and it’s an evolution of Shell’s tactics in the Delta, which is rather insidious, and rather difficult to combat, for a lot of the reasons that we’ve just talked about. The other thing - and this is a little more background into how the situation in the Delta may have got as bad as it did. One of the things that’s been talked about a lot, is the existence of these Shell police, and one of the things I tried to look at was who are the Shell police, and what was it that they do. We’ve been doing a number of interviews with people who were former Shell police staff - and one of the things that came out was that they have, essentially, an undercover operations unit, and when a community would make a claim - if there was a spill in a community - and the community would make a claim against Shell, to say, “we want compensation for our lost crops, for our lost land”, et cetera, et cetera, Shell would send a plainclothes operative into the community, who would have a certain amount of money to befriend people, and to be nice to people, and literally try to get competing claims going among different groups in the community, thus destroying any unity that there may be in the community over who gets compensation. And then Shell then says, “hey, there’s conflict in the community”, and then they’ll say, “it was probably sabotage between those people who were obviously fighting, can’t you see?” And they would end up paying nothing - that is the bottom line. They would instigate the conflict in the first place, and then say that because of the conflict, there can be no resolution to it. Or if there was a resolution, it would be at a reduced level, and they would use the different, competing claims to negotiate the level down, of what it should be. Q - Steve, one question - obviously, highlighting the malign effects of oil company in interaction with a community, and in a sense that’s an argument for a community not getting involved with an oil company, and trying to keep them out. But, they ARE in a lot of communities, and they WILL BE in a lot of communities. One of the problems is this sort of grace-and-favour approach - you know, we’ll do you a school here, and we’ll do you a sports centre there, and there’s always this sense that those favours may be withdrawn. Should there be a much more - if you like, tougher - contract, where the money is placed into a trust, and it’s managed by the community itself, and there’s almost a local license fee - just pay into this trust, and WE’LL spend the money on what we see fit, and we may keep some of it back for when you disappear, and all that sort of thing. STEVE - Percentage of the royalties that are extracted from the land. Exactly. Q - There’s a model of that - I think - I’m no expert on this, but something quite similar to that has been done with the Sullom Voe development, in the Shetland Islands. There is a trust there, and the community has control of this, and is investing it for the time when they think the activity will be run down. I just wonder if there was any other sort of ‘best practice’ advice, or how to deal with these people so that the community can remain united, and can actually do what they want to do, which is to get at least some of the benefits of the developments going on on their doorstep. STEVE - I would just like to say that it’s easy to confuse gifts and favours with rights and accountability, right? So, if there has been environmental devastation on a particular community’s land, it does not take care of it to replace the old flow lines and give a few more Cassava seedlings, right? That’s not restoration, that’s not reparations. Reparations is an independent environmental assessment which objectively assesses, and that’s not funded by the oil company and CONTROLLED by the oil company - that has community and independent observers on it - which then determines what the extent of the damage is and what it takes to clean it up. There has to be some kind of external management process on the entire thing. That’s the best - and that’s a difficult thing to set up - it varies from community to community. Q - Any comments at all on recent news from Nigeria relating to the NARECOM initiative? STEVE - Good question. NARECOM, something called the National Reconciliation Committee, is chaired by a gentleman by the name of Alex Akinyele, who is a Uruguayan. He came into Ogoni, just about the time I was there, in early April, spent several hours in Ogoni, talking to people, and then came out and did a press conference in Port Harcourt, and announced, sitting next to a representative of Shell, that the Ogoni crisis was over, and that it had been settled, and they had a few more things to work out, but it was fine, and there would be no further thing. MOSOP - which is by all accounts, both objective and internal - the only representative organisation within Ogoni - was in no way, shape, or form, included in those talks. People in the delta who are pro-government supporters, say, “well, look, they made this announcement, and nobody stood up publicly and objected to it”, but that’s completely insane, obviously, because anyone who stands up publicly and objects to NARECOM at this stage, or voices their support for MOSOP, instantly finds themselves in jail. On the other hand, no one stood up publicly - you didn’t have 300,000 people in the streets, saying, “yea! The Ogoni crisis is over. Yea! Shell is coming back in”, you know - and this is what you had in 1993 when MOSOP started their campaign against Shell. So it’s clear that the NARECOM initiative is just yet another Government / Shell initiative to try to gloss over the problems. It doesn’t enjoy a lot of credibility in my eyes. Q - Does it look likely that Shell is going to be coming back very soon, or not? STEVE - I think it looks likely that Shell is continuing to try to manoeuvre, to come back. There are numerous reports of people being forced - often at gun point and under torture - to sign statements, “inviting” Shell back into Ogoni. The Ogoni Nineteen, among others, have been forced, within the last month, to sign this statement which says they welcome Shell’s return to Ogoni, and that’s fine. Now none of these statements, it’s worth noting, have been used by Shell publicly, or even used by the military publicly at this stage, so I don’t know what’s happening to them. But certainly, from every quarter that you talk to of MOSOP supporters now - they’re talking about it - how people are being forced to sign these statements, so there does seem to be a good deal of reports, in that regard. So, we’ll see. I don’t know. Okay? Thanks. [APPLAUSE] |
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| Ijaw Revolt Since September 1998, the Ijaw people of the Niger Delta (Nigeria’s fourth largest ethnic group) have been increasingly protesting against destruction of their land by oil companies. Since two thirds of Nigerian oil comes from Ijaw territory, civil disobedience and peaceful direct action by the Ijaw throughout the autumn effectively cut Nigeria’s oil output by up to 40%. On 11th December, a conference of Ijaw youths from over 500 communities made the Kaiama Declaration, calling on oil companies to pull out of Ijawland by 30th December, or face increasing direct action which would attempt to shut their facilities down. No oil companies met the demands, so from 31st December protests increased greatly, with production platforms, flow stations, and terminals closed by protestors. In response, repeating many of the tactics of repression used against the Ogoni, the Nigerian State created a special Security Task Force, and declared a state of emergency in the area. A curfew was imposed, and many civil liberties removed. The state of emergency was lifted a few days later, but at the time of going to press, the Task Force remains, and demonstrations, meetings and assemblies are still banned, facing the threat of attack. With the mobilisation of over 15,000 soldiers have come attacks on houses, hundreds of arrests, and the killing of somewhere between 26 and 240 peaceful protestors in the first week of 1999. Once again we see the brutality of the Nigerian military being used to defend oil interests in the Delta. It has become clear that if human rights are to be respected, and further loss of life avoided, it is surely time for oil companies to withdraw from the Niger Delta altogether.
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