The Town Crier Column
With Patrick Naagbanton

August 31, 2005
The Port Harcourt Telegraph

Riding The Dragon; Royal Dutch Shell and The Fossil Fire, is a befitting title of a publication by the American group, Environmental Health Fund (EHF), written in 2002 by Jack Doyle, a Washington-based writer and researcher. The author had argued in the 351-page book "Royal Dutch Shell is a giant oil company with annual gross sales exceeding $175 billion. It is typically ranked as the world's No. 1 or No. 2 oil company. It is also the world's seventh largest chemical company. Shell has been developing Fossil energy-coal, oil and gas for more than 100 years ".

"Whether chemical or indigenous people, refinery community or tropical forest, a price has been paid - and continues to be paid-in the hydrocarbon quest. Well blowouts, oil spills, refinery explosions, polluted rivers and oceans, and now global warming - all come with the territory. Still, the hydrocarbon dragon is a fire-breathing beast that neither shell, nor any other oil company, has tamed ". Pains and grief under the weighty thumb of the oil and gas Transnational Corporations (TNCs), while enforcing the flow of oil and gas have actually marked the world; they have unleashed on us anguish unheard of, in human history.

Those who question them or their practices anywhere in the world, go down the drain unsung. The world is their chessboard with which, they brandish it gleefully. They have an unquestionable power to our lives and our death. They run governments and ruin governments. They enthrone governments and de-throne governments. This is their world. The epoch of corporate empire and tyranny. Those who ride the shelling dragon must be prepared to tell a sad tale either in wreckage or in the grave. The fossil fire is very hazardous.

Recently, Michael .O. Seighin, Willie Corduff, Brendan Philbin, Vincent McGrath and Philip McGrath, these poor farmers from a tiny village community of Rossport of the Eris peninsular in the northwest of Mayor in Ireland, now famously referred to, as Rossport 5 defied the smoke-darkened dragon. Today, they have an unsweetened long story to tell. Small-scale farmers are they, who eke out miserable living from their badly off quality land. Their journey to dungeon started in December 2004.

Shell sent letters to the Rossport villagers, informing them that, the company would enter their properties (lands) to lay a 5 miles long pipeline. The shell-shocked villagers staged peaceful protests to reject such proposal. The pipeline shall be the highest in the world, a consortium of Royal Dutch, Statoil, which the Norwegian government owns 70% of it and Marathon Oil Corporation, an American energy player, owned the pipeline. The pipeline when completed is expected to pump unsafe and untreated products along it, which is said to be substandard, from the Corib Gas field to a proposed inland refinery in Ballinaboy.

"Gas was found off the coast nine years ago and shell's plan is to land the gas on the beach at Broadhaven and pipe it 5 miles inland for processing throughout the peat of the Bog of Erris " wrote Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondent for the London-based The Guardian newspaper. On January 10, 2005, Shell sent her workers again, to commence work on the pipeline, which will run through living homes, conservation areas and estuaries of rare plants and animal species in the area. Still, oppositions against the project swelled from Rossport and other green campaigners around the globe. The work was halted and Shell and her partners including the Irish government were unhappy.

Like a shady "Black Market ", order which corrupt Nigerian judges grant to cement injustice against defenseless people of the country. A Shell's injunction, sorry, a ruling from Justice Finnegan, the President of the High Court of Ireland, was issued, it mandates the company to have unhindered access to Rossport private lands. The order, also restrained them from blocking the construction of the pipeline. Subsequently, they were sent to Cloverhill Prison, an Irish prison built since 1854. They are to remain in the prison for an indefinite time until they "Purge their contempt " by accepting the pipeline to pass through their lands.

Today is Rossport 5. Shell in Ireland, United Kingdom (UK), If Shell can do this to their people and homeland, one can really pictures the magnitude of atrocities they commit abroad, while prospecting or drilling hydrocarbon. In 1987, at Iko, a small rural community like Rossport in the Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria, appalled by the ecological devastations of their richly endowed land, they organized a peaceful protest against Shell. Shell played skillfully politico-military stuff with the bloody junta of dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, and sent in soldiers armed with weapons of mass destruction, to teach the local folks not to oppose them any longer. Shell's soldiers killed poor people, raped women and looted properties of the villagers of Iko.

I visited the community again recently, with a delegation of respected British parliamentarians, a 64-year-old woman who spoke to me briefly about the Iko incident of 1987 broke down in mournful tears as she narrated the tragedy. I could not help it, but to stop the "interview " halfway to save the poor woman the agony of a bad corporation in Iko. On October 30, 1990, the unlucky dwellers of Umuechem, another pint-sized oil-producing community which hosts Shell, and which belongs to the Etche group in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria has their tale to tell too. Armed with branches of leaves, which locally symbolizes peace amongst the rural residents, to protest the plundering of their environment and desecration of their lives.

A detachment of Mobile Policemen, a special task force which grief-stricken communities in the Niger Delta, that have encountered them called them, "Kill and Go ". The force has a terrible record of extra-judicial executions, rape and looting. Shell sent them to Umuechem to carry out among the poor locals what they know. The rest of the story belongs to the dark pages of the history of Shell in Nigeria. Hordes of protesters and non-protesters alike in the community were sent to their early graves. Properties were stolen, while the Shell's task force raped women (both married and unmarried). All over the Nigeria's delta, the company is well-known not only for emitting deadly gasses from their pipes or dumping of harmful wastes in rivers, streams and rivulets, but for their propensity for to do raw violence.

The, Ogonis of the northeast of the Niger Delta, in the early 90s, led by the late Ken Saro Wawa, a committed Nigerian writer, columnist and activist, waged a non-violent struggle against Shell's for good environment and respect for his Ogoni people. All over their history book is the agony of the Ogoni. Shell gave moral and financial support to a wasting operation of a task force called Rivers State Internal Security Task Force (RSISTF). A twosome of yellow-belly and demented majors, Paul Okinstimo and Obi Umahi, leaders of the RSISTF at different times, had field days trafficking in the blood of poor Ogoni women, children and men, suspected to have supported Wiwa's struggle. Ken Saro-Wiwa and other 2,000 Ogonis are now in their various identified and unidentified graves, that is the high price of oil and gas.

Riding the dragon can be dangerous; Jack Doyle and his Environmental Health Fund (FHF) had warned us. The silence of the Irish farmers in our new burden. The Town-Crier must stand at the barricade with Denny Larson, an avid environmental activist from San Francisco, USA and director of Global community Monitor, Monique Harden of the Shell Corporate Accountability Coalition, USA, and Anne Rolfes of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, USA, over to you all, in this season of barricade and a taste for a new desire.

We must not allow Rossport 5 die like the Ogoni 9, my solidarity to Judith Robinson of the Environmental Health Fund (EHF), USA and Sister Majella Mc Carron, a selfless Irish activist who spent several years working to save the dying Ogoni environment. Thanks our novelist Jennifer Johnston, a distinguished Irish writer whose book, The Old Jest (1979) and The Shadow on Our Skin (1977) shot her into our literary consciousness, and many others at the barricades. My solidarity for the protests, blockades and boycotts to free the suffering Rossport natives, we must dance this rock of freedom against the red men and women, who plunder our lives for oil and gas and save the poor old men from Rossport.

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Email: patricknaagbanton@yahoo.ca
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