NIGERIA: Dire pollution in Ogoniland but little action so far

Photo: Bashiru Abdullahi/IRIN

An oil spill in Bodo is blamed for poor health in the community

PORT HARCOURT, 9 September 2011 (IRIN) – An August 2011 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) study has found hazardous levels of pollution in Ogoniland in southern Nigeria’s Niger Delta, lending credence to claims by locals of environmental damage, health problems and lost livelihoods as a result of 50 years of oil operations in the area.

The UNEP report found oil spills occur with “alarming regularity” and residents had been exposed to petroleum hydrocarbons in air, water and soil. Some 28 wells across 10 communities were found to be contaminated, and in one community, Nisisioken Ogale, water was being drunk from wells containing 900 times the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended level of benzene, a carcinogen.

Other findings include destruction of fish habitats – including mangroves – and soil contamination found at depths of up to five metres. It is estimated a clean-up operation will take up to 30 years to return contaminated drinking water, land, creeks and ecosystems back to full health.

A history of oil spills and pollution has created tensions in the region. Citizens have also complained that they have not benefited from the oil wealth in the area.

Though oil has not been produced in Ogoniland since 1993, infrastructure remains, including active oil pipelines that cross the area. Sabotage and bunkering has added to spills in the Niger Delta.

The UNEP report, carried out at the request of the government, said health symptoms were not recorded in sufficient detail to be conclusively attributed to pollution, but for locals in Bodo the connection is clear: The community suffered two major oil spills in 2008 from pipes operated by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), which is a joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, Shell International, Elf and Agip.

Contaminated wells

A man who lives close to the spill, who only gave his name as Nebachi, told IRIN his whole family was sick. “Our source of drinking water is the well. By the time we fetch water from the well, we see oil on it and that is what we drink,” he said. “We breathe the polluted air. In fact as I am talking with you now, I have chest pain… Everybody in my house is sick.”

Other residents told IRIN they now suffered burning sensations in their eyes at night, respiratory problems, frequent rashes and bloody stools.

Comfort Amadi, the chief nursing officer at Bodo General Hospital, told IRIN common problems believed to be caused by pollution were diarrhoea and respiratory infections. She added: “We often have cases of pregnant women having miscarriages. Due to the oil spillage, people also suffer from malaria as a result of the stagnant water around.”

Babiana Uporo, a nursing officer at the hospital, agreed diarrhoea and respiratory infections were common. “The whole place is polluted and filled with smoke [from gas flares].”

Aster van Kregten, a researcher on Nigeria with Amnesty International, said in interviews with Bodo residents, people told her “they have problems [such as] rashes, headaches and breathing problems.”

Joanna Tempowski, a WHO scientist, said all these symptoms, aside from miscarriages, “are consistent with exposure to hydrocarbons and their combustion products”. She said further investigation would be necessary to determine if the reported miscarriages could be attributed to pollution.

Insufficient response?

Though both Shell and the Nigerian government have accepted the recommendations of the report – including establishing a US$1 billion fund for the clean-up and addressing issues caused by the pollution – very little is clear about what specific action will be taken, or when.

The report contained emergency recommendations around warning people about contamination, supplying drinking water to families with only access to contaminated sources, and monitoring the health of people in Nisisioken Ogale. Some progress has been made here: Residents have been warned about contaminated water sources and emergency drinking water has been trucked in to some of the most deeply affected communities by the state government.

But Chris Newsom from the Port Harcourt office of NGO Stakeholder Democracy Network said the response is only part of what is needed for such a dire situation. “If those levels of pollution were found in the US, Congressmen would be having hysterics and demanding a comprehensive set of immediate responses,” he said.

Newsom pointed out that UNEP had informed the Nigerian government in December 2010 of the dangerously high levels of contamination in drinking water in Nisisioken Ogale, but that no action was taken until the report was released.

Amnesty International’s van Kregten said: “You would expect authorities to do more in terms of emergency measures.” Both Van Kregten and Jeremiah Leela, a senior health worker in Bodo, told IRIN they would like to see the authorities investigate health impacts more widely.

Committee

The Nigerian government has formed a committee to look at the recommendations. However, despite pressure from Ogoni elders in early September, the committee is still considering its response and no decisions have been announced.

A spokesperson for Shell said: “SPDC will support the [Nigerian] government to implement emergency measures as soon as possible,” but was also unable to give any details of action.

“This report should be used to put pressure on the government and oil companies to clean up and compensate people harmed by these spills,” said Eric Guttschuss, a researcher on Nigeria with Human Rights Watch.

Implementing the recommendations of the report and cleaning up the spills will, however, only assist Ogoniland - a small part of the oil-rich Niger Delta – while it is suspected pollution extends much further. “The Ogoni oil spills are only the tip of the iceberg; there have been serious spills across the Niger Delta for decades,” Newsom said. Ogoniland covers just 1,000 of the Niger Delta’s 70,000 sqkm.

“Since the terrain, operator and regulators are similar in other parts of the Niger Delta, it is a reasonable assumption to make that there are similar issues in other parts of the Niger Delta,” said a UNEP spokesperson.

Weak regulatory environment

Poor industry practice and the weak regulatory environment are part of the problem.

While a spokesperson for Shell said “SPDC has always cleaned up spills from its facilities no matter what the cause,” the UNEP report found 10 of the 15 sites investigated which Shell claimed were remediated were found to contain pollution exceeding SPDC and government standards. “SPDC’s own procedures have not been applied, creating public safety issues,” the report said.

In response, Shell’s spokesperson would only say they were “looking very closely at the report”.

The government largely relies on the word of oil companies, which say they clean up spills, but it is apparent from the report that this does not always happen, Guttschuss said, pointing out that the Nigerian government is a majority partner in joint ventures with many of these oil companies, including Shell, and the regulatory environment is very weak.

According to Van Kregten, while oil companies frequently blame oil spills on deliberate sabotage, it is impossible to verify this.

ba/wb/aj/cb  source www.irinnews.org

KENYA: Flood waters add to IDPs’ misery

Photo: Rachel Kibui/IRIN

Vumilia IDP camp chairlady Agnes Wairimu shows books that have been destroyed by recent floods

GILGIL, 9 September 2011 (IRIN) – More than three years after being chased from their homes into squalid camps, hundreds of families at several sites in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, the worst affected in the 2008 post-election violence, now have to contend with a new assault on their wellbeing: dirty flood water.

“We have to spend some nights at nearby Murindu Primary school when our tents flood,” said Agnes Wairimu, chairwoman of the Vumilia Camp in Gilgil, along the Nairobi-Nakuru route.

“We had to return [to camp] last Sunday [4 September] as the schools were set to re-open on Monday, yet most of us had filthy flood water in our tents,” said Wairimu.

The affected families are in the low-lying Vumilia Camp and neighbouring Wanaruona and Kihoto camps.

The raging flood water swept waste from the camp’s shallow latrines into IDP tents.

“I had to throw away about 50kg of beans, which I had kept for my family, as [they] were badly contaminated,” said George Mwangi, a camp resident.

When IRIN visited the Vumilia Camp, Mwangi was shifting what was left of his tent and belongings to higher ground.  

“I have to squeeze myself on a neighbour’s bed and spread out my family members to well-wishers in the camp [for accommodation],” said Mwangi, a father of three.  

“The ground is too wet and the tent still smells awful.”

Mwangi said he planned to heap some soil into the tent to make a temporary bed as he could not afford a new one.

At Gwakung’u camp in neighbouring Nyandarua County, more families were forced out of their tents to a nearby shopping centre by flood waters.

Camp chairman Charles Kariuki warned of the risk of waterborne diseases.

“The flood waters had human waste, yet some people cooked food which was soaked by the water, having nothing else to [eat].”

ICC progress

Despite the flooding, the IDPs are closely following the ongoing proceedings against poll violence suspects at the International Criminal Court (ICC), which are being broadcast live on most local radio and television stations.

Peter Mukuri, an IDP, has to ask his fellow camp members about the proceedings after his radio was destroyed by the flood waters.
 
“I cannot tell how far it has gone, but I know MP [Member of Parliament] William Ruto and journalist Joshua Sang are already at the court,” said Mukuri.

Ruto and Sang are among suspects before the ICC for confirmation hearings over their role in the post-poll violence. Other suspects include MP Henry Kiprono Kosgey, Francis Kirimi Muthaura, head of the civil service, Uhuru Kenyatta, finance minister, and former police commissioner Mohammed Hussein Ali.

The IDPs in the camps are awaiting government resettlement on alternative land.

rk/aw/mw source www.irinnews.org

Sudan is sliding deeper and deeper into a chaotic violence from which
there is no longer any apparent escape and to which there is no
meaningful international diplomatic response. Human suffering
and destruction throughout the country are outstripping the available
humanitarian resources. Following the Khartoum regime’s May 20 military
seizure of the contestedborder off Abyei, some 120,000 Ngok Dinka
indigenous to the region were forced to flee to South Sudan. There is no
prospect for their return, despite the deployment of an armored Ethiopian
brigade under UN peacekeeping auspices,which is incapable of providing
the kind of civilian security necessary for the Ngok to resume their
agricultural lives. Khartoum’s regular forces and its Arab militia
allies continue to pose a terrifying threat throughout Abyei.
 
Khartoum next moved to begin a large-scale campaign of ethnically
targeted destruction in neighboring South Kordofan State, now part of
North Sudan. On June 5 the regime, in a carefully prepared military
and intelligence operation, targeted the African tribal groups known as
the Nuba.Using roadblocks and house-to-house searches, the Sudan Armed
Forces (SAF) and security services rounded up as many Nuba as possible,
often using membership in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North
(SPLM-N) as pretext. The Nuba people supported the Southern Sudan
People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) during Sudan’s long civil
war,and continue to demand “popular consultations” to determine their
status within North Sudan. These were promised as part of the
2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the civil war, but have not
been conducted in any meaningful fashion. Instead, the people of South
Kordofan have suffered large-scale targeted executions and arrests; both
satellite photographic evidence and numerous eyewitness acs have
identified what are, beyond a reasonable doubt,mass gravesites. They may
hold thousands of bodies.
 
Indiscriminate aerial bombardment continues throughout the Nuba
Mountains, the SPLM-N stronghold. Some 200,000 civilians have been
displaced and many more put at risk of starvation. significant
humanitarian access to the region has been blocked by Khartoum.Valerie
Amos, the head of UN humanitarian operations, who finally seems to have grasped the significance of a crisis that has been two months in the making, said earlier this week, “Unless there is an immediate stop to the fighting, and humanitarian organizations are granted immediate and unhindered independent access throughout South Kordofan,people in many parts of the state face potentially catastrophic levels of malnutrition and mortality.” Khartoum remains unmoved and refuses to grant humanitarian access,clearly determined not to allow another “Darfur,” with a large international relief presence,in South Kordofan.
 
Not content with these actions in South Kordofan,Khartoum—increasingly under military control, with deepening rifts in the political cabal—attacked Blue Nile, another Northern state, on September 1. Again, the military operation was prepared in advance, and the seizure of Damazin, the state capital, was rapidly accomplished with large numbers of tanks and trucks carrying heavy machine guns. The house of the elected governor of Blue Nile,Malik Agar, was destroyed (Malik, who also heads the SPLM-N, is now leading
the military resistance). Again, indiscriminate aerial bombardment has
targeted civilian villages and non-military installations. More than
20,000 have already fled into neighboring Ethiopia to the east, and many
more civilians are displaced within Blue Nile. To date, the international
community has offered nothing more than the obligatory expressions of
dismay and demands for an immediate cessation of hostilities. There is no
pressure on Khartoum to change its course of action, no per suavely articulated consequence destructive military campaign.
 
Khartoum’s military and political goals (ultimately indistinguishable)
are to prevent the growth of new sources of resistance inNorth Sudan,
comparable to the resistance offered by South Sudan over many decades of
civil war. As Faoud Hikmat of the International Crisis Group puts it,
Khartoum’s goal is to prevent a “new South of the North of Sudan.” No
matter how destructive these preemptive measures, no matter what the cost
to civilian populations, the regime will pursue its survivalist agenda.
That the economy in the North is a shambles—suffering from high inflation, dramatically reduced oil revenues, and unsustainable external
debt—only adds to the urgency of the military campaigns. Indeed,
Khartoum may even attempt to seize Southern oil fields.
 
Sudan is on the verge of all-out war between Khartoum at the center and
the peripheral areas it has marginalized, including not only South
Kordofan and Blue Nile, but the Beja regions in Red Sea and Kassala
states, Nubia in the far north, and of course Darfur. The most urgent question is whether South Sudan will be drawn into conflict: the SPLA/M in Juba is watching developments with deep alarm and intense dismay, as their former comrades in arms are attacked without restraint from the air and on the ground,and their civilian populations denied humanitarian access. It seems unlikely that the South will be able to remain above the conflict if present patterns persist. And active fighting by the South would ensure war throughout Sudan—from eastern Chad in the west to Abyei and South Kordofan, to Ethiopia, and north to the border with Eritrea.
 
Nothing animates Khartoum’s ambitions so much as a continually sustained
sense of impunity. We have known for almost eight years that crimes
against humanity and genocide on a vast scale were occurring in Darfur,
and yet ethnically targeted violence continues, millions of people remain
displaced and at growing risk, conditions of life in camps for those
displaced are deteriorating, and the UN/African Union Mission in
Darfur—the international peacekeeping response to all this—has been a
disastrous failure. Humanitarian access and space continues to contract,
and the future is unspeakably grim. Are cent study by the Lancet found that
75 percent of all children in Darfur camps suffered from symptoms
of post-traumatic stress syndrome. The number of households led my
mothers,grandmothers, and young girls has created profound social
upheavals. And the epidemic of rape has created an environment of fear
and terror so great as to threaten social stability for a generation.
 
The atrocity crimes in Darfur, including the use of rape as a weapon of
war, were referred to the International Criminal Court by UN Security
Council Resolution 1593 in March 2005—six and a half years ago.The
resolution was based on a UN investigation that, for all its political manipulation, found massive evidence of crimes against humanity, echoing the findings of human rights organizations. To date the ICC has indicted former State Minister of the Interior Ahmed Haroun on forty-two counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur; Haroun presently serves as governor of South Kordofan, following May elections rigged by the regime. Ali Kushayb, a notorious Janjaweed leader (“the colonel of colonels”), has been similarly indicted. President Omar al-Bashir has been indicted on multiple counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It is only a matter of time until a number of other senior political and military officials are indicted. To date Khartoum has spurned the ICC and all calls for meaningfuljustice in Darfur.
 
Certainly nothing said or done by human rights groups, the ICC, the African Union, or other parties has made the slightest difference to Khartoum’s forces, regular and militia. Though there is frequently infighting between the various paramilitary forces that Khartoum has set up—often little more than recycled Janjaweed from particular Arab militia forces—there is nothinviolence, against men, women, and children. The notion of an “international responsibility to protect” such vulnerable civilians has died in Darfur, and its post-mortem is written almost daily in the dispatches of Radio Dabanga, like this one issued on Monday:
 
“Three minor girls in Garsila and another in Kas were gang raped by
government-backed militia wearing military uniforms in two separate
incidents on Sunday, sources told Radio Dabanga. While the three girls in
Mando area of West Darfur were aged between 14 and 17 years of age,the
victim in Kas, South Darfur was 16 years old. A relative of the three teenage girls in Mando told Radio Dabanga, ‘An armed group wearing
military uniforms intercepted the three girls who were on their way from
the village to collect firewood. They then arrested them and raped them
for an entire day’ The girls weren’t released until the next day.”
 
“A relative of the 16-year-old victim in Kas also stated that the six gunmen who attacked the girl were wearing military uniforms. ‘Four of them were riding on camels and two others on horses. The girl was with her mother on her way back from the farm to the village,’ the relative told Radio Dabanga. It was then that the armed group intercepted them and arrested them. The group took turns to rape her for the next 12 hours and also beat the girl’s mother.”
 
As the father of two daughters, I struggle to keep such realities from
overwhelming my sense of judgment and proportion. These unspeakably cruel
crimes are violent, obscenely destructive assaults on the most vulnerable
of civilians, without consequence for the perpetrators. And such instances of rape have been reported continuously, voluminously, and authoritatively for eight years by Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders/médecins Sans frontières (MSF/Holland),and many others. The Amel Center for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture in South Darfur has substantial records of these crimes, and a  compelling overview has been provided by the Harvard School of Public Health and theFrancois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. There is simply no doubt that rape and sexual violence—on a vast, often systematic, and ethnically targeted basis—have profoundly defined the lives of girls and women in Darfur, and will for many years, and that prosecutions for these crimes are virtually unheard of.
 
It is time to acknowledge frankly that the ideal of a “responsibility to protect” is merely that—an ideal before its time, or at least before the international community has devised the means to make meaningful the words of the UN World Summit Outcome Document, unanimously endorsed six years ago by all member states voting,declaring that they were
 
“…prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner,
through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter,
including Chapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with
relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be
inadequate and national authorities manifestly failing to protect their
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes
against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles
of the Charter and international law.”
 
Given the time, energy, and institutional and governmental resources
devoted to promulgating a “responsibility to protect,” it seems both honest and important to acknowledge that this has not been enough—and that without a fundamental change in the ways in which the world responds to atrocity crimes of the sort we see in Darfur, impunity will continue to prevail in Sudan and throughout the world.
 
What we are seeing now, whether in the fates of the girls of Garsila and
Kass or in the invasions of Abyei, South Kordofan, and Blue Nile, are the
consequences of impunity—our refusal to confront the brutal regime
responsible for all of this, ruthless and cruel men who have learned over
many years that words, however strenuouly. Darfur has been the test case for the “responsibility to protect,” and we have failed terribly.

BY Eric Reeves
Smith College
Northampton, MA  01063, USA

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khartoum regime, militia allies, nuba people, agricultural lives, and liberation army.