By Chris Stein – Voice of America, 06 March 2015
Nigeria’s Ogonis Divided Over Resuming Oil Production
KEGBARA DERE, NIGERIA—
Oil once flowed in Ogoniland, as it does from wells throughout the creeks and swamps of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.
But in 1993, the Ogoni people said enough. Leaking pipelines were polluting the fields they farmed and the waterways they fished.
Oil giant Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoniland that year in the face of protests led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa, head of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP. He was hanged two years later by the military dictatorship that ran Nigeria, in a move widely seen as retaliation for his activism.