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Shell execs accused of ‘collaboration’ over hanging of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa

Sunday Telegraph

Oil giant Shell’s relationship with Nigeria’s former military dictatorship will face scrutiny this week as a New York lawsuit begins, reports Leonard Doyle in Washington 

Nigerian activist Ken Saro Wiwa who was sentenced to death and executed in november 1995

“If you call off the campaign, maybe we can do something for your brother.” A New York court will claims this week that Brian Anderson, Shell’s former top official in Nigeria, used those words when asked to intercede with the country’s military regime to save activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa from being executed.

After a secret trial, widely viewed as rigged, Mr Saro-Wiwa was convicted of murder and executed in November 1995 along with eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). To international outrage, Mr Saro-Wiwa’s body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

Almost 14 years later, Mr Anderson, a Nigerian-born British citizen, is about to face a civil jury trial along with 15 other Shell executives concerning their alleged role in encouraging a brutal government crackdown on the Ogani people and in failing to use their influence to prevent the execution of the activists known as the Ogoni Nine.

Despite an international clamour, Shell refused until the very last minute to call for clemency for Mr Saro-Wiwa, waiting until after his trial was over. The jury at the US Federal Court in Manhattan will hear allegations that the oil company wanted to see the popular leader discredited and silenced.

Former US president Bill Clinton revealed last month how he had made a phone call to General Sani Abacha, the then Nigerian dictator, asking him to spare Mr Saro-Wiwa the hangman’s noose.

Abacha “was very polite,” but “he was cold,” Mr Clinton told US author Richard North Patterson. Mr Clinton concluded that Abacha felt “impervious” to pressure because of the West’s appetite for oil.

After the executions, the general allegedly boasted to his cronies: “All these pro-democracy activists run to America and expect America to save them. But the U.S. president himself is calling me ‘sir.’ He is scared of me.”

Nigeria, which passed to civilian rule after Abacha’s death in 1998, was suspended from the Commonwealth as a result of the hangings.

Thousands of miles of oil pipelines are threaded through the poor coastal areas occupied by the Ogoni people, one of 250 ethnic tribes in Nigeria. They have seen little benefit from the oil exploration in their backyard, and although Shell gave large sums of money for community projects, it is accepted that most was siphoned away by corrupt local officials.

Supporters of Mr Saro-Wiwa claim that justice is now finally catching up with those they accuse of helping facilitate Nigeria’s brutal crackdown on Mr Saro-Wiwa’s Ogoniland, or at least failing to use their influence to stop it. Under US law it is not necessary to have “tightened the noose” to be found guilty, said Jennie Green a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Reform, which is bringing the case against Shell.

“We are not saying that Shell just did business in a bad place,” Ms Green said. “Shell was an actor here. Shell wasn’t just standing by.”

The oil giant flatly denies seeking to silence Mr Saro-Wiwa. “Shell attempted to persuade that government to grant clemency; to our deep regret, that appeal – and the appeals of many others – went unheard,” Shell’s global spokesman Shaun Wiggins said. “We were shocked and saddened when we heard the news.”

The company went on to say that the allegations concerning the executions of the Ogoni Nine “are false and without merit. Shell in no way encouraged or advocated any act of violence against them or their fellow Ogonis.”

However Owens Saro-Wiwa, 52, will tell the court that in a desperate attempt to save his brother’s life, he met Mr Anderson three times during the original trial.

He will swear that Mr Anderson, who has made his fortune running oil exploration companies worldwide, told him it would be “difficult but not impossible” to get his brother freed, as long as the Ogoni movement called off its campaign against the company.

His brother refused the offer, saying the campaign against Shell would only end when he was free and the company had agreed to negotiate with the MOSOP movement.

Mr Anderson later broke off contact, according to Owens Saro-Wiwa. After the executions, in 1996, Shell issued a videotaped interview issued by Mr Anderson in which he denied ever having made such an offer, while confirming that he met with Owens Saro-Wiwa.

Owens Saro-Wiwa also said that Mr Anderson also demanded three conditions for the activitists to show “goodwill” towards Shell.

The first was to get a press statement published in Nigerian newspapers, “that there was no environmental devastation in Ogoni”. The second was to call off the protest against Shell and the Nigerian government internationally. The third was that a Channel Four documentary, Drilling Fields, be withdrawn.

Should the jury conclude that Mr Anderson and other executives were culpable in Nigeria’s suppression of the protest movement, which led to numerous murders and the executions of the Ogoni Nine, they could be liable for huge damages to the families of those executed. The lawsuit asserts that as Mr Saro-Wiwa’s campaign grew, Shell become worried that it would hit oil production across the Niger Delta, disrupt its operations and tarnish its image abroad. The multinational “sought to eliminate that threat, through a systematic campaign of human rights violations,” the lawsuit alleges.

Nigeria’s military leaders saw the Ogoni movement as a step towards a separatist war, and viewed Mr Saro-Wiwa as someone who sought political power and a large share of oil revenues. Shell, the lawsuit claims, played into the government’s hands by specifically requesting mobile police to protect its oilfields from attack by protesters.

It alleges that the oil company helped with transport and paid salary bonuses for the police, who become known to locals as the “kill-and-go mob” because of the way they rampaged through villages. In one incident, 80 villagers were killed and 495 houses destroyed by the Nigerian military.

Court documents allege that there was “a pattern of collaboration” between Shell and the military “to violently and ruthlessly suppress any opposition to its exploitation of oil and natural gas resources in the Niger Delta.”

A month after Mr Saro-Wiwa’s execution, Shell executives initialed an agreement with the Nigerian government to pump $4 billion into a natural gas project.

Mr Anderson was later sent to run Shell’s operations in China. After retiring, he joined the board of Addax Petroleum a $1bn oil exploration and production company that operates mostly in Nigeria and West Africa.

The suit against Shell is being brought under the Alien Torts Claims Act, an anti-piracy statute from the 18th century and increasingly used in human rights suits. It permits US courts to hear cases brought by non-Americans for violations of international law. Two years ago year, Bosnian Muslims won a lawsuit against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic under the law.

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