Soldiers stopped cars at checkpoints and arrested 60 people in the third day of a crackdown on militants in Nigeria’s volatile oil region.
The army said Sunday that 160 people have been arrested so far in the Niger River delta region, though 30 of those have been released. The arrests are a reaction to a spate of kidnappings that has seen 15 foreigners seized in the past three weeks. Ten have been released unharmed.
“We want to sanitize the state. We are not in any hurry to relax what we are doing,” army spokesman Maj. Sagir Musa said.
“If security reports require it, we will move to the creeks,” he added, referring to the hard-to-police network of creeks and waterways in the sprawling delta region.
The kidnappings have severely curtailed movements of expatriate staff working for the oil companies that normally pump 2.6 million barrels of oil per day from the Niger Delta. A quarter of this production has been shut down by militant attacks earlier this year, but Nigeria remains Africa’s largest oil exporter and the fifth-largest supplier of crude to the United States.
Inhabitants of delta communities � where many subsist on less than $2 a day despite the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by oil exploration in the region � have repeatedly detained foreign workers to protest living conditions.
Oil spills often pollute farms or rivers, which are the traditional means of sustenance in the region, and government corruption means that the region is severely underdeveloped, lacking roads and reliable electricity.
However, most of the kidnappers who have taken foreigners in the past few weeks have not issued demands, leading to speculation that kidnapping has become more of a matter of money rather than a political activity.
After four foreigners were dragged from a nightclub in Port Harcourt last Sunday, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo vowed to crack down on militant activities.
The operation has met with skepticism from local residents.
“We need peace, food and shelter, not soldiers on our streets,” said Fyneface Aaron, a 61-year-old water vendor. “They will not find the hoodlums and they may end up killing the wrong people.”