General removed from post amid hostage crisis

The commander of a military task force deployed in the Niger Delta to protect Nigeria’s oil industry has been removed from his post, officials said Wednesday.

The region has been plagued for two months by aconstant stream of violence and kidnapping.

Since the start of the year, separatist guerrillas have attacked oil export facilities, killed more than 20 government soldiers and kidnapped 13 foreign oil workers, three of whom are still being held hostage in the delta swamps.

On Wednesday, a military spokesman confirmed that Brigadier General Elias Zamani, commander of a joint military task force based in the oil port of Warri, had been transfered to duties outside the oil-producing region.

“General Zamani has been redeployed. It is not as if he committed any offence,” said defence headquarters spokesman Group Captain Eniola Akinduro.

“It is a routine military exercise. The general has been on that post for more than two years. It is normal that he be moved to
another area,” he added.

Ethnic Ijaw militants — who last month accused Zamani of escalating the crisis by ordering helicopter gunship strikes on oil smuggling barges in the delta creeks — welcomed the decision but said it did not go far enough.

Oboko Bello, the head of the radical Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), said talks to secure the hostages’ release would progress faster if the general’s transfer was followed by the removal of his task force.

“We’re a civilian community. We don’t want this level of garrison,” he told AFP by telephone from Warri, where he is a member of a committee set up by Delta State Governor James Ibori to arrange the release of the hostages.

On February 18, ethnic Ijaw militants armed with rocket propelled grenades and light machine guns stormed a pipeline laying barge operated by the US firm Willbros on behalf of the energy giant Shell and seized nine foreign workers.

Six of the men were later released. But three — US oil workers Cody Oswald and Russel Spell and British security expert John Hudspith — are still being held hostage at a rebel base near the village of Okerenkoko.

An AFP reporter who visited the area met scores of heavily-armed guerrillas equipped with radios, body armour, speed boats and infantry weapons.

Since the kidnapping, attacks have continued against oil facilities.

Shell has suspended loading at the Forcados export terminal and has evacuated the EA offshore field and all of its swamp wells in the western delta, cutting output by 455,000 barrels per day.

The US major, Chevron, has closed its Makaraba oil flow station following a suspected attack on one of its pipelines, shutting off 13,000 barrels per day.

The militants have demanded the demilitarisation of the delta, 1.5 billion dollars in compensation from Shell for polluted fishing communities and the release from jail of two leading members of the Ijaw’s struggle to control oil resources.

Nigeria is Africa’s biggest oil exporter, producing around 2.6 million barrels per day, but three quarters of the population still live in poverty and many in the delta’s 14-million-strong Ijaw tribe dream of independence.

Zamani’s task force — which took its slogan “Operation Restore Hope” from the ill-fated 1993 US mission to Somalia — was deployed to the delta in 2003 after fierce fighting erupted between Ijaw
militants and their Itsekiri neighbours.

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