Nigerian separatist rebels rejected Saturday an appeal from tribal elders for them to release three Western oil workers and warned: “The hostages are going nowhere”.
Earlier, the senior traditional monarch among the Niger Delta’s14 million ethnic Ijaws had urged the militants to release the two Americans and one Briton they have held for three weeks in the delta swamps.
But a spokesman from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said Chief Edwin Clark’s appeal would have no bearing on any decision to release the oilmen.
“Is it not obvious that Chief Clark and his bunch wield no influence on us? He will continue to embarrass his name by pretending to be of relevance. The hostages are going nowhere,” he said, in an emailed statement.
Clark told AFP on Friday that a meeting of Ijaw elders and opinion leaders would urge MEND to free the hostages. “We, the entire Ijaw nation met today and said that enough is enough,” he said.
“We have asked our youths to release the hostages while we start negotiating with the federal government. They’ve made their point and the whole world has listened,” he said, in a telephone interview from the city of Yenagoa.
Heavily-armed Ijaw militants attacked the energy giant Shell’s Forcados export terminal on February 18, fought a gunbattle with navy troopers, set fire to a crude oil loading platform and kidnapped nine foreign oil workers.
Six of the men were later released, but MEND is still holding US oil workers Russell Spell and Cody Oswald and British security expert John Hudspith.
The group has demanded talks with the federal government on regional autonomy, 1.5 billion dollars (1.2 billion euros) in damages for polluted fishing communities and the release of two jailed Ijaw leaders.
Nevertheless, the militants have vowed not to harm the hostages.
“They are fortunate to have been captured and well kept. Assure the families of these guys they will eventually be released without harm. It is beneath us to execute a prisoner without just cause,” the spokesman said.
Mainstream Ijaw leaders say the kidnap was triggered by a Nigerian military assault on villages around the Ijaw settlement of Okerenkoko and that the men are being held as “human shields” to ward off further air strikes.
President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government, however, dismisses the militants as disgruntled oil smugglers angered at a campaign to curtail their trade.