Editorials Opinion and Analysis
The Risk Premium
by Mimi Swartz
(Page 3 of 6)
But old-fashioned kidnappers are now competing with political activists whose demands are more enterprising and more expensive. Militants need money for their cause; they get it not just from kidnapping and bunkering (stealing and selling local oil on the black market) but from sympathetic Nigerian émigrés; likewise, their weapons come from around the world. This increases the danger for workers like Russell Spell: Politically motivated groups like MEND declare they have “nothing left to lose” and that their goals are “to totally destroy the ability of the Nigerian government to export oil,” to regain control of the country’s oil wealth, and to restore basic human rights in the delta. With easy access to the Internet, they have learned from groups like Al Qaeda that it is entirely plausible to demand that “all oil companies must leave the delta region or face their destruction.”
Spell’s job description, then, was to build pipelines in the midst of an undeclared civil war. “The oil companies are not the enemy,” Justus Wariya, an Ijaw who now lives in Houston and supports human rights for the delta, told me. “It is the government. The companies got in the middle.” What Spell, and perhaps Willbros, didn’t realize was that safety in Nigeria had become a mirage—for oil companies, for oil service companies, for all foreign workers, and, of course, for the country’s abundant supply of oil. As a University of Houston oil historian, Joseph Pratt, told me, “In a sense, we’ve all been kidnapped by Nigeria.”
MEND took nine hostages from the Willbros rig—one Filipino, two Thais, two Egyptians, three Americans, and one Englishman. Along with the others, Spell was marched to a palm grove and ordered to sit on some crude wooden benches. He looked around and saw a few tin-roofed concrete buildings riddled with bullet holes. A screen door, cut in half by machine-gun fire, had been sheared off its hinges. The place looked as if it had been under assault more than once.
A man who appeared to be in charge—well built, late forties, in combat gear—viewed them with fury. “Why are you here?” he demanded. To Spell, this seemed a rhetorical question, but in fact it wasn’t. The man turned on his heel, stormed into one of the buildings, and came back out carrying a newspaper. Didn’t they know about Dark February? MEND’s warnings had been all over the news.
Spell scanned the front page of the Nigerian paper as his captors began to take photos of their hostages to release to the international media. The proclamation of “Dark February” came from the newly formed Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta; violence, their leaders declared, would escalate in the area, and for that reason all foreign oil companies should evacuate their employees by midnight, February 17. MEND’s leaders stated that they had chosen armed resistance because of Shell’s refusal to pay the Nigerian government a $1.5 billion fine for polluting Ijaw fishing waters. MEND also wanted the government to release two prominent Ijaw leaders from prison. Their recent attacks on oil facilities and a previous kidnapping in January were, they claimed, direct retaliation for air strikes in the delta by the Nigerian military. More violence was to come: “Administrative edifices, oil installations, vessels, and production machinery shall be sabotaged, and, wherever necessary, hostages shall be taken, this time to ply a poisonous jagged edged sword through the heart of Nigerian oil policies, 50 years of environmental desecration, psychological desolation, economic disenfranchisement and social depression that has been our redeeming franchise so far.”
Spell had never heard of MEND. He had never heard of Dark February, nor did he know that Shell had evacuated 330 of its own employees from the region. Access to newspapers and TV news on the barge was limited. But managers on the barge were in direct communication with the nearest Willbros office. If Shell had gotten word to evacuate its people, why hadn’t Willbros? If the workers had known how much danger they were in, they would have demanded to leave, and the company would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars with each day of work stoppage. It was entirely possible, Spell reflected, that Willbros was playing a game of chicken with Shell over costs. He had seen this ploy during his days working on rigs in the Gulf of Mexico: Who would pay for removing workers when a major storm approached? Spell knew that service companies rarely chicken out first.
The soldiers stripped the hostages of all their personal possessions—money, jewelry, papers, whatever they had grabbed from the barge. The leader—the prisoners soon began calling him the General—took their names and made calls announcing their capture on his cell phone, probably the most useful instrument, along with the Internet, in facilitating the spread of terrorism today. Finally, as the shadows grew long and darkness fell, the soldiers loaded their captives back on the boats and pushed even deeper into the jungle, navigating by moonlight.
A few hours later they landed at what looked to be an old palm oil plantation, with a concrete jetty stretching into the water. The place clearly wasn’t lacking for funds; there were power generators, a machine shop for boat repair, and an abundance of automatic weapons. The air and water both gave off the thick, metallic odor of oil. The hostages collapsed from nervous exhaustion and slept for about 48 hours. When Spell finally awoke, his neck felt as though it was on fire from the rifle blow, and he was dizzy. The dizziness, he realized with growing panic, was because he had been without his hypertension medication for two days.
It did not take long for the group to settle into a strange routine, alternating between the humdrum and abject terror. Days began around seven. The prisoners sat in white plastic chairs in a palm grove, where they watched their captors train—running, lifting weights, and shooting weapons. In off-hours the younger men played soccer and smoked marijuana. Spell stuck close to Cody Oswalt, whose natural inquisitiveness, Spell feared, made the guards nervous and might get them into trouble. At first he avoided the Englishman, John Hudspith, because he felt the security expert had failed them. But as Spell got to know Hudspith, he found him to be a natural leader whose reminders to keep calm and quiet earned the respect of the other men. Macon Hawkins, a fellow Texan, was the oldest and gabbiest among them.
Sometimes the guards brought newspapers, which allowed the hostages to keep up with MEND’s campaigns and the ongoing negotiations for their release. They had bottled water and food; sometimes there was fruit and sometimes fresh fish, which the hostages declined, having seen the filthy water they came from. Their toilet was a small shovel and a short march to the river’s edge. Escape was out of the question; about fifteen armed guards kept constant watch. Even if they had gotten away, no one knew a way out of the jungle. The camp was dangerous enough: Venomous green mamba snakes lounged in the mangrove branches, and hungry mosquitoes swarmed at dusk, raising angry red welts wherever the prisoners weren’t covered with clothing. The malaria medication, Spell noted, came in boxes wrapped in paper stamped with the Shell insignia.
There was much coming and going in the camp in the afternoons and early evenings. Soldiers hiked to a nearby town for supplies; villagers stopped in for a visit. The older ones told the captives they would pray for their release, while the younger ones made no effort to hide their contempt. In quiet times, the soldiers talked about their ambitions, which included going to America. At night, everyone—hostages and their guards—slept on foam mattresses on the tile floors in the General’s two-room cinder block house. The building had window AC units, as well as a stereo/CD player, cell phones, and satellite television, powered by a generator. Everyone watched TV, and Spell found it ironic that some of the guards’ favorite show was a Nigerian version of Big Brother, since they too were trapped in a small space with too many people. A light had been improperly installed above the ceiling fan, so that the room seemed lit by a strobe; the fan also wobbled with a constant yooong, yooong, yooong sound that was worse, Spell told himself, than a dripping faucet.
Their treatment seemed to depend on how well hostage negotiations were going with the government and, Spell assumed, Willbros. On good days his captors were cheerful. MEND had stepped up the pressure by telling the press that they were not sure how long they would keep their hostages alive. At one point they kidnapped some Pakistanis off a ship and marched them to the camp just so they could return to tell the world the hostages were still among the living.
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