OKWAGBE, Nigeria (AP) — As the heavily armed Nigerian soldiers slipped closer to a suspected militant camp in the country's oil-rich southern delta, they were ready for a fight after suffering casualties only days earlier.
They launched a massive attack, including aerial
bombings, that was aimed at finding a wanted militant. Civilians caught in the
middle tried to escape with their lives, human rights activists say.
As many as 150 people died in the fighting
Wednesday and subsequent raids around Ayakoromor, a village lacking mobile
phone reception and only accessible via the Niger Delta's maze of winding
creeks, activists say. However, the military says it fired only after being
fired upon.
Still, the violence represents yet another example
of how those toiling in poverty in a region that makes billions for Nigeria
find themselves caught between a military seeking revenge and power-hungry
militants.
"In this country, we have only two classes of
being," said Casely Omon-Irabor, a lawyer representing the hunted militant
John Togo. "The oppressed and the oppressor."
The attack around Ayakoromor, a small village in
Delta state, included heavy machine gun blasts from Navy vessels and bombing
runs by military aircraft. However, the region's main military commander in the
fight against militants denied Saturday that any civilians died in the recent
assaults, while acknowledging soldiers opened fire on the shoreline of the
civilian village after reportedly being shot at.
"We were taken aback by the volume of fire
that was brought to bear on the troops when we approached Ayakoromor on the way
to John Togo's camp," Gen. Charles Omoregie told journalists at a news
conference. "Soldiers had to fight their way into the camp."
Omoregie said homes in the village burned after
ricocheting rifle rounds exploded gasoline and kerosene canisters.
Those with family in the village, like engineer
Yeigagha Henry, offered a different account. Residents able to escape the
village told him his 76-year-old father died at the hands of the soldiers.
"They set the house ablaze," Henry calmly
recounted Saturday in the nearby city of Okwagbe. "He died inside."
A list compiled by Oghebejabor Ikim, national
coordinator for the Warri-based Forum of Justice and Human Rights Defense,
identified 18 of the dead. Ikim said residents told him that soldiers burned
down the local customary court and a maternity ward, as well as many homes in
the area.
Access to Ayakoromor remained tightly controlled by
the military Saturday. Officials with the Nigerian Red Cross made it inside,
but a military commander blocked two journalists working for The Associated
Press from entering the village, citing a security risk.
Violence in the area also may be continuing.
Soldiers manning a boat landing in Okwagbe speaking in the Hausa language said
someone suffered injuries Saturday. A commander ordered guards to avoid
bringing the injured person past waiting journalists.
Militant and military attacks are nothing new to
the Niger Delta, a region of creeks and mangroves about the size of South
Carolina. The attacks from an insurgency that began in 2006 cut drastically
into crude production in Nigeria, an OPEC-member nation that is one of the top
suppliers of crude oil to the U.S.
Production has risen back to 2.2 million barrels of
oil a day, in part because many militant leaders and fighters accepted a
government-sponsored amnesty deal last year.
But as militants over the years profit from
kidnapping and oil theft, the military has launched several reprisal massacres
against villages. Often, civilians find themselves caught in the middle of a
war over oil they never profit from.
Instead, they eek out a living in petty trading,
fishing and subsidence farming as their children attend classes in rundown
schools with rusting corrugated roofs and clinic cabinets remain barren of needed
anti-malaria drugs.
"What they get as the dividends of democracy,
what they get as part of oil revenue is human slaughter," said Anyakwee
Nsirimovu, the executive director of the Institute for Human Rights and
Humanitarian Law in Port Harcourt. "It's unacceptable and I think children
and young people who watch their parents die and their houses get burned down
will find a way of fighting back."
Meanwhile, both militants and the military find it
lucrative for violence to continue — especially when it comes to the
large-scale oil theft that plagues the foreign oil firms working in the region.
That stolen crude, easily refined, fetches top dollar on the black market. But
in order for the oil to leave the country, security agencies patrolling the
delta must let container ships slip away unstopped.
Between oil theft, amnesty program cash payouts and
additional combat pay offered to soldiers in the region, Nsirimovu said only
the civilians get left out — until the violence comes.
"People who profit from the violence in the
Niger Delta would not want that violence to end," he said.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
Photo
Caption: Women who fled following a deadly army attack on Ayakoromor village
take refuge with other members of the community at a microcredit organization
in the nearby town of Warri, Nigeria, Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010. The military
launched Wednesday a massive attack including aerial bombings that was aimed at
finding a wanted militant. Civilians caught in the middle tried to escape with
their lives, human rights activists say. The violence represents yet another
example of how those toiling in poverty in a region that makes billions for
Nigeria find themselves caught between a military seeking revenge and
power-hungry militants.(AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
