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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
NIGERIA: Death toll mounts in Delta State violence
LAGOS, 19 August 2003 (IRIN) - At least 45 people had died by Tuesday as the death toll increased in four days of gun battles between rival ethnic militias in Nigeria's southern oil city of Warri, witnesses said. Oil transnationals operating in the area had closed their offices.
More than 40 houses were burnt and thousands left homeless as fighting, which broke out on Friday night between Ijaw and Itsekiri militias armed with automatic weapons, persisted despite a nighttime curfew imposed by the Delta State government.
Twenty people were reported killed by witnesses in the first two days of fighting. Ijaw militants said 39 of their people were killed by troops deployed by President Olusegun Obasanjo's government to quell the violence.
"The 39 people include women and children and 16 men killed in cold blood by soldiers," Bello Oboko, an Ijaw militant leader told IRIN on Tuesday. His claims could not be confirmed by independent sources.
But Colonel Gar Dogo, commander of the 6th Amphibious Battalion of the Nigerian army, deployed to end the violence denied that his troops had killed innocent people. "It is not true we have killed any Ijaw people, my soldiers have been very restrained and we have no reason to take sides against Ijaws," he told IRIN.
Bawo Omatsola, an Itsekiri resident, said more than 15 people were killed during attacks launched by Ijaws on their settlements on Sunday and the early hours of Monday. He said many people were still missing and may have died.
Oil transnationals which use Warri as a key base for operations in the western Niger Delta asked their employees to stay away from their offices to avoid being caught in the crossfire. But both Royal/Dutch Shell and ChevronTexaco, which have big operations in the area, said their production and exports have yet to be affected by the violence.
"We have asked people to stay home but our field operations are still going on," a Shell spokesman told IRIN.
A ChevronTexaco official said employees "had "been advised to stay at home" but added the company’s oil export schedules were continuing unhindered so far.
Colonel Ganiyu Adewale, the armed forces spokesman, said more troops were being deployed to the troubled city to create "a buffer zone" between the warring militias and added that the situation was now under control.
"Normally in such a situation there must be casualties but I can't give anything in terms of numbers," he said in response to a question about death toll.
Warri, a sprawling city of one million people set amid the swamps of the Niger delta, is a major oil base for companies that pump the crude oil that is the lifeline of the Nigerian economy from nearby oil platforms.
Fighting between Ijaws and Itsekiris in March left at least 100 people dead and forced oil transationals operating in the area to shut down facilities producing 40 percent of Nigeria's daily export of two million barrels.
At the heart of the violence are claims and counter-claims to the ownership of the oil-rich land. The individuals and communities who control the land mop up the many benefits that can be extracted from the oil companies whose wells have been drilled there.
Ijaws accuse Obasanjo's government of abetting an Itsekiri ascendancy over their neighbours, giving them the best of government patronage and most of the few amenities that come to the impoverished region.
Theme(s): (IRIN) Conflict
[ENDS]
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