November 10th, 2006
This year I had the privilege of being invited to speak on behalf of the BHP Shareholders for Social Responsibility at the BHP Billiton AGM, the world’s biggest mining company, in Brisbane.
And while it some of it approached sleep-inducing, my eyes were nonetheless open wide by the end of it. Technologically the experience was stunning. It was a well orchestrated and slick combination of information overload, long and impressively worded speeches accompanied by many graphs and massive Brave New World style screens relaying the faces of the Chairman and CEO as they spoke.
A number of controversial and unjustified statements were made by Chairman Don Argus in his speech including absolving the company of moral wrongdoing in giving a shipment of Australian wheat as a deal softner to the Iraq regime during the sanctions period (of which the supreme court absolved them) and extended defense of nuclear power complete with unexplained graphs that seemed to back his claim that
nuclear power was both cheaper than renewable energy and more clean than coal. Hardly the area of
expertise of a mining executive. In addition both Argus and Chief Executive Officer Chip Goodyear
boasted of the great and extended opportunities for BHPB in China and India, which ACF spokesperson
David Noonan has said undermines the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Noonan says, “India is right
outside all those international regimes and it’s simply undermining our safeguards reputation and damaging that international treaty by trying to constrain nuclear weapons to push to get uranium export approval to China and to India.”
We were also treated to a couple to of short films extolling the many virtues and good works of the company that left even a cynic like myself feeling they were really helping people and improving the lives of the poor in developed countries rather than raping nations everywhere of their natural resources, undermining democratic process with cash donations, taking advantage of corrupt regimes and leaving many places with a legacy of environmental and social disarray that continues long after the mining is over and BHPB has moved on.
The grand finale of the three hour meeting was perhaps the rush on the tea and pastries that seemed be the highlight of the experience for many of the shareholders present.
BHP Shareholders for Social Responsibility was formed in 1994, over concerns regarding the environmental damage done in Papua New Guinea, by BHPB’s Ok Tedi copper mine, which they owned until 2002. The gold and copper mine discharges 90 million tons of contaminated tailings and waste rock into the river each year. In 1999, BHP admitted that the mine is an ecological disaster. The toxic cocktail of cyanide and acid has killed all life in the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers and made local people ill while depriving them of their land and livelihood. The dumping of waste rock from the mine into the river changed the ecology and water flows creating flooding and disruption to local transportation. BHPB has still not fully compensated the locals.
Since then many other environmental and social justice issues have emerged as a result of the operations of BHPB. BHPSSR have raised many important questions of the board of directors over the years including those related to BHP’s influence upon PNG legislation, the Gippsland-Sydney gas pipeline, environmental and native title issues, the lack of rehabilitation at deep open cut coal mines in Queensland’s Bowen Basin, whistle Blower cases; a continuing oil leak at Groote Eylandt, and unsafe practices on the Griffin Venture (a 100,000 tonne floating oil storage near North West Cape in Western Australia), Gammon Ranges National Park, South Australia, mining and exploration leases in Weetootla Gorge and many others. In essence BHPSSR exists to monitor the effects BHP operations have on people and their environment, workers safety and health and the amount of waste created by their operations: BHP have been accused of environmental vandalism, displacing indigenous people, and unfair union controls.
The pretense of a democratic affair was embodied in the voting of resolutions that included giving non-executive directors a pay rise of AUS$900,000 from a maximum AUS$3m to US$3m. I was surprised in how little interaction there was from shareholders, many of whom I heard discussing the flagrant sizes of the executive paypacket and scoffing at the Chairman’s claims regarding non-culpability in the AWB Iraq bribes affair.
In 2005 BHP Billiton purchased the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia from Western Mining Corporation. Along with the profitable benefits of owning Australia’s biggest deposit of uranium, they also will benefit
from the Roxby Downs (Indenture Ratification) Act 1982 which suspend the mine operations from
a number of significant laws. These laws include: The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988, the Development Act 1993, the Environmental Protection Act 1993, the Freedom of Information Act 1991, the Mining Act 1971 and the Natural Resources Act 2004 (including the Water Resources Act 1997). The size and influence of the mining giant brings with it the arrogance that they can operate outside the law, putting at risk much more than shareholders money.
Near the end of the meeting shareholders were invited to ask questions which just a few of them did. Speaking for ‘BHP Shareholders for Social Responsibility’ I asked Mr Argus if the board would relinquish those legal exemptions to maintain his companies stated commitment to the “highest ethical standards”
and the “strictest environmental and health standards”.
Argus told shareholders that they would not make a commitment to relinquishing their extra-legal privileges granted to former owners. Mr Argus argued that they would continue to benefit from those legal exemptions, that it was “not uncommon” in the mining industry. Mr Argus says that the shareholders (and the rest of the community) would have to trust his word that they were doing the right thing.
He says, “we will apply to the highest standards…we are acting within the law.” I argued that “In refusing to have to abide by the laws that bind every other person, shareholders can only assume that they expect to breach those laws, otherwise they would have nothing to be afraid of.”
While they operate outside the law and with no accountability to environmental and social concerns,
the community has no assurance of culpability for accidents. These exemptions represent a racist and
environmentally irresponsible outcome for the community.
Their exemption from the Freedom of Information Act means that if they have an accident, a radioactive a
leak or destroy aboriginal artefacts, we may never know. It is within the realm of possibility that these things may happen. The Olympic Dam mine, in 1994, had a considerable leak of radioactive water from it’s
tailings dam that went undiscovered and unremediated for years. Things do go wrong. The community needs to know it can be protected. The Chairman’s word does not constitute a legally binding commitment to protect the natural and cultural environment from harm and for future generations. It behooves the world’s biggest mining corporation to set the example of good environmental and ethical practice and not simply pay it lip service.
Until they relinquish the Roxby Downs Indentures, their admissions of best practice, sustainability and integrity with regards to the Olympic Dam mine will remain a sham.
My colleagues from the Mineral Policy Institute also questioned them on human rights abuses in the Phillipines, Columbia and Indonesia and more about the issues surrounding BHPB’s performance on those issue can be found on the MPI website. Much credit should go to Techa Beaumont, who it is apparent by the BHPB Chairman’s reactions, is a regular spokesperson for human and environmental justice at their AGMs and beyond.
originally published in Groundswell, the newsletter of Friends of the Earth Brisbane
for more info see the Mineral Policy Institute
Categories: environment, indigenous rights, social justice |
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May 24th, 2006
In 2002 6.1 million kangaroos and wallabies will be legally exterminated in Queensland: the largest quota EVER. Who knows? Who cares? In this article I ponder these questions and begin to understand why wars and ethnic cleansing are also possible.
The year two thousand and one marked a nadir for the world in many ways. Terrorism has become the universal justification for the oppression of free speech everywhere. Human rights that we have taken for granted in the western world are being whittled away in the name of security. Our minds have been focused on fear, in part generated by actual events, but magnified out of proportion by the mass media. While we are cocooned in this fear the world goes on, perhaps a bit more violent and intolerant than it was before, as we reject record numbers of refugees and our government suppresses so called ‘illegals’ like they are criminals without compassion for their all too human suffering.
In this climate of fear and intolerance the plight of suffering animals gets scant attention. Indeed, it may be, as human rights are being crushed everywhere, so too has the systematic slaughter of animals become more socially acceptable. The value of life has become less sacred, more relative.
The State of Queensland has excelled itself in the oppression of animals in the past few months. Hot on the heels of the extermination of Fraser Island’s dingoes (visitors are reporting no sightings at all now, six months later) the state government embarked on an all out assault on the wild dog population. Aerial baiting with 1080 took place state-wide, indiscriminately killing wild dogs and dingoes alike, despite QNP&WS alleged intention to preserve the dingo in certain areas. Little wonder that this baiting took place, for if the state refused to acknowledge the farmers claims of the plague status of these dogs, after they so enthusiastically ‘culled’ the Fraser dingoes, they would be labelled hypocrites.
And hypocrites they continue to be, giving kangaroos protected status with one hand and taking away their lives with the other. The Queensland Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee has declared a quota of six million macropods for 2002 for this state alone. This figure equates with last years quota for the whole nation. Farmers are claiming plague numbers of kangaroos, and the state is agreeing with them.
Putting aside an aquaintance and prominent kangaroo advocates recent claim that “farmers look out the window and see twenty ‘roos and they call it a plague”, let’s look at the evidence for plague numbers as the state sees it. Until 1983 kangaroo quotas were not set by any scientific method, but arbitrarily. The ACF policy staement reports:
Australian authorities claimed a total population of 32-35 million in 1980, implied this had grown to 36 million in 1982, and even suggested it could be as high as 60 million in 1983. In June 1983 a comprehensive estimate for the years 1980 to 1982 revealed the kangaroo population “peaked” in 1981 at only 19 million. (Grigg, Caughley and Short 1983)
The 1982/83 drought was the most severe on record in eastern Australia and caused an overall mortality of 43% in inland New South Wales kangaroo populations. Applying the known mortality rates to relevant areas of Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia reveals that the post-drought kangaroo population would not exceed 13 million. Australia’s human population exceeded 15 million in 1983. The post-drought floods in western Queensland and north west NSW caused additional heavy post-drought kangaroo mortalities. (ACF 1999)
Kangaroo numbers are calculated by a simple algorythm: for every kangaroo you see in a given area multiply by roughly 3.2 (the figure varies slightly for species of macropod). On the assumption that the quota is usually between 15 and 20% of actual numbers, this gives us roughly a total state-wide population of 35 million. Previous estimates of the total kangaroo population of Australia have varied wildy, but do assume it fluctuates between 15 and 35 million. (Grigg 1999). What flaws are there to this erstwhile ’scientific’ method of macropod guesstimation? The small matter of a margin of error of about 2.2. (Bigwood in Wilson, 1999) The possibility exists that not only have they grossly overestimated the numbers, but that the current quota could lead to local extinctions of some species. Not something that would trouble farmers greatly.
In July 2001 a symposium on Recent advances in the Scientific Knowledge of Kangaroos was held at the Universtiy of NSW. Studies indicate that we are now exterminating Red kangaroos at a rate faster than they can breed. The average age of a Red is now 2 years, yet they do not reach sexual maturity until they are 10. How are they to continue to exist when quotas advocating their deaths get bigger every year? Yet they are declared pests by farmers and conservationists alike. Pest because they want to eat and breed and live in the country that has always been theirs, but has been usurped by the invading forces of introduced species (cattle, sheep and human beings) and the unjustifiable devaluing of their lives over other native animals based on more hearsay than science. There is no assesment process to validate the claims of landowners requesting damage mitigation permits. All figures are based on an aerial survey using the ‘guesstimate’ process I described above.
Apparently the extermination of kangaroos is not something that troubles the average Australian greatly either. Year after year stupendous numbers of macropods are killed in Australia, ostensibly as ‘pest management’, and few of us bat an eyelid (see Table 1). We have become so used to the proclaimations of ’sustainable users’ and the myths of the farming lobby that we believe it. Kangaroos, our national icon and most recognised native marsupial, are massacred with impunity year after year on the weakest of scientific evidence. However, profit often wears the guise of science. Kangaroo meat and skins earn the Kangaroo Industry Association (now euphemistically called the ‘Wild Harvest’) millions in export dollars every year.
The arguments of ‘roo killers are now widely supported by conservations groups too. Conservation by ‘managing’ populations has become a panacea for ecological problems.
So too the public has been led to believe that not only is managment of nature a possibility (laughable, and from my ecocentric p-o-v, the ultimate in human arrogance) but that is positively good for species to be culled. The idea that kangaroos are going to suffer unduly because of their high numbers by eating out their range is the logic behind this argument. Yet historical records show that the early explorers reported huge mobs of kangaroos comparable with the bison of Northern America. There have always been lots of kangaroos, they live lightly on the land just like their indingenous human contemporaries would have. After a year of drought it is far more probably that farmers are now wanting to cull them not because of a population explosion, but because they have already so overstocked their land with cattle that they can’t tolerate the least bit of vegetation being eaten by a native animal. Better to scapegoat the indigenous animals than blame their own bad land use practices.
It is suggested that kangaroos will cause land degradation as a result of overpopulation. Come on now, is anyone who knows that this county has 180 million cattle obliterating flora under hoof (about 70% of our land mass) so naïve as to say it is the kangaroo that is responsible for land degradation? And those that do recognise the damage cattle do, suggest ‘roo farming as an alternative. The ‘roo meat trade, as it currently operates, is based firmly in the pest culling paradigm. Is it any surprise that as beef consumption plummets overseas in the after effects of foot and mouth and BSE and export sales of ‘roo and Australian beef are on the increase that we now see the highest quotas in the history of the industry?
The parallels with the human history of genocide are many. Genocide, as it is defined by Jared Diamond in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, is done primary for four reasons: ideology, power, psychology and land or combinations of these. That we have power over native animals is beyond question, it is the other three that provide some explanation of why we pursue their eradication.
The ideology that sees kangaroos as pests, as resources, is no different to that which led to the massacre and slavery of the Tasmanian aborigines. It makes compelling reading, it’s parallels to contemporary pest animal management astounding:
With the declaration of martial law in November 1828, soldiers were authorised to kill on sight any Tasmanian in the settled areas. Next, a bounty was declared …’Black Catchin’, as it was called…became big business pursued by private as well as official roving parties. At the same time a commission…was set up to recommend an overall policy towards the natives. After considering proposals to capture them for sale as slaves, poison or trap them, or hunt them with dogs, the commission settled on continued bounties and the use of mounted police. (Diamond 1991: 252-53)
When the Tasmanian aborigines were close to extinction, scientists became interested in them. Such was the competition between scientists for this ‘missing link’ research that they desecrated burial sites, and cut off body parts for souvenirs. One even went so far as to make a tobacco pouch of a man’s skin. Indifference is the psychological effect that this trophying has on the attitudes of people towards those they seek to exterminate. Walk into any tourist shop in Australia today and you will find trophies of extermination: kangaroo paw back-scratchers, scrotum purses, travesties of koalas stitched from kangaroo fur. Koalas are fortunate to have achieved the ‘cute and cuddly’ category well before we exterminated them. Though in truth we came very close to it in the early 1900s. Koala skin rugs are now museum pieces, testimony to our grisly pasts.
The original Tasmanians were named ‘primitive’, ’savage’, ‘heathen’ and hence ‘not like us’; just as select of the original animal natives of Australia are labelled ‘pests’ and in ‘plague’. The combination of this language of inferiority and disrespect with trophyism and you have powerful tools to promote acquienscence to mass murder in the wider society.
As the ideology that kangaroos are pests continues to assuage the consciences of Australians, the grab for their land provides a very real excuse for their continued slaughter. In this same way, the Tasmanian aborigines were usurped of their land and then their lives by greed. Greed too is behind the one added act of profiteering that would be unconscionable in a human genocide: meat. While the debate rages as to whether kangaroo meat is safe for human consumption or a decent thing to do to our national symbol, the guts of the matter is largely overlooked. We have stolen their land, we are stealing their lives and making trophies of their skins, and now in the final act of desecration, we want to eat them.
A sense of history can tell us much about why we human beings are capable of what we do to each other and other species. Perhaps it can also help us to circumvent tragedies of extermination before it’s too late. So long as we remain ignorant of our mistakes of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. Let’s hope we can save the remaining orginal Australians from the same terrible fate that befell the original Tasmanians.
References:
Animal Liberation South Australia 2001, Kangaroo Slaughter visited November 2001 at http://www.animalliberation.org.au/comkang.htm
Australian Conservaton Foundation 2001, Policy Statement No. 39 Kangaroo Harvesting visited September 2001 at http://www.acfonline.org.au/asp/pages/document.asp?IdDoc=207
Caughley, Grigg & Short (1983) “How Many Kangaroos?” Search 14: 151-154
Diamond, J 1991 The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage Science Press: London
Environment Australia 2000 Wild Harvest of Native Species - Kangaroos (1991-2000), visited September 2001 at http://www.ea.gov.au/biodiversity/trade-use/wild-harvest/kangaroo/yearly.html
Grigg, G & Pople, T 1999 Commercial Harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia Environment Australia
Rajecki, DW, Rasmussen, J and Craft, HD 1999 “Labels and the Treatment of Animals: Archival and Experimental Cases” at Society & Animals website http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa1.1/rajecki.html
Seymour, F & Oogjes, G 2001 “The Risky Politics of Scape-goating the Victim”, Animal Australia, unpublished manuscript
Wilson, M (ed) 1999 The Kangaroo Betrayed, Hill of Content: Victoria
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November 20th, 2005
November 19 marks a dark day for the indigenous community of Queensland. It marks the first anniversary of the death of indigenous man, Cameron (Mulrinji) Doomagee, after a brutal beating at the hands of the Palm Island police. Doomagee’s death sparked riots in the Palm Island community during which the police headquarters was burnt to the ground.
To date no charges have been laid against the perpetrators despite eyewitness evidence of police mistreatment and medical evidence indicating that Doomadgee bled to death in police custody without medical treatment. Police have been accused of hiding evidence in an alleged surveillance tape of the night Doomagee died. A Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation cleared police involved and an inquest has failed to lead to any convictions.
The anniversary comes at a bad time for the Palm Island Community who face 95% unemployment, severe housing shortages that have resulted in an average of 17 people per house and water shortages that may result in evacuation of the island. The QLD government has ineffective at solving these problems that indigenous people say are intentional and genocidal. These living conditions continue to alienate people from their culture and deprived of decent human living conditions which most Australians take for granted.
A vigil was held outside Queensland Parliament House in Brisbane on Friday. Attended by Doomagee’s relatives and supporters from the local community, people called for and end to police racism and the continuing crimes of aboriginal deaths in custody at a rate of one a day nationally.
Aunty Jean, from the local indigenous spokeswoman called for the reinvigoration of the black power movement to see their rights recognised. She also called for the help from the white community to help them fight back against the neglect of the Queensland government. She spoke a prayer for the family and all aboriginal people touched by deaths in custody.
Doomagee family members were present. Alec Doomadgee, Cameron Doomagee’s cousin and local Brisbane media activist with 4AAAfm said that it was ‘horrible’ being black, because there is so much racism in the community. He said that Cameron Doomagee was “good man, he wasn’t a trouble maker he wasn’t a small man though it’s hard to believe his liver could have been split in half by a fall on some steps.”
Local Brisbane indigenous activist Sam Watson noted that the Qld government could be easily mobilised by a bomb scare on the buses, but seemed unable or unwilling to prosecute the killers of Doomagee. The police officer implicated was in fact, promoted to a better post on the Gold Coast a fact that has had no attention from the mainstream media.
The Redfern mob sent a statement of solidarity, calling for justice for all aboriginal people “who seem to die so easily in police custody”.
Brisbane indigenous activists are calling for a big national mobilisation for aboriginal rights for Human Rights day December 10.
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November 10th, 2004
It’s been no secret that John Howard and many of his cabinet would like to keep most women out of the workforce and at home having good consumeristic babies. Howard went about elimnating a lot of women’s services when he first got in in 1996. Check out this article for details: [Anne Summers IWD lecture 2003]
Today, with his new ‘mandate from the masses’ giving him control of the Senate, he’s set his sights on eliminating aboriginal services and unions are next.
Not only has he (with Labour’s help mind you) eliminated ATSIC - the only indigenous elected body in Australia - but he will introduce new rules that set indigenous people aside as basket-cases in need of guidance. The extent of his arrogance is unbelievable!
Under the new plan, indigenous families will have to force their kids to go to school or risk losing welfare payments. In addition, Howard proposes that cleanliness and diet will be assessed. Considering the lack of access to things like clean water and decent health care in many indigenous communities, this add insult to the already considerable injury the government has perpetrated on indigenous people since 1788. In addition, the lives of indigenous people are constantly under scrutiny - the govt hiring security guards to watch people in a new housing development [ABC], and a raid on the National Indgenous Newspaper in Canberra[ABC] are recent examples, although ongoing ‘racial profiling’ by the police is occuring.
Fortunately the Australian Council of Social Services and the UN Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission have both challenged this plan, labelling it racist and paternalistic. ACOSS points out that indigenous Australians are the poorest group in Australia with life expectancy that is 20 years less than the general population; unemployment rates that are 3.8 times higher; and school retention rates to year 12 that are 44% below that of other Australians.
“Indigenous people must have the tools and resources to take the initiative and manage their own services. History has shown that reliance on old-style paternalism or mainstream services can not reduce poverty, poor health and disadvantage.” ACOSS has recently draw attention to the way that representative demcoracy in this country continues to fail indigenous people: - in the electoral system - in the govt’s actions to take away thier self-management - in delivering health care - in the govt’s actions that exacerbate poverty [and here] - in the criminal justice sytemThe impulse to punish for poverty and disadvantage in citizens largely caused by government policy is frightening but typical of atop-down approach to government.
The UNHREOC claims the new welfare requirements breach the Race Discrimination Act.
Murandoo Yanner had stronger words. Yanner says it is a return to the oppressive 1960s. “It is reverting to an already tried and failed method, with no logical basis to it other than ultra-conservatism…Basically, it is about paternalism, having a great white god watching over us and teaching us to wipe our kids’ noses.”
Other indigenous leaders join him, with one saying “It’s denigrated our Aboriginal community - it’s totally created apartheid within Australia, this move by the Howard Government”. [ABC-1] [2] [3]
But where is the outrage in the non-indigenous community? It’s only a matter of time before Howard targets poor white Australians again. We must all have self-determination to live decent lives, not the authoritarianism of a self-styled dictator proclaiming his right to guardianship over us. It’s an important time for non-indigenous Australians to stand together with our indigenous brothers and sisters because many of us are next
originally published on Darwin Indymedia
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November 10th, 2004
Daily, the mainstream news reports on one of the effects of the West’s dependence on oil — war. However, even when outright war has not broken out, life in communities where oil is being extracted is often violent, unhealthy and exploitative.
Nnimmo Bassey works with OilWatch and Environmental Rights Action to uncover the destructive activities of the many oil companies operating in Niger Delta, including Shell, ExxonMobil (Esso) and ChevronTexaco. He works to expose human rights abuses, which are often government sanctioned.
Bassey is trying to raise awareness about how the initial stages of the climate change cycle — the extraction of fossil fuels to meet the excessive demand of energy consumptive states in the North — cause chaos and human rights violations in his homeland.
In Australia, we are highly dependant on coal for our electricity production. Yet we still consume the equivalent of 872,000 barrels of oil per day, and rate ninth in the world for per capita consumption. We are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters in the world. These facts highlight the extent to which we need to take responsibility for the human rights and environmental effects of our energy consumption.
Bassey describes the Niger Delta landscape as “criss-crossed” with petroleum pipes that leak and spill oil into the streets and on agricultural land and are “never adequately handled”.
There is constant gas flaring and explosions, accompanied by “unbridled repression of the local people by occupation forces”. These forces include Nigeria’s own military, which continues to act at the behest of a corrupt government in league with transnational oil corporations.
The industry has such a pervasive grip on Nigeria that Bassey says “oil-related activities have led to the destruction of whole communities, the killing (including extra-judicial murders) of thousands as well as [the production of] thousands of external and internal refugees” with hardly a murmur from the international community.
The extraction of oil is synonymous with pollution. Indeed, Bassey maintains, “it can be said without fear of any contradiction that no oil spill has been adequately cleaned up in the Niger Delta”. The environment has been severely degraded in many places. Bassey believes the oil industry is intrinsically hostile to the environment and the people who live on it.
Waste products from oil extraction include gas, drilling mud and drilling cuts. The constant gas flaring, where gas is burnt off as an unprofitable byproduct of oil extraction causes “continual noise, acid rain and retarded crop yield, corroded roofs and lung diseases”. Bassey says that gas flaring has resulted in the Niger Delta being described as “the biggest single industrial complex in the world contributing to global warming today”.
Human health has suffered so much so that the Niger Delta is now a place “where life is short and unpredictable; where so much wealth is extracted and where so much wretchedness is evident”.
In addition to the lung diseases related to gas flaring, the pumping of mud waste into marine environments may be responsible for food-borne poisoning and illnesses. Explosives have been used in many places to the extent that aftershocks “have been known to impact on the auditory systems of sea birds and mammals finally affecting their ability to community and procreate. Other side effects are noted in diminished food supplies, increased cases of hypertension and endocrine imbalance. The ultimate impact is on the fish supply on which the economy of the local people hangs.”
Bassey links oil extraction to climate change in the area: “Climate change was once a remote possibility. Today it is a reality and an immediate threat to the very existence of island and coastal communities.”
Attempts to clean up oil spills have been either poorly attempted or non-existent. Legislation has been enacted to absolve transnational oil corporations of responsibility if they allege sabotage. Bassey claims, “[corporations] often set whole forests on fire in a bid to wipe out the evidence of the spills.”
Many human deaths have resulted from explosions or toxic cleaning chemicals in oil spills. Pipelines can also explode, a recent incident caused the deaths of 1000 people at the Jesse petrol pipeline in the Niger Delta. As in other occasions with other corporations, the state-run oil company NNCP attempted to place responsibility on the victims, accusing them of being saboteurs and vandals.
In 1999, the government blamed anti-Shell “rebels” for the deaths of four police officers, and razed an entire town, Odi, in retaliation. According to Human Rights Watch workers who visited the town two weeks after the attack, the stench of decomposing bodies was noticeable a kilometre from the town, and there were only three buildings left standing.
Ultimately, the promises made by government and industry of higher standards of living, new roads, school and hospitals do not materialise or fail to remain once the companies have made their profits. In addition, oil companies make no pretence to public consultation in Nigeria, unlike in Western countries. These double standards amount to environmental racism.
Bassey says: “The oil industry believes that the people have no right to know what is happening in their environment. Dialogue, they believe, ends in social tokens such as classroom blocks and ill-equipped health centres.”
The connections between oil extraction, climate change and human rights could not be more obvious than they are in Nigeria. For the predominantly poor rural Nigerians, the effects of climate change heap injury upon injury: deforestation (which Bassey describes as “a truly vicious circle”, because as climate change increases, so does deforestation through tree death, which further increases climate change), heat waves, tropical diseases, salinisation of crop lands, rising sea level and the dislocation of potentially millions of people.
Bassey’s trip to Australia is one of hope. The solidarity of the Australian people is essential for the reformation of his country, indeed the unjust system that makes the Niger Delta as it is today.
In Bassey’s words: “It is time for all of us to realise that environmental actions have environmental costs. Laws must be enacted to ensure that the environment is protected against both public and private actions that fail to take account of costs and harms inflicted on the eco-system. Our environment, indeed, is our life.”
originally published in Green Left Weekly
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