Shell Oil under Renewed Attack for Human Rights Abuses
5/13/97
*******************************
RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: Shell Oil under Renewed Attack for Human Rights
Abuses
Source: Rainforest Action Network
Date: 5/13/97
Press Contact: Mark Westlund - ranmedia@ran.org
SHELL OIL UNDER RENEWED ATTACK AT LONDON ANNUAL GENERAL
MEETING
HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS RELEASE INDEPENDENT ANNUAL REPORT
LONDON - The Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the world's largest
international oil company, came under attack today from
environmental and human rights activists for its
activities in Peru and Nigeria, at the same time as the
company prepares to fend off a shareholder resolution
critical of its policies at its annual meeting tomorrow.
In the United States, there will be demonstrations in at
least eight cities demanding that Shell improve its
human rights perfomance.
Coinciding with Shell's annual general meeting and the
release of the company's first worldwide environmental
report, Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground,
released their own independent annual report that reveals
Shell's destructive environmental practices in Peru and
Nigeria. The report, with a blood-spattered Shell logo on
the cover, criticizes the company's approach to gas
development in Peru, and accuses Shell of making only
cosmetic changes to its operations in Nigeria. Two
representatives from Peru and Nigeria, Ledum Mites,
president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni
People and Wrays Perez, secretary of AIDESEP, Peru's
largest indigenous federation, will also attend the
meeting.
In Peru, Shell will be drilling for natural gas this July
in a rainforest area that Peru's government set aside as a
homeland for uncontacted, indigenous peoples. These
tribes, the Nahua and Kugapakori Indians, live on a 2,200
square mile rainforest reserve about 300 miles east of
Lima. They are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who are
inextricably linked to their natural surroundings; the
rainforest is their source of food, shelter, and the focus
of their spiritual life. When Shell conducted preliminary
exploration of the region in the mid-'80s, opening the
rainforest to outsiders, certain Nahua groups were exposed
to a whooping cough and influenza epidemic that killed off
an estimated fifty per cent of the population.
Since 1958, Shell has extracted billions worth of oil and
natural gas from the Niger River delta area of Nigeria,
home to the Ogoni tribe. As a result, the Ogoni's
traditional fishing and farming life has been devastated
by oil pollution, and, according to the Wall Street
Journal, the land has become a "ravaged environment." The
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
has declared the Niger's mouth as the most endangered
river delta in the world - a direct result of nearly four
decades of oil exploitation.
Desiring profits from Shell and other major oil companies,
the Nigeria government has been silencing the voices of
protest in Ogoniland, to the point of executing human
rights activist, poet, and 1995 Goldman Environmental
Prize Winner, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight fellow activists.
The report reveals new information about the destruction
of the delta environment.