Shell Oil Under Renewed Attack for Human Rights Abuse
5/13/97
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Headline: Shell Oil Under Renewed Attack for Human Rights Abuse
Source: Rainforest Action Network
Date: 5/13/97
RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK * PROJECT UNDERGROUND * OILWATCH
For immediate release - May 13, 1997
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 Nigerian
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.