Nigeria Must Deal With Cruel Past

This month, Owens Wiwa will travel from exile in Toronto to Abuja, Nigeria, to ask the newly elected president of that country, Olusegun Obasanjo, to release the body of his brother, renowned author and environmental advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa. Saro-Wiwa was hanged on Nov. 10, 1995, and buried with eight fellow activists in a common grave. Wiwa also will ask Obasanjo to launch a review of the trial and convictions of Saro-Wiwa and the others, which international investigating bodies, including the United Nations, have already concluded were rigged. The outcome of this meeting could help set the tone for how Nigeria, which is returning to democracy, reckons with the extreme repression and human rights abuses that marked Gen. Sani Abacha’s reign of terror. For Obasanjo--himself imprisoned and sentenced to death by Abacha--agreeing to the requests is nothing less than a moral imperative.

The executions, carried out amid universal appeals for clemency, remain the emblem of the Abacha regime’s singular brutality. No verdict on trumped-up murder charges could hide what Nigerians knew: Saro-Wiwa and the other leaders of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People were killed for protesting the ruinous impact of oil exploration in their impoverished, environmentally sensitive corner of the Niger Delta.

PEN Center USA West was one of a number of organizations to question Royal Dutch/Shell, the multinational oil giant operating in the Ogoni region, and all other multinational oil companies working in Nigeria about their connection to the suppression of dissent in oil-producing communities. It was only after Abacha died last June that protests against oil exploitation regained force throughout the delta. Sadly, as they have spread, so, again, has the repression.

How to address the volatility in the Niger Delta and its root cause--a corrupt system that siphons oil revenues and returns nothing to oil-producing communities--are among the greatest challenges facing Obasanjo. During his campaign, he expressed sympathy for the plight of these communities. But true reconciliation must include a frank discussion of the crimes committed against them by Nigeria’s military rulers. What better way to begin than by releasing the bodies of Saro-Wiwa and the others for reburial in their home communities and acknowledging the gross illegality of their trials and executions?

But it is not only for the sake of Nigeria’s scarred oil communities that Obasanjo should agree to revisit the nightmare of what are now called the Ogoni Nine. The terror that Abacha brought to bear on those in the delta was business as usual under a military regime that sought to eliminate dissent as it rode Nigeria from economic and cultural leadership to virtual ruin. Caught up in this were military officers, journalists and leading intellectuals, including playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who was forced into exile and accused in absentia of terrorism.

Though political prisoners have now been freed and exiles are returning, many bear the stigma of fabricated charges and prison terms. Who knows if these so-called criminal records will be conveniently resurrected? President Obasanjo has already seen this happen: His losing opponent based a legal challenge of the February election in part on Obasanjo’s imprisonment by Abacha. Owens Wiwa himself risks returning to Nigeria as a fugitive, having eluded an arrest warrant issued by the same judge who presided over the killing of his brother.

Agreeing to reopen Saro-Wiwa’s case would be an important first step to revisiting the cases of all Nigerians, among them many of the country’s best and brightest, who were accused, charged, convicted or imprisoned for crimes they did not commit; who were arbitrarily detained or jailed, and who were harassed, attacked or murdered by a military regime intent on silencing dissent.