Nigerian militia MEND

"We ARE not terrorists," screamed a black-masked militant brandishing an assault rifle. "We are freedom fighters!"
He had arrived minutes earlier in a motorboat bristling with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades held by fighters in camouflage body armour and balaclavas.
White flags, a tribute to their tribe's god of war, fluttered from the stern.
This is the Niger Delta, the heart of Africa's biggest oil producer. But despite the billions of dollars in oil wealth, this region - about 70,000 square kilometres - is home to some of the world's poorest people. Most of the fishermen in these creeks live in the same huts and use the same bark nets that their fathers did. More than 60 per cent of Nigeria's 128 million inhabitants scrape by, earning less than $1 a day, with no hope of employment or education.
In many places, the frustration with a government ranked by Transparency International as the third most corrupt in the world has spilled over into violence.
"We have no water to drink, no schools, no electricity, no jobs," complained one machine-gun-toting youth from the latest Delta-based insurgent group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).
"Have you been to Abuja (the capital)? It is paradise there. Why can't we have that down here?"
MEND has masterminded a spate of attacks and two mass kidnappings in the past three months. The first abduction, in January, ended with all four foreigners released unharmed. But after the Nigerian military ordered retaliatory strikes on strategic targets or innocent villagers, depending on who you talk to, a second group of nine expatriate workers were seized last month. Six have been released, but the group still holds two Americans and a Briton.
Alex Vines, head of the African program at London's Royal Institute for International Affairs think tank, believes the attacks are linked to next year's elections. "This type of activity and violence happens during every electoral cycle. The surprise is not that it has happened but that is has happened so soon," he said.
The violence has shut down a fifth of Nigeria's production. The damage to Africa's biggest oil producer, which normally pumps 2.5 million barrels a day, is sending shockwaves through a market already jittery about instability in the Middle East.
The militias know that with 90 per cent of Nigeria's export earnings coming from oil, attacking oil installations is the quickest way to make the Government take notice of their demands. They want an inquiry into killings by the military, promises of development and the release of key tribal leaders.
One of those they want freed is Alhaji Dokubo Asari, whose threats of an all-out war on oil interests drove prices to record highs two years ago. Asari, on trial for treason, has said he was originally armed as a political enforcer to ensure the election of current Rivers State governor Peter Odili in 2003.
"Don't forget, most of these militants received their first weapon from the ruling party," local human rights activist Dimieari Von Kemedi said.
"When the elections were over, the guns melted into the swamps. Given the weapons now available in the Delta, any serious politician will be looking for bigger and better weapons for their own boys."
Twenty-year-old Akpoviri Igbeh, unemployed and looking for work around Warri's docks, approves of what MEND is doing. "They kidnap those foreigners so that people know what is going on here," he said. "We have the right to use force because nobody is listening. We are like the goose that laid the golden egg, but nobody cares for us."


source: news agency