22 JULY 2002: “THE GODS
ARE ANGRY.”

July
21, 2002  |  ESCRAVOS, Nigeria (AP) — A huge fire broke
out Saturday at ChevronTexaco’s main oil terminal, days after unarmed village
women ended a 10-day siege that crippled the oil giant’s Nigeria operations.

    The
blaze at the multimillion-dollar Escravos terminal in southeastern Nigeria
was ignited by a bolt of lightning during
an early morning storm, the company said in a statement.

    
The lightning set fire to a storage tank containing about 180,000 barrels
of crude oil. Oil workers used remote-controlled chemical cannons to contain
the blaze and pumped about 80,000 barrels out of the burning tank.

    Additional
support was requested from other oil operators, the statement said.

    No one
was hurt, the company said.

    The fire
sent giant flames and a towering pillar of black smoke into the sky.

    “The
gods are angry. Chevron needs to compensate us for this land. The women
leave, and two days later, this thing happens,” said unemployed villager
Lucky Mune, as he watched the blaze from a distance.

    The fire
was the latest blow to a company still facing a series of takeovers at
its Nigerian facilities by unarmed village women.

    Meanwhile
Saturday, unarmed women occupying at least four ChevronTexaco facilities
in southeastern Nigeria said Saturday they had freed their two hostages
in return for a promise from oil executives to meet with them.

    The women,
who live nearby, are demanding jobs for their relatives as well as electricity,
water and other amenities. The protest follows a larger but similar action
at ChevronTexaco’s main oil terminal that involved about 700 workers —
including Americans, Britons, Canadians and Nigerians — being held captive
for 10 days.

    The women,
ranging in age from 30 to 90, used a traditional and powerful shaming gesture
to maintain control over the facility — they threatened to remove their
own clothing.

    The hostages
were freed only after the company pledged to build modern towns out of
poor villages.

    As that
protest was ending, several hundred women from a rival tribe seized at
least four ChevronTexaco flowstations in the same area. On Friday, the
women occupying the Abiteye station took two workers captive, both Nigerians.
They were apparently the only employees who stayed behind after the protest
action began.

    One,
a security supervisor, was released hours later and the other, a community
relations officer, was allowed to leave Saturday. Far from appearing traumatized,
he waved to the women, who cheered as he boarded a ferry.

    Fanty
Wariyai, a protest leader, said ChevronTexaco promised to send a senior
official to meet with the women on Monday. ChevronTexaco officials could
not immediately be reached for comment.

    The protest
turned into a hostage-taking after ChevronTexaco angered the women by asking
them to send representatives to a meeting with company officials and tribal
leaders in the southern city of Warri.

    “They
want us to meet the community leaders who are men, who live in Warri, and
who don’t know our suffering,” Josephine Ogoba, another protest leader,
said Friday. “If Chevron will not come here, we will not allow their staff
to go.”

    The peaceful,
all-woman protests are a departure for the oil-rich Niger Delta, where
armed men frequently use kidnapping and sabotage to pressure oil companies
to give them jobs, protection money or compensation for alleged environmental
damage.

    The Niger
Delta is one of the West African country’s poorest regions, despite its
oil wealth. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest exporter of oil and the
fifth-largest supplier to the United States.