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Oil company tries end standoff nigeria Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Oil company tries to end Nigerian standoff
Associated Press
LAGOS, Nigeria — Oil company officials were negotiating with labor leaders on Wednesday to try to convince Nigerian strikers to release 97 foreign hostages, including 17 Americans, that they are holding aboard oil platforms.
About 100 strikers have prevented the oil workers from leaving four offshore rigs owned by Houston-based Transocean since April 19. The rigs are some 25 miles off the West African nation's coast.
The foreign hostages also included 35 Britons. Another 170 Nigerian workers from other companies were also being prevented from leaving.
The hostage takers have blocked access to helicopter landing pads and docks on the rigs to protest a company decision to use boats instead of helicopters to ferry Nigerian staff from shore. They are also angry over company moves to dismiss five oil union members.
Some of the hostages said they fear their captors will kill them or blow up the rigs if authorities try to free them with armed raids. Their conditions were unclear, although no injuries or deaths had been reported.
"Make no mistake of the danger we're in," one hostage said in an e-mail message read by Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee, an Aberdeen, Scotland-based labor union that has members among the hostages. "If they have lost everything, they will make sure we lose everything. And that means our lives."
Company officials, however, dismissed reports that any oil workers had been threatened.
The rigs, owned by Houston-based Transocean, were drilling wells on behalf of oil multinationals Royal/Dutch Shell and TotalFinaElf.
National leaders of Nigeria's largest oil union, which is not officially supporting the strike, were meeting Wednesday with Transocean executives and the strikers' chosen local union representatives in a bid to end the impasse.
The meeting was being held in Nigeria's commercial capital of Lagos.
"We hope to resolve the problem today," said Elijah Okougbo, deputy secretary-general of the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers of Nigeria.
Many of the strikers had signaled a willingness to end the standoff but wanted assurances they wouldn't lose their jobs, Molloy said.
Sabotage and hostage takings by community activists, labor groups and thugs demanding compensation for land use and alleged environmental damage are relatively common in the Niger Delta, where nearly all of Nigeria's oil is drilled. Hostages rarely are harmed.
Thirty-one people were allowed to leave two rigs by boat on Monday, Transocean spokesman Guy Cantwell said. Two were Transocean employees, while the others worked for third-party service companies.
A British hostage told his wife early Tuesday that the hostage-takers were threatening to blow up the rigs if anyone tried to storm them, Molloy said.
However, the woman, whom Molloy declined to identify, said her husband did not believe the strikers had explosives. Molloy did not know if the strikers had guns, although he said some hostages said their captors were armed with firefighting axes.
Cantwell said the 100 striking workers were being served court injunctions. He said the situation was calm and the company hoped to resolve the impasse peacefully.
"We are working on all levels of the Nigerian system, including government authorities and the branch of the union above the striking branch, who disagrees with the strike, and we're trying to resolve it as quickly and safely as we can," he said.
Transocean chief executive officer Robert L. Long on Tuesday described the negotiations as "delicate," and expressed hopes the standoff would be peacefully resolved "within a week."
Eight Shell employees, including seven expatriates of unspecified origin, were among the hostages, a spokesman for Shell's Nigerian subsidiary said Wednesday.
Ethnic and political violence is another frequent hazard in the region. Fighting in March shut down nearly 40 percent of Nigeria's production of 2.2 million barrels a day.
Nigeria is one of the world's largest oil exporters and the fifth-largest producer of U.S. oil imports.
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