A Violent Window of Opportunity

A YouTube video released last month has caused quite a stir in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta. The spokesman for the militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) e-mailed out the clip, which depicts two young brothers -- one already dead, the other unarmed and begging for his life. A soldier asks the living boy, lying on the floor near his deceased brother, where he is from. "Bonny," he replies, an oil-producing community in the region. Without pause, the soldiers shoot him twice in the head.

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That kind of violence is shocking not so much for its rarity as for its banal familiarity in the Niger Delta, where conflict is today at its height. For nearly a decade, groups such as MEND have attacked oil production infrastructure, usually taking pipelines offline for brief periods. But in the last several months those attacks have picked up -- both in frequency and intensity. Confrontations between the militants and the military are increasingly common, and civilian casualties in nearby communities have been devastating. Oil production has fallen drastically.

Yet strange as it sounds, now might be just the time to resolve one of the region's longest-standing violent conflicts.

The roots of the violence are clear: an abundance of oil combined with a surplus of instability. Poverty and unemployment are pervasive in Nigeria, particularly in the delta. Years of an unresponsive federal government have encouraged minorities -- both ethnic and economic -- to form militias and gangs to secure a share of the country's massive oil wealth. In the Niger Delta, this problem is particularly acute. Communities there have lived for decades with the pollution that comes with proximity to aging oil wells. Even as they've watched the crude pulled from their land, just 13 percent of the oil revenues is earmarked for the people in the delta states.

For the last decade, criminal and political militants, have used everything from targeted attacks to oil bunkering to hostage-taking to make clear their discontent. The result is the current violent situation. In February, for example, an 11-year-old girl was killed while trying to protect her 9-year-old brother from kidnappers. MEND and other militant groups have promised to continue kidnappings and attacks until the government agrees to peace talks.

Unfortunately, a succession of Nigerian governments has undertaken only sporadic efforts to redress local grievances and bring the conflict to a halt. The current administration of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua promised to attack the Niger Delta issue early; he acknowledges the desperate situation in the delta and has even visited there himself. But since his inauguration in 2007, Yar'Adua's strategy for addressing the problem has been unclear and ineffective. One of his solutions, a newly created Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, simply adds more layers of bureaucracy to an already over crowded problem.

Up to now, the government has also been stepping up military attacks. But the pervasive civilian casualties have meant that the delta is more unstable and angrier than ever. In May, for example, civilians were caught between militant groups and the Nigerian military for only the most recent time in a long history of collateral damage. The military Joint Task Force (JTF), a special-operations unit set up to curtail violence in the delta, has reportedly killed hundreds of civilians and displaced thousands more.

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