Nigeria - MEND In Truce.

Nigeria's largest rebel group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), on July 15 began a 60-day ceasefire after Abuja released its leader Henry Okah. MEND forces target oil facilities in the delta, claiming that not enough of the country's oil profits find their way back to the local population.

Okah had been held for more than a year by the government on charges including treason. But he was released as part of an amnesty, after several months of negotiations - with many figures in the delta and representatives of international oil companies (IOC)_operating in the area having been involved as mediators. MEND forces have bombed oil facilities both offshore and around Lagos, as well as kidnapped foreign nationals involved in the petroleum industry.

A July 15 MEND statement said the ceasefire included kidnappings, but the group told the BBC that pipelines and oil buildings blown up must not be repaired. This poses a problem, however, as the IOCs in the region want these repaired so that over 1m b/d of crude oil production is guaranteed a steady flow. The other problem is that MEND's condition means it will be fighting hard when the ceasefire expires if its demands other than Okah's release are not met by Abuja.

Apart from MEND, there are hundreds of criminal gangs in the Delta. They are not expected to observe the truce. Since 2006 oil production in Nigeria has been cut considerably due to the actions of MEND and the other groups.

The troubled background does not encourage experts assessing the prospects after the truce expires. Before the ceasefire, serial attacks by MEND and other groups on petroleum facilities had punctured the country's crude oil production capacity and was hindering its drive to grow its proven oil reserves to 40bn barrels in 2010.

In the previous three months, MEND had extended its fight against the federal government to the locally-operating IOCs. Its forces attacked Shell' Afremo-B oil platform in retaliation for the alleged invasion of an Ijaw community in the Warri South-West Local Government Area of Delta State by the military Joint Task Force (JTF) on July 2. MEND forces had attacked other IOC operators in the Delta area.

Three weeks earlier, MEND attacked Shell's pipelines at Adamakiri and Kula, both in Rivers State in the Eastern Niger Delta. It said it had also attacked the Afremo offshore oilfields operated by Shell 23 km from an export terminal through which crude oil from Shell's Forcados fields was pumped. The attacks were the first to strike Rivers State, the eastern-most of the three main states in the Niger Delta, since the militants launched their latest campaign of sabotage following a military offensive in the western delta in June.

Persistent attacks by MEND over the past three years had cut crude oil output in the OPEC member-state to less than two-thirds of its 3m b/d capacity. MEND first burst onto the scene in 2006, knocking out more than a quarter of Nigeria's oil output - then around 2.4m b/d - in a matter of weeks.

MEND had dubbed its offensive "Hurricane Piper Alpha" after the North Sea oil platform which blew up in July 1998 and was the worst offshore oil disaster, and warned it might attack deep-water facilities off the Nigerian coast. In all, about 132 oil fields were earlier in July said to have been shut while the country was losing about 1.5-1.6m b/d of crude oil - thus puncturing the country's quest to realise a 4m b/d capacity in 2010/11.

The Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) in July released the performance chart of Nigeria's upstream and downstream operations for the first quarter of 2009. It said the crude oil production rate was between 2.024m and 2.08m b/d for January and February and much lower for March. It said 174 fields were in production while 127 remained shut in because of the violence.

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