Today, the Ogoni people are involved in two grim wars. The first is the thirty-five year old ecological war waged by the multi-national oil companies, Shell and Chevron. In this most sophisticated and unconventional war, no bones are broken, no blood is spilled and no one is maimed. Yet, men, women and children die; flora, fauna and fish perish, the air and water are poisoned, and finally, the land dies. The second war is a political war of tyranny, oppression and greed designed to dispossess the Ogoni people of their rights and their wealth and subject them to adject poverty, slavery, dehumanization and extinction.Taken together, both wars, waged against a defenseless and small people, amount to genocide and are a grave crime against humanity. Pitted against two deadly, greedy, insensitive and powerful enemies, the Ogoni people have refused to yield and are fighting doggedly  and heroically for survival. And the war must be won for the alternative to victory is extinction.

---------Ken Saro-Wiwa, 1993.

 

The Ogoni initiated a different strategy to sever the cycle of colonialism and build a civil society. Their struggle for self determination offered a model for other nations to organize their resistance efforts. This nonviolent movement for basic human rights through peaceful protest revolutionized politics in Nigeria.

--------Joshua Cooper, 1999.

 

The commitment to nonviolent resistance is crucial to the Ogoni movement for self determination. Beginning with the drafting of the Ogoni Bill of Rights and the subsequent nonviolent campaigns, the Ogoni have been able to light a flame of justice that is burning brighter than the oil flames in Ogoni.

--------Joshua Cooper, 1999.

 

The 4th of January was truly a liberation day: a day on which young and old, able and disabled, rich and poor, all of Ogoni came out to reassert themselves and to give notice that the nation had come of age and that it would not accept its destruction passively. We had surmounted the psychological barrier of fear. Ogoni would never be the same again.

------Ken Saro-Wiwa, 4th January, 1993.

 

... a people, no matter how few, who are aware of their rights and determined to reclaim them in a nonviolent manner, cannot be crush by military might.

Ken Saro-Wiwa.

 

We would be heading for a more democratic system, far from the dictatorships which have ruined the continent, and we might succed in reordering our societies, undoing Berlin of 1884, so that there would not be somuch exploitation at all levels in all parts of the continent.

------Ken Saro-Wiwa, A Month and A Day, p.134.

 

I hoped that I had started a movementwhich might transform Africa. Would the Ogoni revolution be a model for other small, deprived, dispossessed and disappearing peoples? If only we could make it! A large number of communities ready to take their fate into their hands and practice self-reliance, demanding their rights non-violently, would conduce to democracy and more politically developed peoples.

Ken Saro-Wiwa, A Month and A Day, p.134.

 

The Ogoni movement is impressive because it brought out the entire community - children, women and elders. It is a solitary example of what can be done in the face of extreme circumstances.... It is a model that holds models for other indigenous peoples of the world.

------Wole Soyinka, July 6, 1998.

 

I tell you this, I may be dead, but my ideas will not die.

------Ken Saro-Wiwa.

 

Lord take my soul, but let the struggle continue. 

-------Ken Saro-Wiwa, November 10, 1995.

 

It is bad enough that it is happening a few years [before] the twenty-first century. It will be a disgrace to humanity should it persist one day longer.

-------Ken Saro-Wiwa

 

... a bad verdict, an unjust sentence and now it has been followed by judicial murder.

Former Bristish Prime Minister John Major, November 10, 1995.

 

The prosecutions appear to be politically motivated and the proceedings and decisions of the specific tribunal set up to specifically try the cases do not satisfy international standards for fair trial.

------Amnesty International, September 15, 1995.

 

It is clear that there have been several breaches both of the Nigerian Constitution and the International Human Rights instruments, to which Nigeria is a party.

-------Michael Bimbaun, Queen's Counsel, 1994.