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.

Man, fearing terrorists, fires at helicopter
July 20, 2002 Posted: 1:22 PM EDT (1722 GMT)

WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia (AP) -- A man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire on a helicopter landing in a residential neighborhood, thinking the chopper was carrying terrorists, police said.
    Helicopter pilot John S. Sutton landed his helicopter July 13 at the home of businessman John Peters to pick him up, police said.
    John Chwaszczewski, a semiretired construction worker, became alarmed when he saw the chopper swoop down over his garage, about a block from Peters' home.
    "Maybe I overreacted, but I did feel this was terrorism at its utmost," Chwaszczewski said.
    Chwaszczewski told police the shooting was "a natural reaction," after having watched the events of September 11.
    A woman who identified herself as Sutton's wife said he would have no comment.
    Sutton was charged with recklessly operating an aircraft, a misdemeanor, Deputy Police Chief Ken Middlebrook said Friday. If convicted, he could face a month in jail.
    Chwaszczewski was charged with interfering with an aircraft, discharging a firearm, an AR-15 rifle, in a public place, reckless handling of a firearm and assaulting Sutton. He faces up to eight years in prison and $10,000 in fines if convicted.

From: http://www.projex.demon.co.uk/archives/keenan.html

David Thomas interviewed by David Keenan

Looking back on these tapes now, how do you feel about them?

I'm not sure what you mean. Am I nostalgic about them? No. Am I embarrassed or shy about them? No. Do they reveal anything to me? No. I suppose one of the problems has always been that this phase of our history has never been made public. We started out dedicated to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. We remain dedicated to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. This is the foundation but like many foundations maybe it rests unnoticed. You have to remember the Prime Directive: Never repeat yourself. At all costs, and beyond any reason or logic, keep moving. So we made this music in 1974-5. It's hard, groove rock played with passion and unwavering dedication. Isn't that what you're supposed to do? And once you've proved that you HAVE the Right Stuff you move forward or you slip backwards. Only the dead remain secure.

What exactly happened in Cleveland during the early-Seventies to make it such an insanely creative spot? Most people think of these years as a bit of a black hole for outsider rock 'n' roll - how come it was so different in Cleveland? Was the fact that The Velvet Underground had pulled through there a couple of times really that significant?

Alot of things came together in one place and one time. I'm tired of going thru the story but I'll give it a shot one last time.

(1.) It was a unique generational window. Charlotte Pressler described it best in her piece, "Those Were Different Times." I quote the first few paragraphs.

"This is a story about life in Cleveland from 1968 to 1975, when a small group of people were evolving styles of music that would, much later, come to be called "New Wave." Misleadingly so, because that term suggests the current situation, in which an already evolved, recognized "New Wave" style exists for new bands to aim at. The task of this group was different: to evolve the style itself, while at the same time struggling to find in themselves the authority and confidence to play it. And they had to do this in a total vacuum. The whole system of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person on Manhattan's Lower East Side to become a star did not exist. There were no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what these people were doing. If they did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling. One is dead.

"There are questions I would like to know the answers to. Why, for example, are so many of the people in this story drawn from the same background? Most of them were from middle or upper-middle class families. Most were very intelligent. Many of them could have been anything they chose to be. There was no reason why they should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet all of them turned their backs on this world, and that meant making a number of very painful choices. First, there was the decision not to go to college at a time when the draft was still in effect and the Vietnam War was still going on; and several of these people were drafted. Most of these people did not marry; those that did generally did not have children; few of them worked jobs for very long; and the jobs they did hold were low-paying and dull, a long ways from a "career." Yet they were not drop-outs in the Sixties sense; they felt, if anything, a certain affection for consumerist society, and a total contempt for the so-called counterculture. The Sixties drop-outs dropped in to a whole world of people just like themselves but these people were on their own.

"You can ask, also, why they all turned to rock 'n' roll. Most of these people were not natural musicians. Peter perhaps was, and Albert Dennis, and Scott Krauss; but John Morton and David Thomas and Allen Ravenstine and Jaime Klimek would probably have done something else, if there had been anything else for them to do. One can ask why there wasn't; why rock 'n' roll seemed to be the only choice.

"I would like to know too the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged wire. It was a desperate, stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection; the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert, but our desert was the Flats. Remember that the people who did this music had an uncompromising stance that gave them no way up and no way out. It was the inward-turning, defiant stance of a beleaguered few who felt themselves to be outside music, beneath media attention, and without hope of an audience. It seems that the years from 1974 to 1978 in Cleveland were a flash point, a quick and brilliant explosion, even epochal, but over with and done. No amount of nostalgia can bring those years back; they were different times. Still, I can't imagine living any other way than the way I learned to live in Cleveland during those years. We found it hard, in 1975, to imagine that anyone would live to see the year 2000. It's not that hard to imagine it now. What's become hard to imagine - but then why would we want to recapture it? - is the timeless, frozen, quality of life as we lived it in 1975, in the terminal landscape of Cleveland, with our drivenness, our rage, and our dreams of breaking through."

(2) Cleveland was, in the early 70s, a nexus for all music. Record shops competed for the new and cutting, for the complete and final word. Almost everyone I can think of who was in a band was working in a record store. Not only the college radio stations but even local commercial FM stations played radical music. So the "scene" in Cleveland was compact, informed, tough and protected from any threat of fame or acceptance.

(3) We were the Ghoulardi kids. It's been suggested by any number of us that the Cleveland/Akron event of the early 70s was attributable in large part to his influence. I was ten in 1963 when he went on air and 13 when he left Cleveland in 1966. After him I believe that I could only have perceived the nature of media and the possibilities of the narrative voice in particular ways. Describing how he devastated the authority of the media, and of the Great and the Good, how he turned the world upside down, would take too long and would be too hard to translate-- a dumb slogan or two, some primitive blue screen technique, and a couple firecrackers for 90 minutes on the TV every Friday night, how unsafe could that be? You have no idea. He was the Flibberty Jib Man.

(4) Don't dismiss the power of The Velvets. Yes, it was a big deal. It changed lives. Every band in Cleveland in the early 70s could do Foggy Notion, for example-- all that unreleased stuff that would later appear on bootlegs-- but learned from cassettes. Doing Sweet Jane was such a rube thing to do it came to be a litmus test for naffness-- like doing Smoke On The Water or something. Bands from AKRON would do Sweet Jane!

Rocket From The Tombs almost seem now like some kind of early testing ground for the new punk rock/avant rock. Their impact seems to be more in the way that they infected other groups - Pere Ubu, Dead Boys etc - was there something so intense and charged about that grouping that meant it would always be an unstable entity? Does the fact that its legacy is so fractured bother you?

RFTT was always doomed. Everything from Cleveland was doomed. RFTT is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. Pere Ubu is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. That is the power of Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire. Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that no one but your brothers will ever know it. That's the deal we agreed to.

Looking back at the lyrical pre-occupations and the casualties that resulted, that whole scene seems an intensely nihilistic/apocalyptic one - would you agree with this perception? What was it that fuelled such nihilism? Or was it just an as-serous-as-your-life approach to art?

I don't know what drove it. Of course we were serious. What kind of question is that? It was a compact and isolated group of people. The rivalries were intense. The disdain for anything anodyne was immediate and severe. It was a hothouse environment. Lots of the people lived on the urban frontier. Allen, Peter and all the crew at the Plaza were real urban pioneers. It could get weird. And we were young. We had turned our backs on the hippies and we had rejected the safe course thru college. (Until just recently no Ubu member had ever graduated from college-- or even lasted more than a year! And we were smart kids and EVERYBODY went to college in those days.) So we were drawn to art and in the early 70s rock music was the only valid art form. Rock music was the cutting edge. If you were good you went into rock. If you were 2nd string, if you were not quite good enough, then maybe you wrote or painted or made films. Who cares?

How do Pere Ubu and Rocket relate? Are the Ubu seeds to be found in Rocket or would you say Ubu's project was distinctly different?

I don't know. They relate because Peter and I went on to form Pere Ubu and so for us it was a continuum. For Scott Krauss, for example, or Allen Ravenstine, or Tom Herman, it was not.

Were you consciously trying to bring the techniques of the avant-garde to rock music? Was it as theoretical as that or was it more to do with taking rock 'n' roll at its word and freaking with it?

Rock is the avant garde. There was no question of taking one to the other. This is a racial problem. Because you are a foreigner you don't understand the nature of rock music as a cultural voice, as the American folk experience, so you are always looking to interpret it in alien terms. This was the problem with punk. Punk was an imperialistic grab at someone else's culture fueled by chicken-hawkers, multi-national corporations and a guy who wanted to sell clothes. It provided a dumbed-down template aimed at the lowest-common denominator that sold the Big Lie that art was something ANYBODY could do. Well it wasn't. It isn't. It never will be. (I always had this problem at Rough Trade in any Desert Island Disk debate-- no one believed, that given one record to take, I wouldn't hesitate a nanosecond to choose John Cougar Mellenkamp's out-takes to any Smiths record. John Cougar was playing the music of his culture with an authentic voice, that Smiths guy, hard as he tried, as great as he was, as much as I liked what he did, could never disguise the stone cold fact that he was a foreigner and once removed from the True Moment.)

The liners to the new CD make the point that if this grouping had released an LP it would be seen in the same historical light as Horses, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Kick Out The Jams and The Stooges 1st - what do you think? Do you have any regrets about the fact that this group never made it to the LP stage and were never fully documented? Are there any other RFTT jewels hidden in the vaults?

Yes, I suppose it would have been a great record. So? There are many great records. There are many that haven't been made. I am always proud to be counted among the Brotherhood of the Unknown.

How do you feel about The Dead Boys' version of "Sonic Reducer"? What was the idea of the sonic reducer?

I'm not keen on it-- the vocals are overcooked-- but maybe also it's because it's the source of the one piece of bitterness I have in my career. When Gene asked if they could use some of the material I told him he could have it all, take all the credit, but NOT Sonic Reducer. They could use Sonic Reducer but they couldn't pile on the writer credits. But they did. Gene and I remain friends but he knows how I feel and we avoid the conversation. I think I explained sonic reduction as well as it can be done in the liner notes.

What do you think of the subsequent near-deification of Peter Laughner in the rock and fan press? What are your memories of him now? How important was his input/role in Rocket? What do you think he would have done had he lived? You ever read Lester Bangs's tribute to him? What did you think of that?

I have nothing to say to outsiders about Peter. Do what you want. Believe what you want. Use him for any agenda you have in mind. Leave me out of it.

Do you see a direct line of descent from RFTT through to your current stuff?

Yes.

Do you ever get sad and nostalgic for those "different times"? Could rock music ever be so free and full of possibilities again?

I am not nostalgic. Rock music remains the only music that is free and full of possibilities. All the endless variants of dance / ambiance are a deadend. Jazz suffers on without the human voice and rose as far as it could under that restriction many years ago. World Music is MOR background music for TV shows about women's problems. No, I am not nostalgic. I still walk the narrow road. Say, how's things in YOUR town?

Do you think of Crocus Behemoth as being a different person? How do you feel about that particular incarnation?

No. And there was no "incarnation." It was simply an alias to disguise the fact that I was writing inordinate amounts of the magazine. I happened to use it for certain kinds of writing that became "popular" among the readers so I kept it as a commercial or ego consideration. Also because it's an artifact of the year I spent in a White Panther commune it had fond personal memories for me but that's about it.

David Thomas

FROM UCLA WEBSITE:

Disastodrome! is a 3-day festival. Sixteen avant-garage heroes, boundary breakers forever outside the world of music-by-numbers, are led into the Moment by one of rock's great prodigies and Pere Ubu founder, David Thomas.

Friday, Feb 21
Caligari's Diner
Individual voices and unique visions bellied up to the bar at Caligari's Diner, featuring the pale boys, and the electrifying Kidney Brothers, the duo that pinned a Purcell Room audience to the back of their seats at the London Disastodrome. Plus absolutely special guests.

Saturday, Feb 22
Mirror Man
The U.S. premiere of the improvisational opera featuring David Thomas, Linda Thompson, Bob Holman, Van Dyke Parks, Robert Kidney and always special guests. "A tour de force," says Mojo. "Evokes the restless hobo spirit of Harry Partch," says Time Out London. "A contemporary update of the Kerouac era," says The Guardian.

Sunday, Feb 23
Custodians of the Avant-Garage
Pere Ubu, Rocket From The Tombs and guests. Any appearance by Ubu is special enough but this night features the one-off reunion of the truly legendary Rocket From The Tombs.
 

AND: CHECK THE UBU PROJEX WEBSITE.

Ravers against the machine
Party-goers, ACLU take on ‘Ecstasy’ legislation

By David Montgomery
THE WASHINGTON POST

July 18 — Two young women on an urgent mission have been lugging boxes into the offices of U.S. senators this week. The boxes contain petitions an inch thick, one for each senator. Nearly 10,000 signatures were collected over the Internet in five days.
        THE PETITIONS declare: “This bill is a serious threat to civil liberties, freedom of speech and the right to dance.”
       Look out, Congress: The ravers are coming.
       “We’re offended by the fact they’re blackballing an entire musical genre,” said Amanda Huie, checking senators’ names off her list Tuesday afternoon.
       The genre in question is electronic dance music, which fans enjoy at all-night parties called raves. Legislation in Congress could hold promoters responsible if people attending the events use illegal drugs such as Ecstasy, the party drug frequently associated with raves.
       The Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002 — or the RAVE Act — has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee and is on the consent calendar, meaning it could receive final approval without a roll call vote at any time. When he introduced the bill in June, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said “most raves are havens for illicit drugs,” and congressional findings submitted with the bill label as drug paraphernalia such rave mainstays as bottled water, “chill rooms” and glow sticks.
       The bill would expand the existing federal crack house law, which makes it a felony to provide a space for the purpose of illegal drug use, to cover promoters of raves and other events.
       Another bill pending in the House — the Clean, Learn, Educate, Abolish, Neutralize and Undermine Production (CLEAN-UP) of Methamphetamines Act, introduced by Rep. Doug Ose (R-Calif.) — goes further. It would hold concert promoters in violation if they “reasonably ought to know” that someone will use an illegal drug during an event.
       The House bill has 67 sponsors but has languished in committee since February, while in one month the RAVE Act — sponsored by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) — has sailed smoothly to the brink of approval.

‘AN INNOCUOUS BILL’
       Caught by surprise, some ravers briefly considered a more theatrical protest on the Hill, perhaps showing off totems of their culture-rainbow hair, baggy pants, extended trance jams and those controversial glow sticks. But no. This is Washington, and ravers know the folkways. Huie, dressed quietly in slacks and shirt, said people from 49 states signed the petition. (Ravers must be scarce in North Dakota.)
          “This is a petition about S. 2633,” Huie told receptionists in office after office, referring to the bill number with insider aplomb. She is the marketing director of Buzzlife Productions, a Washington promoter.
       Biden’s staff has been surprised, too — by the sudden outcry. “We thought this would be an innocuous bill that everybody would rally in support of,” said Alan Hoffman, Biden’s chief of staff.
       After all, the bill merely adjusts the wording of the so-called crack house law. For example, crack houses are fixed indoor locations; the RAVE Act would also cover temporary outdoor venues.
       So what?
       “It violates the First Amendment,” said Marv Johnson, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
       Johnson argues that while there is no constitutional right to smoke crack, there is, in fact, a right to dance. Music and dance are protected forms of free expression, he said. By extending the crack house law to dance parties, the RAVE Act would discourage promoters from sponsoring this kind of art, he said.
       The ACLU was caught as flat-footed as the ravers, and is seeking a senator to put a “hold” on the bill, to get it off the consent calendar and force a voice vote.
       Biden rejects the ACLU’s characterization. The issue is the drugs, he said, not the music. The bill was prompted by unsuccessful prosecutions of rave promoters under the crack house law. Introducing the bill, Biden said Ecstasy is responsible for thousands of overdoses and some deaths, and its abuse by teenagers has jumped 71 percent since 1999. He said police investigations in several cities demonstrate that raves are a favorite place to buy, sell and take Ecstasy tablets.
       Some promoters distribute fliers bearing pictures of pills or argot for Ecstasy such as “E” or “X” or “Rollin’ ” — evidence that doing drugs is part of the purpose of those raves, Biden said. Under his bill, only promoters who stage events for that purpose would be prosecuted.
       But that may not be much of a safeguard for legitimate promoters, according to the ACLU and rave advocates. The congressional findings attached to the bill bluntly state that “the trafficking and use of ‘club drugs’ . . . is deeply embedded in the rave culture.” The findings become part of the legislative history of the bill and could support a prosecutor’s claim that any rave should be suspect, Johnson said. The RAVE Act provides for civil penalties of $250,000 or twice the gross proceeds of the rave, requiring a lower burden of proof than the crack house law’s criminal penalties, Johnson said.
       “The way the system really works is, you arrest and accuse and then you fight it out in court,” said Lonnie Fisher, president of Ultraworld Productions in Baltimore. “They could break the back of a small promoter financially.”

NO ROCK ACT
       But Grassley, in a statement yesterday, said the RAVE Act is an appropriate extension of the crack house law: “There are people who host raves so they can sell Ecstasy, just as there are people who rent houses so they can sell drugs. We’ve seen raves advertised as safe, alcohol-free and drug-free places for kids to socialize and dance. If this is what the promoter actually intends, then they don’t have anything to worry about.”
       Ravers seem most offended by what they say is another smear to the reputation of their strobe-lit scene. They contend that police, politicians and media have exaggerated the amount of criminal activity in rave culture since it began more than a decade ago. There are plenty of drugs at rock shows, too, ravers claim, yet no senator has proposed a ROCK Act.
       “This bill seems to imply that people go to raves to do drugs, and the music is there to accentuate the drug experience,” said Luciana Lopez of Washington, who is protesting the legislation. A copy editor for a science journal, she said she neither drinks nor uses drugs — but does wear green and blue wigs to raves.
       “This culture is really important to me,” she said. She described the euphoria of dancing for hours with people who may start as strangers but who by early the next morning are exchanging hugs and phone numbers. “It makes you feel part of a community,” she said.
       The water and the “chill rooms” are for cooling off after dancing, she said, not because so many ravers are overheated on Ecstasy. And the glow sticks look cool.
       Lopez and many Washington ravers are found Friday nights at Buzz, the weekly rave party sponsored by Buzzlife at Nation, the club on Half Street SE. The cover charge is $15 before 11 p.m., $20 after, and the dancing stops at 6 a.m., according to Huie.
       Three years ago, a local television station went undercover at Buzz and broadcast alleged drug use. In the welter of bad publicity, Buzz temporarily shut down. The ravers claimed the discovery of drugs was blown out of proportion. Now ravers must empty their pockets at the door, according to Huie.
       Congress has taken up the issue of rave culture at least once before. A year ago, as part of a celebration of Detroit’s tricentennial, the House and Senate passed a resolution congratulating the city for, among other things, helping to pioneer techno, the electronic dance music popular at raves.

Women occupying the ChevronTexaco oil export terminal in Escravos take their afternoon nap at the terminal's airport on Tuesday, July 16, 2002. The women said that they will occupy the terminal until they get final documentation from the company offering local residents jobs, schools, water, electricity and other amenities. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

Nigerian Women Storm ChevronTexaco
Wed Jul 17,10:02 AM ET

ESCRAVOS, Nigeria (AP) - Unarmed women stormed four ChevronTexaco oil pipeline stations in southeastern Nigeria, a prominent activist said Wednesday.
    The takeovers came as signs of an ethnic dispute emerged in a separate 10-day occupation of the company's main oil terminal in the Niger Delta region.
    Kingsley Kuku, spokesman for the ethnic Ijaw Youth Council, said hundreds of unarmed Ijaw women captured four pipeline flowstations in boats on Tuesday.
    An unknown number of employees at the sites were "allowed to leave," he said. He did not know if any workers remained inside.
    Wole Agunbiade, a spokesman for ChevronTexaco's Nigeria subsidiary, could neither confirm nor deny the reported takeover.
    Kuku said the latest protests occurred near the villages of Opueketa, Abiteye, Makaraba and Otunana.
    They are some 50 miles east of Escravos, ChevronTexaco's multimillion-dollar oil export terminal where a separate group of unarmed village women has been holed up since sneaking inside on July 8.
    "Our women are without fear. They are participating actively in our struggle and have embarked on this action without the use of arms, not even brooms," Kuku said.
    He warned that Ijaw men would "burn down all Chevron oil facilities" if police or soldiers tried to forcibly remove the women protesters or otherwise harmed them.
    The latest action was launched to force the oil giant to grant jobs and help improve living conditions of nearby villagers, Kuku said.
    Lucky Lelekumo, a spokeswoman for the Ijaw women, said in a statement quoted by the daily Punch newspaper that the action was to draw attention to widespread poverty in villages with "nothing to show for over 30 years of the company's existence."
    The protesters also hoped to force the state government to give assurances that Ijaws would be granted favorable municipal council boundaries delineating the tribe's lands from rival Itsekiri areas, Kuku said.
    The Ijaws accused the women who raided the Escravos terminal of using their siege to pry government concessions in a yearslong land dispute between Ijaws and Itsekiris. Although the Escravos protesters include women from several different ethnic groups, the core group is Itsekiri.
    Anino Olowu, a representative of the women still inside Escravos on Wednesday, denied her protest was linked to the land dispute, or to the Ijaw action.

THANKS TO JOSHUA B.!

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