For the relatives, the trial remains our last opportunity to close this sad chapter in our lives. For 12 years, we have all separately developed strategies to survive, living with the anger and the rage that one’s relative was unjustly murdered and that many of the institutions and individuals who were responsible for human rights violations continued not only to get away with murder but also to profit from their crimes.
We have remained dignified while the world has moved on. Few have ever wondered about the emotional or financial welfare of the victims — but real lives, real people were destroyed.
In the face of the provocations and psychological trauma of all this, I have tried to maintain a dignified position, worked assiduously to deny myself the right to grieve in order to find a lasting solution to the challenges of the Ogoni and the Niger Delta in Nigeria.
The day after my father was hanged, I was asked my opinion of Shell and I didn’t hesitate to answer that Shell was part of the problem and must be part of the solution.
I haven’t changed my opinion. I am not interested in retributive justice but a justice that is creative, a justice that enables all stakeholders in this affair to account for and learn lessons from the past so that we can all move forward within a constructive and sustainable framework. We have to remain committed to building the kind of world that ensures that people who live on natural resource-bearing areas are not treated as collateral damage in a senseless race for profit.
With all of its experience in Nigeria, Shell knows that such creative justice is possible and that the time for us to move in that direction is at hand.
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