Four US documentary filmmakers Arrested in Niger Delta

Sandy Cioffi in Seattle
Four documentary filmmakers from the US and a Nigerian citizen have been arrested by the Nigerian military in the Niger Delta. The Seattle-based crew has been detained since Saturday. The film crew was finishing work on the documentary Sweet Crude. Arrested were director Sandy Cioffi and crew members Tammi Sims, Cliff Worsham and Sean Porter, as well as Joel Bisina, founder of the Niger Delta Professionals for Development. Sandy Cioffi appeared on Democracy Now! in 2006 to discuss the situation in the Niger Delta and the role women played in protesting multinational oil corporations.

Sandy Cioffi: “And those women were demanding fairly basic things, like jobs, some remediation of the environment, water, electricity, healthcare, basic infrastructure that you would expect, that if you have $38 billion annually of revenue going to your government, that you would have, and they have none of those things. In fact, they have quite the opposite. They have their livelihood taken away from them.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Nigeria to immediately release Sandy Cioffi and the four other members of her crew and to end what it described as a pattern of censorship of the conflict over oil in the region.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/15/headlines

JOURNALISTS IN NIGER RELEASED

Niger journalists free, but two still in prison
Niamey - Police in Niger have released two journalists held for allegedly defaming the country's finance minister but they still face prosecution, a press association said on Friday. "They have been freed but the prosecutor has notified them that legal procedures will follow their normal course," Boubacar Diallo of the Association of Independent Press Editors told AFP.

Soumana Maiga, founder of the biweekly L'Enqueteur, was detained Wednesday, while Ibrahim Souley, the publication's director, was briefly detained last Thursday before being held again for questioning five days later. L'Enqueteur published a series of articles last month that included allegations that Finance Minister Ali Lamine Zeine had been involved in embezzlement and favouritism in ministry appointments.

Two other journalists are also being held in Niger. Moussa Kaka, Radio France Internationale's correspondent in the country, has been detained since September 26, while Ibrahim Manzo Diallo, director of the biweekly Air-Info, has been held since October 9. They face charges over alleged links to a Tuareg rebel group active in the country's north. Prosecutors at Agadez, in the north of the country, questioned Manzo Diallo for the first time on Friday, grilling him for three hours in the presence of his lawyer Moussa Coulibaly, who also represents Kaka.

FOR AN EARLIER WAVES OF CHANGE POST ABOUT THE SITUATION IN NIGER, GO TO
Niger Radio Station Head Taken to Prison

Filmmaker Florian Opitz facing 14 years of prison in Nigeria

from:http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2007/10/05/florian-opitz-facing-14-years-of-prison-in-nigeriaFlorian Opitz was arrested in Nigeria by the Nigerian State Security Service (SSS) and has to appear in court today. He is accused of 'endangering national security' and faces up to 14 years in prison. Florian Opitz is a freelance documentary filmmaker, author and journalist. His last very successful documentary "The Big Sell-Out"is a political film. In various episodes the abstract phenomenon of privatisation is depicted in stories about very concrete human destinies around the globe. The documentary tells tragic, tragicomic but also encouraging stories of the everyday life of people, who day by day have to deal with the effects of privatisation politics, dictated by anonymous international financial institutions in Washington D.C. and Geneva, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO)."

Arrested with him were filmmaker Andy Lehmann (Berlin), Danjuma Saidu (Nigeria) and Judith Asuni (US/Nigeria), doing research in the Niger delta for their next film. They were alledgedly taking pictures of oil refineries, pipelines and ships. The Niger Delta has seen many bloody conflicts about resources, oil revenue and distribution of wealth, often depicted as 'ethnic conflicts' by neighbouring tribes. Judith Asuni has lived in the region for 36 years and works with the peace work NGO
Academic Associates/PeaceWorks. http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/en/node/18

The Niger Delta moved in the focus of attention with the trial against Ken Saro-Wiwa, author, television producer, and environmentalist who received the Right Livelihood Award in 1994 and was nominated for the Peace Nobel Price in 1996. He was executed in 1995. The German Journalist Association demands all four arrested to be released and calls the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs to intervene. http://www.djv.de/SingleNews.20.0.html?&tx_ttnews[tt_news]
=1093&tx_ttnews[backPid]=18

Florian Opitz has screened 'The Big Sell Out' during the last Globale film festival in May in Berlin together with Andrej Holm, leading to a public debate about privatisation. http://www.globale-filmfestival.org/en/node/9 Before he left to Nigeria he left us his card and said "Call me if there is anything I can do to help from from there." It's up to us now to help
free him.