Nov 15, 2009
LAGOS (Reuters) - The main militant group in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta said on Sunday it had started formal peace talks with President Umaru Yar'Adua, three weeks after reinstating a ceasefire in the region.

The Movement for the Niger Delta (MEND) said a team of representatives including Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka and two retired senior military officers met Yar'Adua for more than two hours on Saturday.

"This meeting heralds the beginning of serious, meaningful dialogue between MEND and the Nigerian government to deal with and resolve root issues that have long been swept under the carpet," MEND said in an emailed statement.

Attacks claimed by the militant group have battered Africa's biggest energy industry over the past three years, preventing Nigeria from pumping much above two-thirds of its capacity and costing it around $1 billion a month in lost revenues.

The group and other armed factions say they are fighting for a fairer share of the oil wealth in the Niger Delta, one of the world's biggest wetlands where villages remain mired in poverty despite five decades of oil extraction by foreign firms.

But MEND has been severely weakened since its main field commanders and thousands of gunmen accepted a presidential offer of amnesty earlier this year and handed over their weapons.

The group reinstated a ceasefire three weeks ago after Yar'Adua met with Henry Okah, believed long to have been MEND's most senior commander and one of the first prominent militant figures to accept the amnesty.

MEND said Okah and Farah Dagogo, its former overall field commander, attended Saturday's talks as observers.