Editor's Foreword to Documentation of Warri Peace Congress

URHOBO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Addendum:
CONVENERS' DRAFT REPORT
OF
THE WARRI PEACE CONFERENCE
JULY 24, 1999,
AT HOWARD UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC

Editor's Foreword

Dr. Mobolaji Aluko of Howard University, Washington, DC, was one of the two Conveners of the Washington, DC, Peace Congress on the Warri crisis. He was also, in a way, the intellectual leader of the effort to reduce the crisis to a meaningful exchange of ideas among leaders of the ethnic groups of the western Niger Delta living in North America. Probably naturally, he was the first person to react to the documentation of the Peace Congress which we have undertaken.

Beyond his admiration for the efforts put into the documentation, Dr. Aluko has pointed out two errors in the Editor's Introduction to the documentation. First, he says that he never actually attached documents from the three delegations to the draft report. Second, he says: "The Itsekiri delegation NEVER objected to the inclusion of ANY DOCUMENT to our report," contrary to such an assertion in the Editor's Introduction.

The first alleged error is not really material. Dr. Aluko did propose attaching the documents (one each from the three delegations) to a final report. On checking the records with respect to the second error, it was clear that Dr. Aluko was correct. I have therefore deleted from the Editor's Introduction the erroneous statement which reads as follows: "The Itsekiri Delegation did object to the inclusion of the Ijaw and Urhobo documents in the official report." I regret the error.

In the course of attending to these points of error raised by Dr. Mobolaji Aluko as "slight editorial correction," it became clear that the draft report and its discussion are very much part of the documentation of the Peace Congress. I have therefore added them in this section as an addendum to the documentation.

Peter Ekeh
December 7, 1999

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