groups against authorities. Recently she specialised in corporate intelligence and PR-strategy of multinationals against
their opponents - including net-activists.

Special thanks to Josselien Janssens.
REFERENCES
articles on the same subject by Eveline Lubbers:
* Counter-strategies against netactivism. Shell is afraid of Internet. at: http:/Awww.xs4all.nl/~evel/brenteng.htm
* Sheil is making the same mistake. Chad a second Nigeria? at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~evel/chad.htm
* Beat the Dutch! Netactivism in Amsterdam. at: http://www.xs4all.nl/~evel/beat.htm

THE DANGERS OF CO-OPTATION
WITH CORPORATIONS
CURRENT PR PRACTICES
AGAINST CAMPAIGNERS

jyamoy Apuy

Over 2,000 Ogoni, including their leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa have died since they started their non-violent campaign
against Shell. Many Ogoni are still imprisoned today. Their only crime was to campaign against the ecological de-
struction of their homeland by Shell and ask for a greater share of the oil wealth that had been drilled from under
their land. What have the Ogoni got to do with corporate PR, you might ask? Right from the start of the Nigerian con-
flict, Shell was more interested in preserving its image than protecting the environment or listening to the griev-
ances of the peoples of the Niger Delta. The company complained that it suffered from a communication problem,
rather than a real one. In the weeks after Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed, Shell, which faced a public corporate cri-
sis, tried to spin its way out of trouble, spending millions of dollars justifying its continuing operations in Nigeria.
In the company's adverts and press releases, the Ogoni were portrayed as violent, as separatists, as sappateurs,
while Shell systematically lied to the world over its links with the military regime. How the truth was manipulated in
Nigeria is just one small example of corporate public relations industry that spends 35 billion dollars a year pro-
tecting business interests world-wide. What is PR? It is the secretive art of subtle manipulation, whose point, in the
words of one Mobil executive “is getting people to behave the way you hope they will behave by persuading them
that it is ultimately in their interest to do so”.

We should not underestimate the power of corporate PR - Indeed some people argue that corporate propaganda
threatens democracy itself. As Australian scholar Alex Carey said: "The twentieth century has been characterised by
three developments of great political importance; the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the
growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."Lets look at some
specific examples of corporate PR at work, and what we can learn from them. In 1995, the year Saro-Wiwa was
murdered, Shell received a prestigious Award from the then Chancellor, Ken Clarke for its range of corporate videos,
one of which was on climate change. Being the largest global oil company in the world, Shell should be worried
about climate change. It is now an established fact that we are changing the world's climate. The burning of fossil
fuels is largely to blame. For the last forty years, Shell and the other fossil fuel companies have adopted a dinosaur
mentality towards climate change. Instead of joining the debate constructively, they set out to destroy it. Essentially
the oil industry responded with what we call the 3-D PR Strategy,

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