Nobelist Soyinka Flees Nigeria

PARIS -- Nigerian Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka, who sneaked out of his country to France to avoid a travel ban, said he left after learning Nigerian authorities planned to keep him under house arrest.

Nigerian authorities "planned to give me the Burmese treatment," Soyinka said, referring to 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest in her native Burma for 5 1/2 years.

"Word of this filtered down to us," he said at a news conference in Paris. "The decision to leave became inescapable... . Nigerians find themselves today in the grip of a brutal dictatorship." Soyinka, an advocate of democracy, said.

UNESCO officials said the Nigerian writer arrived in France over the weekend. Nigerian authorities had banned him from leaving the country and confiscated both his passport and a United Nations laissez-passer that he had planned to use to attend a writers' conference in Strasbourg earlier this month.

The French Foreign Ministry said Soyinka traveled to Paris with a laissez-passer delivered by France's embassy in Benin, which borders on Nigeria.

Soyinka, 60, would not divulge the details of how he left Nigeria except to say that it had "wounded my sexagenarian dignity" and he had crossed the border at an unguarded spot.