Posted by IOL on
The United Nations said on Tuesday a team of experts would resume work to demarcate the border between Cameroon and Nigeria after a row over a contested village was resolved.
Dakar - The United Nations said on Tuesday a team of experts would resume work to demarcate the border between Cameroon and Nigeria after a row over a contested village was resolved.
The border demarcation is part of efforts to resolve a year-old dispute over who owns the Bakassi peninsula, thought to hold significant reserves of oil. The peninsula's status almost brought the neighbours to war in 1981.
A UN-led joint commission was set up in 2002 to define the land boundary between the two countries following a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which said Bakassi belonged to Cameroon. Nigeria has yet to hand it over.
Field experts from Nigeria, Cameroon and the United Nations started last week to verify the border on the ground but encountered problems when they came to the village of Koja.
The chairman of the commission, UN special envoy to West Africa Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, said the row had been resolved after talks between the commission and Nigeria in Abuja.
"Now that clarifications have been provided and the issue has been resolved, the demarcation work could resume within one week," he said in a statement. No details on the exact terms of the resolution were immediately available.
Last week, the United Nations said Nigeria risked prolonging the border dispute by trying to miss out Koja.
The ICJ ruling noted that Koja, a Nigerian village, was problematic because it had spilled over on to Cameroonian territory. The court said it had no power to modify the boundary at Koja, effectively splitting the village in two.
The demarcation work started last month with a field team charged with verifying the boundary line drawn on preliminary maps according to the ICJ ruling. They were also due to identify sites for placing concrete pillars to mark the frontier.
Nigeria was due to hand over Bakassi last September but failed to do so, citing "technical difficulties".
Most of the peninsula are wetlands, rich in fish, while the offshore area in the Gulf of Guinea contains several oilfields and possibly more to be discovered.