Obasanjo to meet Biya in Geneva on Bakassi

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Monday he would meet Cameroon’s President Paul Biya in Geneva this week to discuss the dispute between the two countries over ownership of the Bakassi Peninsula. The meeting, due to be held on Friday under the auspices of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, would be the first between the two leaders since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) awarded the oil-rich peninsula to Cameroon on 10 October. Nigeria rejected the ruling on the grounds that the ICJ ignored the original title of the mainly Nigerian inhabitants in Bakassi in favour of a 1913 colonial treaty between Britain and Germany, under which the peninsula was deemed to have been ceded to Cameroon. "I have confidence that we will not resort to war," Obasanjo told a visiting delegation of the Nigerian Bar Association in the presidential residence, Abuja. Troops from the two countries had clashed occasionally in the peninsula from the early 1980s. But after Nigerian troops occupied most of Bakassi in late 1993, Cameroon filed a complaint at the ICJ the following year, leading to last month’s ruling. The importance of the 1,000 sq-km strip of land which juts into the Gulf of Guinea has grown since the emergence of the region as one of the major oil zones in the world. International oil companies are operating on both the Nigerian and Cameroonian sides of the peninsula.