Commission to visit Bakassi peninsula

The UN-chaired commission that is trying to resolve the dispute between Cameroon and Nigeria over the Bakassi peninsula is to send an assessment mission to the peninsula, the UN reported on Wednesday.

The mission would visit the affected areas "in order to better understand and appreciate the practical problems it would have to deal with and resolve in the course of the implementation of its mandate," the UN quoted a joint communiqué adopted on Tuesday at the end of the first formal meeting of the "mixed commission" in Yaoundé, Cameroon.

It had also agreed to establish a sub-commission, comprising legal experts and cartographers from Nigeria, Cameroon and the United Nations, responsible for the demarcation of the land boundary between the two countries.

"The sub-commission is scheduled to meet before the end of next January to prepare a small-scale map indicating the boundary and to consider the nature and characteristics of the maps that need to be prepared for the demarcation...[it] also agreed to consider the assignment of UN military liaison officers in both countries at a later date," the UN said.

Chaired by the Secretary-General's Special Representative for West Africa, Ahmedou Ould-Adballah, the commission was formed after a ruling in October on Bakassi by the International Court of Justice, which gave the oil-rich peninsula to Cameroon.

Nigeria disputed the ruling, saying it did not consider "fundamental facts" about Nigerian inhabitants of the territory, whose "ancestral homes" had been adjudged to be in Cameroonian territory.