AT least 10 people have been killed in fighting in a land dispute between rival ethnic communities on Cameroun’s western border with Nigeria, reports said on Thursday.
They said tribesmen from the Oliti community in Cameroun and their rivals from the Nigerian Yive community had used locally made firearms, known as “dane guns,” in clashes in the past two weeks in the Akwaya border region.
Dozens of people were wounded and hundreds forced from their homes by the violence, which had destroyed houses, farms and other property.
�The two ethnic groups have been disputing ownership of a piece of land for several decades which has, from time to time, resulted in sporadic violent clashes,” Paul Abine Ayah, member of parliament for Akwaya, told Reuters.
A local official, Bernard Awono Oloume, said a squad of police had been sent to the area to try to halt the fighting, but their mission was hampered by the difficult terrain.
�Akwaya is one of the most remote parts of Cameroun. There are no roads linking it to the rest of the country and the only way to get to the area is through Ikom and Obudu in Nigeria,” Oloume said.
Ayah said the Camerounian and Nigerian authorities had neglected the long-running dispute, concentrating instead on the Bakassi peninsula.
Nigeria and Cameroun had argued for decades over sovereignty of the Bakassi territory, which has offshore oil deposits. The then president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, agreed last year to hand over the peninsula to Cameroun in line with a 2002 ruling by the International Court of Justice.
In another development, the House of Representatives has rejected a letter from President Umaru Yar�Adua asking the National Assembly to ratify the agreement on Bakassi peninsula.
The House, in taking the decision, said the President failed to observe due process in forwarding his request to the National Assembly. The House, therefore, advised him to re-present the letter in a proper form.
Specifically, the House advised President Yar�Adua to present his request in the form of a bill to become a law. The Bakassi agreement between Nigeria and Cameroun began to generate controversy lately when the Senate threatened to reverse the decision of the past government on the issue.
The Senate claimed that the government of former President Obasanjo failed to carry the National Assembly along before ceding the Bakassi peninsula and some other Nigerian territories to Cameroun based on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling.
President Yar�Adua had forwarded his memo on Bakassi entitled �Re- ICJ Judgment: The Green Tree Agreement between Nigeria and Cameroon� to both the Senate President and the House Speaker, asking the National Assembly to ratify the agreement.
The Speaker, Honourable Dimeji Bankole, had hardly presented Yar�Adua�s letter for debate when members kicked against it, emphasising that the letter should have been presented in the form of a bill.
It was only one lawmaker, Honourable Bala Ibn Na�Allah who differed, stressing that rather than throwing the letter out, the National Assembly should have deployed its necessary organs to assist the President in presenting the request in the form of a bill for necessary ratification.