THE HAGUE: The International Court of Justice on Thursday awarded Cameroon sovereignty over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula in the Gulf of Guinea, handing down its ruling on a long-standing dispute with Nigeria.

“The sovereignty over the Bakassi peninsula is Cameroonian,” the president of the UN’s world court, Gilbert Guillaume, said as he read out the ruling in The Hague.

Conflict between Cameroon and its powerful west African neighbour Nigeria broke out over the marshy territory of some 1,000 square kilometres (400 square miles) in 1993, when each side accused the other of deploying troops.

At stake are major oil reserves believed to lie in the border area, as well as rich fish stocks.

The lengthy court judgment declared that a colonial agreement reached in 1913 between Germany, which ran what was then Kamerun, and Britain, the power in Nigeria, remained valid in the Bakassi area in spite of any objections from the Nigerian government.

The ICJ also gave Cameroon sovereignty over disputed territory at the northern end of the border between Cameroon and Nigeria, in the Lake Chad region.

However, regarding some other parts of disputed territory between Lake Chad and the Bakassi peninsula, the court judgment came down in favour of Nigeria.

Cameroon argued that Bakassi had been a part of the country since Nigeria in 1975 acknowledged Yaounde’s sovereignty in gratitude for its neutrality during the bloody civil conflict known as the Biafra War between 1967 and 1970.

No such accord was ever made official, however.

Nigeria handed in its case to the ICJ in January 2001 and Equatorial Guinea has also stepped in, asking the court to “protect (its own) judicial interests in the Gulf of Guinea”.

The dispute was complicated by several border changes. France and Britain took joint control of Cameroon after World War II and further alterations occurred after both west African countries gained independence in 1960.

In 1961, voters in the English-speaking Southern Cameroons chose to join former French Cameroon, while those of formerly British-ruled northern Cameroon opted to become part of Nigeria.

The whole border is about 1,000 kms long.

Cameroon took its claim to ownership of the territory before the ICJ in the Dutch capital in 1994 and both the Yaounde government and the Nigerian government in Abuja have pledged to abide by the ruling of the court.

The ICJ was created after World War II to settle disputes between states and is the main judicial organ of the United Nations.—AFP