SIGNIFICANT LAND DISPUTES
By Yemi Soneye
Friday, July 29, 2011
Last April, neighbours Thailand and Cambodia killed scores of each other over the lands surrounding the
Preah Vihear temple, a UNESCO world heritage site. The incident was reported by
Reuters news agency as “Southeast Asia’s bloodiest border dispute in years.”
Unfortunately still, like past attempts to resolve the over fifty years old dispute,
the talks set up and mediated by Indonesia between the two countries at the May
summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) failed flatly. Prime
Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia and the outgoing Prime Minister of Thailand,
Abhisit Vejjajiva refused to shift their grounds.
Prime
Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel also refused the suggestion of President Barrack
Obama of
the United States that Israel returns to its pre-1967 territories in May
as a
major gesture of peace. - the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip
and the
Golan Heights lands that were taken by Israel in the 1967 Six Days War
with
neighbouring Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Netanyahu's
argument is these territories are returned before Hamas' acceptance of
Israel’s right to exist would
leave Israel defenseless.
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Sudan,
one of the utter
failures that came out of the notorious late 1800s scramble for Africa,
was split into two countries on July 9, when Southern Sudan became the
world's newest nation . But Sudan is now terrorising its new southern
neighbour. One of the main reasons
for this is that the oil-rich land of
Abyei that lies between the two countries was not factored in the 2005
ceasefire agreement between the
Northern
Sudan government and Southern Sudan rebels, and this has caused rounds
of gunfire
exchanges between the two sides, a development that gravely threatens
the
future and stability of the two countries that now exist in the place of
Sudan.
The war-weary people of Northern and Southern Sudan must be wandering
why it
seems that they have been, in the words of Thomas Malthus in An Essay On
The
Principle Of Population, “condemned to a perpetual oscillation between
happiness and misery and after every effort remain still at an
immeasurable
distance from the wished-for goal.”
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The land disputes
between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Palestine and Northern and Southern
Sudan may just be permanently impossible to resolve bearing in mind the
numerous peace initiatives by individuals, groups and international agencies have
brokered over the years, and the constant rejections of suggested concessions by the disputing
parties.
Land bears financial, social and well, unfortunately and fortunately, huge
emotional significance. The holding of land and the yearning to hold it eats
deep into the existence of every man. To hold it, some men are driven to strife
and some to hard work. Okonkwo, the central character of Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart, who had the misfortune of a sybaritic and consequently poor father,
got his farming lands, and a major symbol of wealth, from dints of hard work.
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Land, like money and
other instruments of wealth, is bound to be in constant change of ownership. Feudal
lords have found the currency of land they used to hold solely passed on to
serfs in their lifetimes. Sometimes however,
and this is when the strife music plays, the significance of, even, a small
area of land, would be so great to a man that nothing would be sufficient to make
him exchange its ownership. In the cited land disputes, lands bear
significances of religion emblem, nations’ identification, and huge source
of wealth. The sentiment over land ownership often burn strongly and the many owner(s) of the
lands are seemingly bent on shedding their lives to repel perceived incursions.
It is not every land dispute
that will be ‘resolved’ as peacefully as the Nigeria-Cameroun dispute over
Bakassi Peninsula, a former Nigerian territory that was awarded to Cameroun by
the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002, and which Nigeria finally withdrew
from in 2008 despite an order of a Nigerian Federal High Court as against this.
In 1962, the ICJ awarded the lands surrounding the Preah Vihear temple to
Cambodia but that has been largely unbinding on the Thailand-Cambodia dispute.
The Nigerian act cannot be preached in the above situations.