Bakassi: The Marston report, 1982
Forwarded By Dr. Nowa Omoigui
On May 12, 1982 Professor Geoffrey Marston, LLB, LLM, Ph.D., of Cambridge University, submitted a detailed report commissioned by Nigeria, to then Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Chief ROA Akinjide.
Marston had been commissioned in November 1981 to advise the Shagari government on the onshore and offshore boundary between Nigeria and Cameroun - in the aftermath of the incident on May 16, 1981 when Nigerian soldiers in three canoes were ambushed and killed by Camerounian soldiers.
The Professor advised that:
"The boundary regime established by the Anglo-German Agreements of 13 March 1913 and 6 July 1914 is binding on both Nigeria and Cameroun by virtue of a rule of customary international law reflected in Article 11 of the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in respect of Treaties, 1978, as well as in the Declaration of the Organization of African Unity of July 1964 and, in respect of Nigeria, the Exchange of Notes with the United Kingdom of 1 October 1960. This regime cannot thus be abrogated or modified unilaterally by either Nigeria or Cameroun."
Although, therefore, there was room to haggle over the maritime border, the case of the Bakassi peninsula itself was settled as being in Cameroun. The Professor expressly stated that he did not see how any legal claim to the peninsula as some were trying to make, could be sustained.
Indeed in his book, "Beckoned to Serve", published in 2001, former President Shagari says he hinged his demand for a Camerounian apology in 1981 on the fact that Nigeria had claimed that the soldiers were shot on the Akpa Yafi river while Cameroun claimed they were shot on the Rio-de-Rey river. To readers familiar with the geography of that area, the fact that Shagari says Cameroun owed an apology for the shooting on Akpa Yafe - but not if it had indeed occurred on the Rio-de-Rey - suggests that the former Nigerian President accepted the Akpa Yafe river as the land border (as the 1913 Treaty defined it), which would support the view that the peninsula was and is in Cameroun. I am not sure the Nigerian public at that time understood the significance of this detail.
Marston's report is an important milestone because the arguments he made back and forth in the report to Attorney General Akinjide about various potential legal approaches to the maritime problem obviously influenced the submissions Chief Akinjide made as a private lawyer on behalf of Nigeria to the ICJ in 2002 - 20 years later.
Knowing that the title of ownership of the peninsula itself was clearly stated, first by Teslim Elias in 1970, and then, independently, by Professor Marston in 1982, to be Camerounian, therefore, one wonders why Nigeria was taken on a wild goose chase at The Hague. Perhaps this is what former Police Chief MD Yusuf and former Attorney General Olu Onagoruwa meant when they both recently said the Legal team representing Nigeria was misleading the country about the facts.
Nevertheless, why defining the Nigeria-Cameroun maritime border on the basis of the 1913 treaty has been such a technical problem - and how it was addressed in 1971 and 1975 by the Yakubu Gowon Team - will be the subject of a future article.