DAKAR, 5 January (IRIN) - IRIN-WA Weekly round-up 361 for 30 December 2006 - 5 January, 2007

CONTENTS:

BURKINA FASO: With rising border tensions, local officials meet SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Oil and tensions bubble beneath the surface SENEGAL: While northern Casamance still simmers, the south is now calm

BURKINA FASO: With rising border tensions, local officials meet

With tensions rising between Niger and Burkina Faso as they accuse each other's security forces of crossing the border to rob and harass villagers, local officials in the area met recently to renew a call for a buffer zone. "The situation is very difficult as the exact location of the border has not been agreed on," the governor of the Sahel Region of Burkina Faso, Bila Dipama, told IRIN on Thursday, a week after the meeting in Burkina Faso's eastern town of Fada. The buffer zone should run between the Tillaberi Region in Niger and the Eastern and Sahel regions of Burkina Faso and should be controlled jointly by the two countries' security forces. The officials also agreed to call on the International Court of Justice in The Hague to arbitrate the border dispute.

Full report: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56929 and SelectRegion=West_Africa and SelectCountry=BURKINA_FASO-NIGER

SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Oil and tensions bubble beneath the surface

These sleepy twin islands poking out from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean are among the most peaceful places on earth. Now, with geological surveys suggesting that the islands could be sitting on billions of barrels of oil and, with a population of less than 150,000, every man, women and child on the islands could, in theory, become millionaires. Some of the world's biggest oil companies have already paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to drill oil in the surrounding waters. However, experts on the effects of sudden resource wealth in poor countries are sounding the alarm that Sao Tome and Principe could destabilise and even collapse.

Full report http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56926 and SelectRegion=West_Africa and SelectCountry=SAO_TOME_AND_PRINCIPE

SENEGAL: While northern Casamance still simmers, the south is now calm

Thousands of people displaced by decades of low-level conflict in the southern part of the Casamance region of Senegal have started returning to their villages in recent years, according to a researcher working in the area, and there are signs that thousands more may return in the near future, he added. “Generally people in the area along the border with Guinea Bissau are optimistic and I don’t think that it’s a naive optimism,” Martin Evans, a geographer at the University of Leicester who has been researching the social and economic dimensions of the conflict for more than seven years. He spoke to IRIN on Wednesday ahead of presenting his findings to the Association of American Geographers at a meeting to be held in April in San Francisco. “With no reports of major fighting south of the Casamance River in recent years many of the estimated 60,000 displaced are starting to say that conditions are now favourable enough for their return,” he said.

Full report http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56907 and SelectRegion=West_Africa and SelectCountry=SENEGAL

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