ZOMWE NEWSPAPER ZINA ZALEMBA LERO; LAKE MALAWI BORDER CAPE TIMES, 24th March, 2014: Lake Malawi border battle may go to global court The first naval battle of World War I was fought on Lake Nyasa, as it was called then, on August 13, 1914, just 17 days after fighting had begun in Europe. British naval commander EL Rhoades, captain of the 350-ton gunboat HMS Gwendolen, based in what was then the British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi), disabled and captured the slightly smaller German gunboat Hermann von Wissmann, commanded by his erstwhile drinking companion, Captain Berndt. Although this was hailed by the London Times as a great “naval victory on Lake Nyasa”, the Hermann von Wissmann was on dry land for repairs at the time of the “battle”. And Berndt had not yet been informed that Germany was at war with Britain, according to Oliver Ransford’s Livingstone’s Lake. It is hard to imagine any battle on Lake Nyasa (or Lake Malawi as Malawi now calls it) in anything but these comical terms. Yet there has been some alarming sabre-rattling recently over the lake. Part of the frontier between Malawi and Tanzania has run along the eastern shore of the lake since 1890, when Britain and Germany carved up their colonies. At independence both countries accepted this, under the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) agreement that enshrined colonial borders. That left Tanzania with no part of the lake, although in the southern part of Lake Nyasa, Britain and Portugal had drawn the boundaries of their two colonies in the more conventional way, through the lake. Tanzania and Malawi have occasionally quarrelled about the boundary over the years, but the dispute turned ugly after October 2011, when the the Malawian president, the late Bingu wa Mutharika, awarded British oil company Surestream Petroleum licences to explore for oil in the lake. In August 2012, Edward Lowassa, chairman of Tanzania’s parliamentary committee for defence, security and foreign affairs, warned that his country might be prepared to go to war over the border. President Jakaya Kikwete later appeared to hint at the same threat. In May, Tanzania antagonised Malawi further by announcing its intention to launch two passenger ships on the lake. Tanzanian police boats may be patrolling what Dar es Salaam regards as the border, according to the journal Africa Confidential. Despite these threats and apparent provocations, the two governments subsequently insisted they wanted to settle the dispute diplomatically – and locally. They agreed to mediation by former SADC presidents, led by Mozambique’s Joaquim Chissano and including South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and Botswana’s Festus Mogae. The first attempt by Chissano’s team, late last year in Lilongwe, ended in failure. So did the second, in Maputo on Friday. Chissano announced afterwards that the two sides “have rigid positions”. Malawian Foreign Minister Ephraim Chiume stuck to his country’s familiar argument that, according to the OAU (now the AU), the colonial borders were sacrosanct. Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe insisted that under international law, frontiers should be drawn through the middle of shared bodies of water – and that the OAC/AU rules allowed for the re-negotiation of borders. Chissano said the mediators had hoped to persuade the two governments to cooperate in exploiting the lake economically while they resolved the border dispute. Tanzania and Malawi could not agree on this, although they said Chissano’s mediation should continue. Obviously the mere whiff of black gold has put the resource curse on relations between the two otherwise friendly neighbours. Only a credible, rigorous legal process in the International Court of Justice seems to stand any chance of settling this dispute peacefully.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:17:48 +0000
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