By Tansa Musa YAOUNDE, March 7 (Reuters) - Villagers in northwestern Cameroon have burned down some 300 homes and forced thousands of people to flee a rival settlement in a dispute over farming land, a senior local official said on Wednesday. The villages of Bawock and Bali Nyongha in the central African country's North-West Province have been locked in a leadership struggle and battle over land rights for decades but the scale of the latest attack took residents by surprise. It came on the eve of the region's new planting season, when tensions over land rights are particularly acute. "I have never seen arson perpetrated on such a large scale," Jules Marcellin Ndjaga, the senior administrative officer for the area, told Reuters. "It was a very sad situation. I met families -- men, women and children -- running in all directions," he said, adding the government had sent soldiers to reinforce the area. The clashes, which took place on Tuesday, were triggered when Bawock villagers reportedly tried to burn down Bali Nyongha's "fon" -- the traditional chief's palace -- in retaliation for a similar attack on their settlement. The people of Bali Nyongha reacted, by burning down all the houses in Bawock and sending residents fleeing, witnesses said. Their fury was heightened by the belief their rivals had stolen a traditional bag used in a ceremony meant to ensure fertility in the upcoming planting season. "I don't know where my mother is and I don't know where my children are," one resident told state radio. Ndjaga said some 8,000 displaced people had taken refuge in the main provincial town of Bamenda, although some locals said the number who had been forced to flee was twice that number. Confrontations over land and natural resources, especially at the start of the agricultural season, are a regular feature of life in rural Cameroon, where many are subsistence farmers. Last year, angry villagers in the North-West province beat their chief to death and burnt his corpse after they accused him of selling farmland to wealthy cattle breeders. They then stoned to death the policeman who came to arrest the main suspects.
