Sudan: tribal conflict in state of Nile-Bleu left more than a hundred dead in less than a week

After a week of clashes, calm returned to this border state of Ethiopia, but the interethnic violence has won other Sudanese states.

Le Monde With AFP

The balance sheet of the tribal conflict in southern Sudan which had broken out in mid-July was revised upwards on Wednesday July 20. Interethnic clashes left 105 dead and 291 injured last week, according to the Minister of Health of the State of the Nile-Bleu, Jamal Nasser.

After almost a week of firearm clashes, calm returned to this border state of Ethiopia on Saturday. “Everything is calm now, but there remains the question of the displaced,” added Mr. Nasser joined by telephone by the agency France-Presse (AFP) in al-Damazine, chief town of the state of the Nile-Bleu.

It is for access to land that violence broke out on July 11 between the Hausa – one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, presents from Senegal to Sudan – and the Bartis clan, in the ‘State of the Nile-Bleu, Frontier of Ethiopia. But the violence has won several other states, the Hausa, one of the ethnicities involved in the conflict, mobilizing through the country to claim “justice for martyrs”. Violence notably won the state of Kassala, further north, where thousands of Hausa on Monday burned down public buildings. On Tuesday, they were thousands to demonstrate in Khartoum, North Kordofan, the center, or in Kassala, Gedaref and Port-Soudan on the East Coastal, noted AFP journalists.

Hundreds of deaths in recent months 2>

According to the UN, more than 17,000 people from the State of the Nile-Bleu fled their house for fear of lost bullets, mainly women and children, several thousands of whom now survive in three schools in Al- Damazine. Located in southern Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, the state of the Nile-Bleu is also underprivileged. The UN claims to have provided humanitarian aid to more than third of the inhabitants in the first quarter of 2022, or 563,000 people.

/Media reports.