Fighting breaks out on the borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan on July 11 between people of the Berti and Hausa ethnic groups.
o Fighting breaks out in the state on the borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan on July 11.
o Ethnic Clashes have broken out in between members of the Berti and Hausa communities.
Ethnic clashes in Sudan’s Blue Nile have killed 105 people and injured 291, the state’s health minister said, providing a new estimate Wednesday. Fighting broke out in the southern state on the borders with Ethiopia and South Sudan on July 11 between the Berti and Hausa communitiesÂ
“The situation is now under control,” state health minister Jamal Nasser assured by telephone from the state capital al-Damazin, 460 kilometers south of Khartoum. Military deployment has eased the infighting since Saturday, he stated.
“The challenge now lies in privind shelter to the displaced,” Nasser said. The United Nations stated on Tuesday that more than 17,000 people have fled from their homes from the fighting, with 14,000 sheltered in three schools in al-Damazin.
From January and March this year, the UN stated that aid was being provided to 563,000 people on the Blue Nile. Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, tainted with an economic crisis that has worsened after an October coup led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has seen rare interludes of civilian rule since independence.
In Sudan, deadly infighting regularly occurs across the land, cattle, and water-bound areas and grazing, especially in those still littered with weapons left over from decades of civil war. Fighting in the Blue Nile allegedly broke out after Bertis rejected a Hausa request to allow for a “civil authority to oversee access to land”, a prominent Hausa member said.
A Berti leader said that the group was responding to a “violation” of their land by the Hausa community. While fighting is said to have stopped and relative calm has returned, tensions have escalated in other parts, where the Hausa people have taken to the streets demanding justice for their martyrs.
Thousands more protested on Tuesday in Khartoum, Kassala, North Kordofan, Gedaref, and Port Sudan, according to local correspondents.
