Thousands of Sudan’s Hausa people set up barricades and attacked government buildings in several cities yesterday, witnesses said, after a week of deadly tribal clashes in the country’s south.
In a bid to shed light on the violence in Blue Nile state, which has killed 60 people and wounded 163 others according to local authorities, activists called for a demonstration today in Sudan’s capital Khartoum.
The clashes, between tribes, first erupted last Monday after the Bertis rejected a Hausa request to create a “civil authority to supervise access to land”, a prominent Hausa member said on condition of anonymity.
But a senior member of the Bertis had said the tribe was responding to a “violation” of its lands by the Hausas.
Blue Nile governor Ahmed al-Omda on Friday banned public gatherings and marches for one month and imposed a night-time curfew in the state, which borders Ethiopia.
In a statement yesterday, he said authorities will “strike with an iron fist” against those inciting “racism, hatred and strife,” according to state news agency SUNA.
Troops were deployed in Blue Nile on Saturday, and since then an uneasy calm has prevailed there although tensions have escalated elsewhere.
In the eastern city of Kassala, the government banned public gatherings after several thousand Hausa people “set government buildings and shops on fire”, according to eyewitness Hussein Saleh.
“It’s panic in the city centre,” Kassala resident Idriss Hussein said by telephone. He said protesters were “blocking roads and waving sticks.”
In the city of Wad Madani, some 200 kilometres south of Khartoum, “hundreds of Hausa people put up stone barricades and burned tyres on the main bridge to block traffic”, resident Adel Ahmed said.
This picture taken yesterday shows a view of a burning vehicle in the wake of clashes in Sudan’s eastern city of Kassala.
