As soon as Khartoum stepped forward, Mohamed Hamdan Diqlo (Hamidati), leader of the Rapid Support Forces, and Vice-President of the Sovereign Council, last Saturday, came from the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, until the Ethiopians began attacking the Sudanese lands of the Gedaref state.
In the latest developments, the Ethiopian "Shifta" militia attacked the Sudanese farmers' lands adjacent to the Ethiopian border on Tuesday, killing and injuring Sudanese forces who responded, according to Al-Jazeera Net sources, to the Ethiopian artillery fire.
The Sudanese army said that last Sunday it had attacked "some components of the Ethiopian forces" at the Anfal site in the eastern bank of the Atbara river in the Al-Fashqa area.
Hamidati's visit to Ethiopia - which lasted for three days - came after an Ethiopian attack on the same area in late May, which resulted in deaths and injuries. At that time, the Sudanese army accused for the first time its Ethiopian counterpart of supporting the "Shifta" militia.
A strategic planner and an
official in the border administration in Gedaref State, speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, said that the visit of Hamidati is not feasible in containing the border dispute currently raging over the lands of al-Fashqa, because the recognition of these lands by the federal government in Addis Ababa did not protect them from the nationalist attacks of the Amrahs bordering to al-Fashaqah.
According to the official, who preferred to be withheld his name, the joint field work committee between the two countries seized 754 thousand feddans in 2005, which was seized by Ethiopian farmers, and expansion continued to reach about 895 thousand feddans of highly fertile lands.
He also says that most of Ethiopia's exports of sunflower, sesame and maize crops are produced from about one million acres in Sudanese lands.
It is considered that the gap between the position of the central government in Addis Ababa and the reality of infringements on the borders within an Ethiopian strategic plan that supports the reality of the population and agricultural settlement of the Ethiopians within Sudanese lands, even if resorting to international arbitration finds the International Court logical reasons grant Addis Ababa some rights.
Ethiopian settlements
The same source affirms that the Ethiopians now have settlements in the literal sense, which is confirmed by the deputy in the parliament dissolved from the circle of Al-Fashaqa, Mubarak Al-Nur, by saying that the Ethiopians have changed the demography of the region by establishing cities, roads, churches and cemeteries.
The light - in his speech to Al-Jazeera Net - chronicles the Ethiopian presence in al-Fashaqa in 1957, when seven Ethiopian farmers cultivated 3,800 acres, and between 1964 and 1967 the number increased to 27 and the area of their farms increased to 33,000 acres.
He adds that the number of Ethiopian farmers, between 1972 and 1991, increased to 52 farmers in an area of 84.5 thousand acres. After 1994, their number reached 1,659 farmers in about one million acres, penetrating inside the borders of Sudan, with varying depths between nine and 22 kilometers.
The status of the Al-Fashqa region - isolated from the rest of Sudan - enabled the Ethiopians to tighten their control over it, as the region is a peninsula interspersed with rivers of Islam, Atbara and Setit.
The dissolved parliament proposes to redistribute 265 km of the boundary between the Gedaref State and the Tigray and the Ethiopian Amhara regions, a strip of 15 known demarcation points, as well as Sudan imposing its sovereignty over the region in practice by developing it and linking it to roads and bridges over its rivers.
New factors
Mohamed Idris Omar - a journalist from the state of Gedaref - indicates that the deadly skirmishes in the Al-Fashqa region have been going on for many years, without finding their luck from the media due to the method of calm that the previous regime followed.
According to the Al-Jazeera Net journalist’s statement, the Sudanese army recently deployed its forces in the area, and its spokesperson’s announcement, the Ethiopian attacks, as happened late last month, shed light on the issue of al-Fashaqa.
It is reported that on April 8 last, the head of the sovereignty council, Lieutenant General Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, accompanied by the officers of the Operations Authority and the director of military intelligence, visited al-Fashqa, following reports of crowds of the Ethiopian army and their incursion into Sudanese territory.
The journalist states that the deployment of Sudanese military reinforcements to the area is good, but that there are still insufficient forces within the limits of a few hundred soldiers, while Ethiopian militias are active with the beginning of the fall to force Sudanese farmers to lease their lands to their Ethiopian counterparts.
Historical ambitions
Although the researcher at the International Center for Future Prospecting Zamzami Bashir excludes the outbreak of war between the two countries as a result of the conflict over the Pistache, he proposes to arm Sudanese farmers in the area under the command of the army similar to the "Shifta" militia of the Ethiopian army.
He notes that the late Ethiopian President, Meles Zenawi, had stated that his country was adopting the Renaissance Dam, its largest strategic project near the Sudan border, and therefore it is impossible to enter into a war with it.
Al-Zamzami added, while speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, "However, there are historical ambitions for Ethiopia in the eastern borders of Sudan, which may not be taken into account now, but it is certain that the battle of the Renaissance Dam between Addis Ababa and Cairo is managed in Sudan, which is destined to be between two countries that are overtaken by a population."
History facts are more likely to ambush Ethiopia with mountainous terrain with flat agricultural lands inside Sudan. In 1891, the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II sent a letter to European heads of state specifying the limits of his empire until Karkouge on the Blue Nile in central Sudan.