Ahmed Fadl-Khartoum
Ethnic unrest has erupted between the Bani Amer and Nuba tribes in the three eastern states of Sudan for three months, turning into bloody events that killed about 100 people in the city of Port Sudan on the Red Sea, the main port of the country.
A state of lawlessness and uncertainty following the fall of President Omar al-Bashir on April 11 helped to spread tribal tension along the eastern belt.
The fighting and the loss of life and property in Port Sudan, where the two components constitute the backbone of life in the city, about 675 km northeast of the capital Khartoum.
Ihab Mohamed Nasr, a journalist based in Port Sudan, told Al Jazeera Net that life is now almost paralyzed in the city.
Painful statistics
The victims of the renewed events last Thursday as a result of a quarrel of 37 dead on both sides, according to the Central Doctors of Sudan, an entity belonging to the pool of professionals, without issuing any official statistics so far.
Sources in Port Sudan - talked to Al Jazeera Net - the number of victims reported by the Committee of Doctors of Sudan in the Nuba tribe, pointing to 11 other dead from the Bani Amer.
The same sources say that renewed clashes between the two tribes, which lasted on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, have brought serious developments this time in the form of atrocities including burning murder and the use of bullets instead of the white weapon on a large scale, as well as burning entire housing blocks.
This was confirmed by the report of the Central Doctors of Sudan on Monday that 17 of the 37 deaths were from gunshot wounds, 92 of about 200 injured by gunshot wounds, as well as eight people were burned.
Witnesses from the city said they saw bodies littered in the streets and were buried without going to the morgue.
Seeds of sedition
In similar events that erupted in early June, 40 people were killed from Beni Amer against 12 from Nubia on the occasion of Eid al-Fitr, to inspect the city in all of these events a hundred dead.
The incident happened after the sit-in broke out in front of the army general in Khartoum on June 3.
The spiral of lawlessness between Nuba and Bani Amer dates back to the protests during the era of ousted President Omar al-Bashir, when Manfeltun took advantage of the protests in Gedaref to loot a shop.
Later, in the same city, a dispute broke out between Saqqa of the Bani Amer nationalists and a woman from Nubia, leading to a number of dead and wounded.
The state of congestion went to the city of Khasham Korba, Kassala state, when Jawahery shot dead two people for trying to loot his gallery.
| Army deployed in Port Sudan to contain tribal clashes |
Painful memories
According to Ihab Nasr, the first fighting between the two tribes took place in January 1986, but was limited in losses and contained within 24 hours. "The renewal of this conflict after the former regime goes, opens up several questions," he said.
Nasr warns that the talk that Nuba expatriates violates the reality because their presence is old and so large that they have glasses in the Red Sea state, headed by the beholder Kamel blue; while Brown Amer glasses in the neighboring state of Kassala and run in the Red Sea state and a warden
In a statement on Monday, the SPLM-North promised events to reflect the racist attitudes and policies of the Sudanese state since 1956, creating ethnic hostilities and arming social and cultural groups against others.
The movement's secretary-general, Ammar Amoun, warned that the events in Port Sudan would be a prelude to a larger and more comprehensive sedition fed and run by the government.
Government complacency
Accusations of negligence and deceleration extended to the official agencies, which failed to end sedition that lasted for about three months, resulting in bloody events such as Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha.
Perhaps this is what prompted the Sovereign Council to dismiss the military governor of the Red Sea State and the director of the General Intelligence Service in the state.
A local leader of the Bunni tribe, Amer, who declined to be named, said the breakthrough "imitations" - a tribal reconciliation system respected by the Beja tribes in eastern Sudan - exacerbated events.
He says that the peace is always a month, during which the perpetrators are brought to justice and the payment of blood money and reparations.The period expired on July 8, and ten days later Port Sudan arrived a delegation of civil administrations in Sudan and asked to extend the deadline for another month.
He adds that after August 8, a delegation from the Popular Congress Party arrived in the neighboring Nile River state and asked for another deadline until September 8, but this time the truce was breached by a quarrel.
The authorities' inability to record 1,070 reports against an unknown person appeared in the events in Port Sudan, and what the state police chief admitted at a fact-finding press conference this month was that police withdrew during the events to run out of tear gas, which would not have happened during the protests.