Calm returns in Sudan’s Blue Nile after deadly ethnic clashes

While fighting is reported to have stopped and relative calm returned to Blue Nile, tensions have escalated in other states, where the Hausa people have taken to the streets demanding creation of a “civil authority to supervise access to land.”

“The situation is now calm,” state health minister Jamal Nasser told AFP by telephone from the state capital al-Damazin, some 460 kilometers (285 miles) south of Khartoum.

The deployment of the army had eased the fighting since Saturday, he said. “The challenge now is in sheltering the displaced,” Nasser said.

The United Nations said Tuesday that more than 17,000 people have fled their homes from the fighting, with 14,000 “sheltering in three schools in al-Damazin.”

The ethnic clashes in Sudan’s Blue Nile state in a deadly land dispute killed 105 people and wounded 291, the state’s health minister said, providing a new toll Wednesday.

Fighting broke out in the southern state on July 11 between members of the Berti and Hausa ethnic groups. The clashes reportedly stem from the Bertis’ rejection of a Hausa request to create a “civil authority to supervise access to land”, a prominent Hausa member said.