Thousands of members of the Hausa ethnic group, involved in the tribal conflict that has bereaved Sudan for a week, set up barricades and attacked public buildings in several cities on Monday, witnesses said.
Determined to increase the pressure following clashes which, according to official sources, left 79 dead and 199 injured, they are now calling for demonstrations on Tuesday in Khartoum.
The violence first erupted a week ago in Blue Nile state, bordering Ethiopia, between the Hausa, African farmers present throughout the Sahelian strip, and another African clan, the Bartis.
The former say they have been wronged and are calling for the formation of a local authority to oversee access to land and water. The latter claim to be the owners of the land and refuse any passage to inhabitants who do not belong to their clan or supervision outside the tribal system.
Khartoum has sent reinforcements which have maintained an uneasy calm since Sunday.
Blue Nile Governor Ahmed al-Omda, who had already imposed a night curfew and a month-long ban on gatherings, vowed on Monday to deal “with an iron fist on those who incite hatred”.
– Violence spreads to other regions –
But the spiral of violence has now spread to other states in Sudan.
In Kassala (east), the governorate decreed a ban on assembly following several thousand Hausa “burnt down part of the local government premises, administrations and shops”, according to a witness, Hussein Saleh.
Idriss Hussein, another resident, adds that the Hausa “block the roads waving sticks”. “It’s panic in the city center,” he still assures AFP by telephone, while according to another witness, “stores and banks have lowered their curtains”.
In Wad Madani, 200 kilometers south of Khartoum, “hundreds of Hausa have set up barricades of stones and burnt tires on the main bridge and are blocking traffic,” said Adel Ahmed, another resident reached by telephone.
Water and land, vital for farmers and herders, have already caused hundreds of deaths in recent months during tribal conflicts in a country where many weapons circulate following decades of civil war and rebel guerrillas.
Violence is also on the rise, experts note, since the putsch in Khartoum in October 2021 which created a security vacuum.
And they serve, accuse the pro-democracy, the interests of the military power and its ex-rebel allies who thus press for political gains.
The Hausa are one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups with tens of millions of members from Senegal to Sudan.
They are nearly three million in Sudan, of which they share the majority religion, Islam, but not the official language, Arabic, because they speak Hausa.
They live mainly from agriculture in Darfur, bordering Chad, in the state of al-Jazeera, south of Khartoum, as well as in the states of Kessala, Gedaref, Sennar and Blue Nile, which border the Eritrea and Ethiopia.
