Sudan forces fire tear gas at protests

KHARTOUM: Police fired tear gas in Sudan’s capital Khartoum Sunday against hundreds of anti-coup protesters who also called attention to increasingly deadly tribal clashes in the country’s south.

The capital has been the scene of near-weekly protests since army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan launched a power grab in October last year that derailed a transition to civilian rule.

The coup saw key donors pull the plug on funding, exacerbating a long-running economic crisis and feeding into inter-communal unrest in remote parts of the country.

Blue Nile state, bordering Ethiopia, is the latest crucible of tribal clashes — and on Sunday, authorities there raised the death toll to 60, from 33 the previous day, in fighting that began nearly a week ago.

“Al-Damazin is bleeding,” one Khartoum protester’s placard read on Sunday, referring to the provincial capital of Blue Nile.

In the city of Wad Madani, some 200 kilometres south of Khartoum, protesters diverted their demonstration to the local hospital to “donate blood to our brothers wounded in tribal clashes in Blue Nile,” protest organiser Ammar Mohamed told AFP.

The clashes in Blue Nile state, between the Berti and Hawsa tribes, first erupted last Monday.

The violence came after the Berti tribe rejected a Hawsa request to create a “civil authority to supervise access to land”, a prominent Hawsa member had told AFP 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 Hawsas.

The revised death toll of 60 was provided by Blue Nile health minister Jamal Nasser, who also told AFP that 163 people have been wounded.

“Violence is never a solution,” UNICEF tweeted Sunday, in a country where the UN estimates half the population will be pushed into extreme hunger by September.

Pro-democracy demonstrators accuse Sudan’s military leadership and ex-rebel leaders who signed a 2020 peace deal of exacerbating ethnic tensions in Blue Nile for personal gain.

Security forces had erected road blocks on bridges crossing the Nile linking Khartoum to its suburbs, AFP reporters said, to deter protesters who vowed to take to the streets in large numbers to protest against Burhan.