Mon 18 January 2021:
The death toll from tribal violence between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan’s West Darfur province climbed to at least 83, including women and children, a doctor’s union and aid worker said, as sporadic violence continued Sunday.
“The death toll from the bloody events taking place in the city of al-Geneina … has increased since Saturday morning … [to] 84,” CCSD, a local branch of the country’s doctors’ union, said in a statement on Twitter.
The deadly clashes grew out of a fistfight Friday between two people in a camp for displaced people in Genena, the provincial capital. An Arab man was stabbed to death and his family, from the Arab Rizeigat tribe, attacked the people in the Krinding camp and other areas Saturday.
The statement added that the clashes left 160 wounded, including members of the armed forces.
Saturday’s clashes initially pitted the Massalit tribe against Arab nomads in al-Geneina, about two weeks after the United Nations and African Union ended a 13-year peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
The violence morphed into broader fighting involving armed militias in the area, which left several buildings, including houses, scorched.
A database by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, showed that inter-communal violence across Darfur region doubled in the second half of 2020, with at least 28 incidents compared to 15 between July and December 2019.
West Darfur province experienced a “significant increase” of violence last year, with half of the 40 incidents reported in the entire Darfur region, OCHA said Sunday.
The vast Darfur region was the scene of a bitter conflict that erupted in 2003, leaving about 300,000 people dead and 2.5 million displaced, according to the UN.
At the time, fighting erupted when ethnic minority rebels rose up against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, which responded by recruiting and arming a notorious Arab-dominated militia known as the Janjaweed.
The main conflict has subsided over the years but ethnic and tribal clashes still flare up periodically, largely pitting nomadic Arab pastoralists against settled farmers from non-Arab ethnic groups.
The clashes pose a challenge to efforts by Sudan’s transitional government to end decades-long rebellions in areas like Darfur, where most people live in camps for the displaced and refugees.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “is deeply concerned” about the violence and “calls on the Sudanese authorities to expend all efforts to de-escalate the situation and bring an end to the fighting,” his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said.
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