State of emergency after Southern Darfur tribal clashes

The nature of tribal clashes in the central state of Southern Darfur, which has reportedly seen 50 people killed in recent days, has been exacerbated by an inflow of arms from neighbouring countries which are experiencing instability, according to Sudanese diplomatic sources.

Media reports from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday said Sudanese police and army forces had been deployed in Southern Darfur to prevent further clashes between two Arab tribes, the Rizayqat and Ma'aliyah, after the latest outbreak of violence at the weekend.

Reuters, which placed the number of the dead at 27, quoted the daily Khartoum Monitor newspaper as saying the violence was part of a pattern of recurrent tribal fighting in the area, where scarcity in grazing areas and economic hardships had caused intense rivalry between cattle communities like the Rizayqat and farming groups like the Ma'aliyah.

Armed groups of Rizayqat tribesmen on Saturday attacked and burnt a village of the rival Ma'aliyah, from Western Darfur, the Associated Press agency (AP) reported on Tuesday.

"The government of South Darfur, the police, the army and security forces are in full control of the situation there," AP quoted a public statement, issued by the interior ministry on Tuesday, as saying. The fighting was reportedly sparked by a dispute over a cattle grazing area.

Tribal fighting over pasture and water resources has been part of normal life among nomadic tribes in the in the Darfur regions for generations, but the problem has recently escalated following the influx of arms from Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR), particularly the latter, according to Muhammad Ahmad Dirdiery, charge d'affaires at the Sudanese embassy in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

Dirdiery told IRIN on Wednesday that the upsurge in fighting in the Western Darfur could be attributed to the influx of weapons from Sudan's western neighbour, the CAR.

"Tribal fighting is not new in that part of the country," Dirdiery said. "It is a nomadic region. Pastoralists are prone to conflict, because they share pasture and water resources... Some of the tribes in this region have put their hands on such weapons, and this generally tends to worsen the nature of conflict in the region."

However, the situation was currently "under control", and chiefs from the two tribes had been brought together to "sort out their differences", he added.

According to Dirdery, Sudan's borders with the CAR and Chad were not properly defined with natural barriers and remained "generally porous", making it difficult for the Khartoum government to exercise effective control on the arms influx into its territory.

The CAR has been subject to internal strife, including a coup attempt on 28 May 2001 when soldiers loyal to former President Andre Kolingba launched an offensive against current President Ange-Felix Patasse.

The CAR capital, Bangui, was again besieged by hostilities in November 2001, when CAR government forces tried to arrest a former army commander, Gen Francois Bozize, on behalf of a judicial commission probing the coup attempt of 28 May. Soldiers allied to Bozize came to his defence, and five days of intermittent fighting ensued in the northern districts of Bangui, before Bozize and his forces were dislodged and fled northward to the southern Chadian town of Sarh.

The CAR authorities then accused Chad of backing Bozize and his supporters, who repeatedly engaged in confrontations with CAR military forces along the two countries' common border. A nationwide curfew, imposed after the May coup attempt, was only lifted on 9 May 2002.

The regional tensions and military build-ups, combined with the massive availability of weapons in southern Sudan as a result of the long-running civil war, enable tribal groups, militias, dissident and rebel groups, and ordinary civilians in the Horn of Africa to gain access to small arms with unprecedented ease, according to regional analysts.

Frequent complaints of banditry raids in the Darfur region, mainly attributable to the influx of weapons from the CAR and Chad, need be addressed through long-term measures by the government, according to Dirdiery.

However, the area where the latest Rizayqat-Ma'aliyah clashes had taken place was "not too close" to the CAR and raised a different set of issues, he added.

Sudanese President Umar Hasan al-Bashir had declared a state of emergency in Southern Kordofan and formed a high-level security body with "sweeping powers" to arrest, try and punish those found guilty of fuelling the tribal clashes, AP reported on Tuesday.

"This is a committee that has sweeping powers. It can arrest and deport any person," it quoted Salah Ali al-Ghali, the governor of Southern Darfur, as saying on state-run Radio Omdurman.