Day: July 16, 2022

KHARTOUM— Dozens of families were Saturday fleeing violence in Sudan’s Blue Nile State, where ongoing clashes between two tribes have killed at least 31 people, local officials said.

At least 39 others have been wounded and 16 shops torched since the violence broke out on Monday over a land dispute between the Berti and Hawsa tribes.

“We need more troops to control the situation,” local official Adel Agar from the city of Al-Roseires said on Saturday.

According to him, many people were seeking refuge in police stations and the unrest had resulted in many “dead and wounded”.

Agar did not give a toll breakdown but said mediators were urgently needed to de-escalate the violence.

Soldiers were deployed to contain the unrest and a night curfew has been imposed by the authorities starting Saturday.

Blue Nile governor Ahmed al-Omda issued an order Friday prohibiting any gatherings or marches for one month.

The violence broke out after the Berti tribe rejected a Hawsa request to create a “civil authority to supervise access to land”, a prominent Hawsa member said.

But a senior member of the Bertis said the tribe was responding to a “violation” of its lands by the Hawsas.

Clashes resumed on Saturday after a brief lull, close to the state capital Al-Damazin, witnesses said.

“We heard gun shots… and saw smoke rising,” resident Fatima Hamad said Saturday from Al-Roseires, across the river from Al-Damazin.

Ahmed Youssef, a resident of the state capital, said “dozens of families” crossed the bridge into the city to flee the unrest.

Hospitals put out urgent calls for blood donations, according to medical sources.

One source at Al-Roseires Hospital said the facility had “run out of first aid equipment” and that reinforcements were needed as the number of injured people was “rising”.

The UN special representative to Sudan, Volker Perthes, called on all sides to exercise restraint.

The “inter-communal violence and the loss of life in Sudan’s Blue Nile region is saddening and deeply concerning,” he tweeted.

By late afternoon Saturday “the situation had improved” in the Qissan region, according to Omda, the governor of the Blue Nile State.

But clashes continued in Al-Roseires, he said in televised remarks.

The Qissan region and Blue Nile state more generally have long seen unrest, with southern guerrillas a thorn in the side of Sudan’s former strongman president Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted by the army in 2019 following street pressure.

Experts say last year’s coup, led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, created a security vacuum that has fostered a resurgence in tribal violence, in a country where deadly clashes regularly erupt over land, livestock, access to water and grazing.

Source: Nam News Network

Forest elephants are smaller than their cousins on the African savannah, but in Gabon their destructive raids of farmers’ fields are having an outsized impact on support for the government and its conservation agenda.

With over 10% of its land protected in national parks, Gabon has become the main stronghold in central Africa for critically endangered forest elephants, whose relative abundance and marauding habits are undermining efforts to protect them there, authorities and scientists warn.

The long-standing conflict has become markedly more acute in the past few years – 2021 saw the most widespread anti-elephant protests so far by farmers across Gabon, according to the environment ministry.

“Some people cannot farm anymore – the elephants are eating so much of their crops,” Environment Minister Lee White told Reuters. “It has become a political issue and is eroding support for conservation and for the president (and) government.”

Just outside the capital Libreville, splintered tree-trunks, trampled undergrowth and churned-up earth mark where an elephant strolled through the forest.

When they draw close to villages, these natural bulldozers can wipe out carefully tended crops in just a few hours.

“You can see how people get mad and sometimes kill the elephants,” said guide Djakel Matotsi as he followed the elephant tracks in Pongara National Park.

Up to 50 elephants are killed per year in revenge or self-defense, while around 10 people have been killed by elephants in the past 2-1/2 years, according to the environment ministry, which says there is not enough data to quantify long-term trends.

The raids are causing food prices to rise, spurring rural exodus and driving up perceptions that the authorities prioritize elephants’ interests while doing little to support the around third of Gabonese who live in poverty, said Oliwina Boudes, head of a female farmers’ association.

“All rural communities harbor this feeling,” she told Reuters.

Need for detente

The need for a detente is clear. Gabon is home to 95,000 or 60-70% of all African forest elephants, which are facing dramatic decline elsewhere, a study published in Global Ecology and Conservation in December showed. Managing these herds while promoting rural development in Gabon is of “critical importance to the species’ persistence,” it said.

After nationwide consultations in 2021, authorities are rolling out new initiatives this year to try to strike this balance.

To address the lack of data on elephant disturbances, the ministry has launched a database and app to track and verify complaints while for the first time, the government has set aside $4.5 million in this year’s budget to compensate farmers for trashed crops.

The government is also allowing charity Space for Giants (SfG) to trial elephant-repelling electric fences around fields, customized to simplify their installation and maintenance in tropical forest conditions.

The 57 single-strand fences set up so far have repelled all interactions with elephants, SfG said in June. It plans to install 500 by year-end if it can get the funding.

Even with the fences, the government will need to do more to help farmers cope with elephants as it pursues its ‘Green Gabon’ plan for sustainable development, said John Poulsen, elephant ecologist at Duke University, who is helping SfG assess the impact of the fence trial.

He said that the government could potentially deploy agents in the field to help keep troublesome elephants away from villages and provide training so communities can deal with problem animals better themselves.

“If they have that perception that elephants are that bad … it absolutely affects their outlook and willingness to work with the government and with other conservation efforts,” he said.

Source: Voice of America