Skip to footer

Some 100,000 flee Darfur, many villages burned, 100 dead: UN

Weeks of clashes around a gold mine dispute in northern Sudan ends with dozens of villages burned, and human toll worse than estimated.

  • By Reuters

| Khartoum, Sudan

A surge in violence in Sudan's strife-torn Darfur region has killed more than 100 people and forced 100,000 to flee, the United Nations said on Wednesday, sharply increasing its estimates after weeks of clashes.

Fighters caught up in a dispute over control of a gold mine had set fire to around three dozen villages in the north of the region, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, Ali Al-Zatari, said in a statement.

More than 100 people had died and around 70,000 people had been displaced by the fighting between rival Arab tribes that broke out in the Jebel Amer area last week, he added.

Another 30,000 people had left their homes after separate fighting between the Army and a rebel group in the central Jebel Marra area that started late in December, the UN said.

Conflict has raged in vast arid region for almost a decade since mainly non-Arab tribes took up arms against the Arab government in Khartoum in 2003, accusing it of political and economic marginalisation.

Violence overall has ebbed since the massacres reported in the early days of the uprising. But the latest clashes have been some of the worst in the area for months.

"The largest concentration of displaced people is in El Sireif where thousands of people are in urgent need of food, water, shelter and medical attention," Zatari said in the statement.

Last week the UN said the gold mine dispute and the Jebel Marra fighting had displaced a total of 30,000 people.

Events in Darfur are hard to verify as Sudan restricts travel by journalists, aid workers and diplomats.

Rebel divisions and a string of broken ceasefires have scuppered years of international mediation and several rounds of peace talks. Banditry has also spread.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials to face charges of masterminding war crimes in Darfur. They deny the charges and refuse to recognise the court.

Human rights groups and the UN estimate hundreds of thousands of people have died in Darfur's conflict. The government says around 10,000 people have been killed.

(Reporting by Ulf Laessing; editing by Andrew Heavens)

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Some 100,000 flee Darfur, many villages burned, 100 dead: UN
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0116/Some-100-000-flee-Darfur-many-villages-burned-100-dead-UN
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe