NAIROBI (Reuters) – Ethiopia warned Sudan on Tuesday that it was running out of patience with its neighbor’s continued military build-up in a disputed border area despite efforts to disperse tensions with diplomacy.
The decades-old dispute over al-Fashqa, land within the international borders of Sudan, long settled by Ethiopian farmers, erupted late last year in weeks of clashes between forces on both sides.
“The Sudanese side seems to be moving in to inflame the situation on the ground,” Dina Mufti, a spokeswoman for the Ethiopian foreign ministry, told reporters. “Is Ethiopia going to start a war? Well, we say we are working on diplomacy.”
“How long will Ethiopia continue to solve the problem through diplomacy? There is nothing that has no limit. Everything has a limit,” he said at a briefing in Addis Ababa.
Soisan’s intelligence minister and government spokesman Faisal Mohamed Saleh said the country did not want war with Ethiopia, but its forces would respond to any aggression.
“We are afraid that this commentary will take a hostile position towards Sudan. We urge Ethiopia to stop attacking the Sudanese territory and Sudanese farmers,” he told Reuters.
Later, Sudan’s Foreign Ministry condemned what it called an attack by Ethiopian ‘gangs’ in al-Fashqa on Monday, five kilometers from the border. Five women and a child are dead, and two other women who harvested are missing.
Sudan said on December 31 that it had taken control of the entire Sudanese territory in the area. Ethiopia says Sudan has used its forces diverted by the Tigray conflict to occupy Ethiopian land and loot properties.
The United Nations said in a report on the humanitarian situation in Tigray last week that there were reports of a military build-up on both sides of the border around the area.
The border tension comes at a time when Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are also trying to resolve a three-way over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia regards the dam as the key to plans to become the largest power exporter in Africa. Egypt, which gets more than 90% of its fresh water from the Nile, is afraid that the dam across the Blue Nile could ruin its economy.
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan said on Sunday that they had reached a new deadlock in the dispute. Egypt and Ethiopia have separately blamed the Sudanese objections to the framework for the talks.
Dinah criticized Ethiopia, Dinah, both Egypt and Sudan for delaying the negotiations. “Do the two speak the same language? More or less. The two speak the same language when it comes to standing still.”
(Reported by Nairobi Newsroom and Khalid Abdelaziz in Khartoum; Written by Maggie Fick; Edited by David Clarke and Jonathan Oatis)