Some 200 killed in Ethiopian ethnic clash
February 12, 2004

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ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (Reuters) - Attackers killed almost 200 people in western Ethiopia, most of them small-scale miners, when mounting ethnic tensions in the area exploded into a day of bloodshed, the government said Wednesday.

The Jan. 30 killings were one of the worst outbreaks of communal violence in years in Ethiopia, a landlocked country of about 67 million people divided into a large number of linguistic and ethnic groups.

It takes a long time for information to trickle into the capital Addis Ababa from remote towns like Dima, more than 500 miles west of the city, due to poor communications.

“On 30th January, in the Dima district of Gambella bordering the Sudan, 196 people were killed, of whom 172 were traditional miners mainly from the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples state,” Ethiopia’s ministry of federal affairs said in a statement.

“These atrocities were conducted by an armed group of over 200 men who claim to be leaders of the Anyua,” it said.

The government said the Anyua, also spelt Anuak, ethnic group were the principal victims of a riot on Dec. 13 in Gambella state’s main town of Gambella, in which the government says up to 60 people were killed.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Council, based in Addis Ababa, puts the number of people killed in Gambella state in December at closer to 300 people.

It was not immediately clear what ethnic group or groups were represented among the victims of the latest attack.

Anuaks have in the past clashed with Nuer in the area over land, but Ethiopia’s Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples state from which most of the latest victims originated, comprises a number of different groups.

The government issued its statement hours after visiting British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn said Britain, a major aid donor to Ethiopia, was concerned about violence in the west of the country.

“Fighting in Gambella is obviously a cause of a great concern to everybody including the international community,” he told a news conference in Addis Ababa at the end of his three-day visit to the Horn of Africa nation.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Council issued a report last week detailing rising incidents of ethnic violence in various parts of Ethiopia, saying government policies of basing administrative units along tribal lines had aggravated tensions.

The government has in the past accused the council of issuing politically motivated fabrications.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) have evacuated all their international staff from parts of western Ethiopia, according to a UNHCR source.

An estimated 4,000 residents of Dima town have fled to the nearby town of Mizan due to the violence, according to U.N. sources. Aid workers said up to 15,000 Anuaks had fled into neighboring Sudan.