KHARTOUM, 31 January 2005 — Armed police were out in force across Port Sudan yesterday following two days of riots by ethnic minority protesters in which at least 17 people were killed, witnesses said. Tensions ran high as hundreds of mourners turned out for the funerals of those killed in what Beja leaders described as a “deliberate, premeditated” attack against their community by the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum. The protests sparked a security clampdown across eastern Sudan, with arrests of Beja activists also reported in the region’s other main towns of Kassala and Jebeit, officials of the opposition Beja Congress said. “Everywhere you go and look, you see groups of police and army troops giving you the impression that they are going to shoot at you,” witness Abdullah Bakash said. “The atmosphere is tense and one feels it can explode any time,” he said, adding that there were nonetheless no new protests yesterday. The Beja Congress’s leader in Red Sea state, which includes Port Sudan, said separate funerals were held yesterday for 17 of the protesters killed by the security forces. Abdullah Mussa Abdullah accused the authorities of going back on an agreement reached late Saturday for a single mass funeral for all of the dead. Thirty-seven wounded, including two women and two children, remained in hospital, Abdullah said from Port Sudan. He said more than 160 people had been detained in the city and a further 12 in Kassala and 15 in Jebeit. “We believe for the situation to get quiet in the Beja areas, the government should abide by what has been agreed upon,” he said. Abdullah said that in talks late Saturday a government delegation headed by Agriculture Minister Majzoub Al-Khalifa Ahmed had agreed to recognize the Beja Congress, release protesters who had been detained, and launch an investigation into the security force action. Ahmed was also the government’s pointman in northern Sudan’s other main ethnic minority uprising, a nearly two-year-old rebellion in the western region of Darfur. In the capital, Beja Congress leaders held a press conference yesterday to set out their demands. Party secretary-general Amna Dhirar called for the dissolution of the state government in Port Sudan charging that “it has failed to protect the people”. She accused the security forces of heavy-handed action in the city, and demanded immediate talks with her party’s leadership-in-exile in neighboring Eritrea. “They behaved as snipers, shooting in the head and inside houses,” Dirar said. “They have harassed the women. It was a massacre for exterminating the Beja people.” Beja leaders claim their people number some four million in Red Sea and Kassala states along the Eritrean border.
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