NAIROBI (Reuters) – Ethiopia warned Sudan on Tuesday that it is losing patience with its neighbor’s continued military build-up in a disputed border area, despite attempts to dispel tensions with diplomacy.
The decades-long dispute over al-Fashqa, land within Sudan’s international borders that has long been resolved by Ethiopian farmers, exploded in weeks of clashes between forces on both sides at the end of last year.
“The Sudanese side seems to be pressing to inflame the local situation,” Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Dina Mufti told reporters. “Is Ethiopia going to start a war? Well, we are saying, let’s work on diplomacy.”
“How long will Ethiopia continue to resolve the issue using diplomacy? Well, there is nothing that has no limit. Everything has a limit,” he said at a news conference in Addis Ababa.
Sudan’s information 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 fear that these comments contain a hostile position towards Sudan. We ask Ethiopia to stop attacking Sudanese territory and Sudanese farmers,” he told Reuters.
The Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs later condemned what it called an attack by Ethiopian “gangs” in al-Fashqa on Monday, three miles from the border. Five women and a child were killed, and two other women who were harvesting are missing.
Sudan said on December 31 that it has taken control of all Sudanese territory in the area. Ethiopia says that Sudan took advantage of the distraction of its forces by the Tigray conflict to occupy Ethiopian land and loot property.
The United Nations said in a report last week on the humanitarian situation in Tigray that there were reports of a military increase on both sides of the border around the area.
Border tensions come at a time when Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are also trying to resolve a three-way dispute over the Ethiopian Great Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia sees the dam as the key to plans to become Africa’s largest energy exporter. Egypt, which obtains more than 90% of its scarce fresh water from the Nile, fears that the dam that crosses the Blue Nile could devastate its economy.
Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan said on Sunday they had reached a new impasse in the dispute. Egypt and Ethiopia separately blamed Sudanese objections to the structure of the negotiations.
On Tuesday, Ethiopia Dina criticized Egypt and Sudan for delaying negotiations. “Are they both speaking the same language? More or less. Both are speaking the same language when it comes to slowing you down.”
(Reporting by Nairobi and Khalid Abdelaziz newsroom in Khartoum; text by Maggie Fick; edited by David Clarke and Jonathan Oatis)