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Negotiations will take place on Tuesday, a week after Ethiopian forces killed at least four Sudanese soldiers along the border.
Sudan and Ethiopia will hold negotiations next week to delineate their shared border, a statement from the office of Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok said on Sunday.
The talks will take place on Tuesday, a week after Ethiopian forces ambushed and killed Sudanese troops along the border.
“Hamdok and his Ethiopian counterpart Abiy Ahmed discussed on Sunday the meeting of the committee to delineate the borders to be held on December 22,” the statement said.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of an ongoing summit in Djibouti on Sunday of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional bloc comprising eight countries. Hamdok is the current director of IGAD.
A cross-border attack by Ethiopian and rebel forces last Tuesday killed at least four Sudanese soldiers and wounded a dozen more in the Abu Tyour area in eastern Sudan’s Gadarif province.
Sudan’s state news agency SUNA said on Saturday that its army had deployed “large reinforcements” in the province to take back territories controlled by Ethiopian farmers and rebels in the Sudan al-Fashqa border area.
The troops would stop at the border in accordance with the 1902 agreements between Sudan and Ethiopia, SUNA reported.
Tuesday’s cross-border attack in Abu Tyour came amid weeks-long fighting in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, which has pitted the federal government against regional authorities.
The Tigray fighting has sent more than 52,000 Ethiopian refugees to Sudan, most of them to Gadarif province.
At the beginning of the fighting in Tigray, Sudan deployed more than 6,000 troops on its border with Ethiopia.
Ongoing border clashes
The attack in Gadarif was the last by Ethiopian and rebel forces against Sudanese troops and people in recent months, and has strained ties between the two neighbors.
The parties have held talks in recent months to encourage Ethiopian farmers to withdraw from the Sudan al-Fashqa border area, which they have cultivated for years.
Following the attack, the head of Sudan’s ruling sovereign council, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, traveled to Gadarif and spent three days there overseeing the deployment of heavily armed troops in the border area, according to a senior military official.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to report to the media.
Addis Ababa wanted to downplay the significance of the incident and said it did not threaten the relationship between the two countries.
“Such incidents will not break the link between our two countries, as we always use dialogue to solve problems. Those who stoke discord clearly do not understand the strength of our historical ties, ”Prime Minister Abiy tweeted on Thursday.
The government is closely following the incident with the local militia on the border between Ethio and Sudan. Such incidents will not break the link between our two countries, as we always use dialogue to solve problems. Those who stir up discord clearly do not understand the strength of our historical ties.
– Abiy Ahmed Ali 🇪🇹 (@AbiyAhmedAli) December 17, 2020
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