by Mohamed Hasni
KHARTOUM, Feb 18, 2007 (AFP) - Sudan's political fissures are being played out between students in the universities, often with deadly results, and only a new culture of tolerance can end this fighting, say experts.
On February 9, clashes between rival student groups in Khartoum's Al-Nilayn University resulted in the stabbing death of a young activist from the pro-government student union and the injury of 10 others -- setting off a cycle of further clashes over the past week.
"The tension between the parties affects their student organisations and sometimes this is expressed violently in the universities, as happened at Al-Nilayn," said student leader Mohammed Abdallah Sheikh Idriss, in the daily Al-Sudani.
Most of Sudan's 26 universities are in Khartoum and they contain hundreds of thousands of students that observers say reflect the divisions in the country, which on and off for the last half century has been wracked by some form of civil conflict.
The main split is between students allied with President Omar al-Beshir's National Congress Party and those with the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) -- replicating the main combatants of the 20-year civil war betwee north and south that ended with a peace agreement in 2005.
The Congress party and the SPLM are supposedly partners now in government, but mistrust remains and occasionally flares into the open, such as when Vice President Silva Kirr criticized Beshir on January 9 for dragging his feet on applying the peace accord on its second anniversary.
The fact that the Congress student groups publicly refer to the Sudanese soldiers that died fighting against the southerners as "martyrs" has rankled the SPLM students and many say that was behind the clashes at Nilayn university.
The SPLM students, however, deny they had anything to do with the stabbing death, but add that it came after several days of attacks and provocations by National Congress students.
In the aftermath of the stabbing, further clashes took place between rival student groups at al-Azhari university, with a number of offices getting ransacked.
Tensions between the rival student groups are especially high in the run up to each universities' student union elections.
To add to the mix, Sudan's other opposition parties, including Sadeq al-Mahdi's Umma Party and Hassan Turabi's Popular Congress, have their own student groups which are generally opposed to the pro-government party.
Minister of National Education Mubarak Mohammed Ali al-Majzoub has accused "all the political parties for being implicated" in the violence and has called for tolerance and dialogue among the students.
Police, meanwhile, have conducted several raids on student campuses, including one on Sudan University that netted light weapons and Molotov cocktails and resulted in the arrest of 10 students.
University officials, however, maintain that force is not the only way of stopping the violence but instead a culture of tolerance and peaceful coexistence must be fostered on the campuses.
Ibrahim Othman Hassan, director of programmes at Khartoum University has gone so far to say that these concepts should be part of the curriculum taught to the students.
Historians note that while violence is nothing new in Sudan's universities due to the political upheavals in the country, the increasingly violent character of student interactions suggests that the country's next generation is lacking in political maturity.
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