Senegal violence threatens country’s stability as experts call on government to instill calm

Senegal experts called on the government on Monday to instill calm after days of the deadliest violence in years and concerns it could have lasting consequences.

Days of clashes between security forces and supporters of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko have killed at least 16 people and injured hundreds of others. Police have arrested 500 people, some of whom used Molotov cocktails and weapons.

“(There’s) the threat of chaos. The threat of civil war,” Alioune Tine, founder of Afrikajom Center, a West African think tank, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday in the capital, Dakar. “We have never ever lived this situation in Senegal … We cannot go fighting among ourselves and we have to stop now, to make peace now, to be united now.”

The clashes first broke out last Thursday, after Sonko was convicted of corrupting youth but acquitted on charges of raping a woman who worked