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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Inching closer to reconciliation?
By Gamal NkrumahLast week, Al-Ahram's Centre for Strategic Studies hosted a seminar on the current Egyptian-Libyan mediation effort in the Sudanese crisis. Al-Sadig Al-Mahdi, leader of the Umma Party and a former prime minister, was the keynote speaker.
The seminar took place as the Sudanese government announced plans to set up a committee to organise a national dialogue conference to promote reconciliation in war-torn Sudan where over 1.5 million people have lost their lives since 1983 as a direct result of the civil war.
"There have been signs in the past few months that the regime is taking a less confrontational approach towards the Sudanese opposition," Al-Mahdi explained.
Al-Mahdi denied that he was going to cut any separate deals with the Sudanese government. He said that any deal that does not realise peace and stop the civil war would be ineffective and meaningless. Moreover, any deal that does not lead to democracy would be meaningless, too. "I am not prepared to cut any deals which do not have democratisation in Sudan and an end to civil war in the country," Al-Mahdi told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Participants debated the repercussions of the Egyptian-Libyan mediation efforts. A joint Egyptian-Libyan delegation was led by Fouad Youssef, the head of the Sudanese desk at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, and Libyan Ambassador to Sudan Suleiman Al-Shahoumi. No details of the joint initiative were given to the press.
Al-Mahdi said that the meeting of the Sudanese opposition in Libya last month was unprecedented. He stressed that the Tripoli meeting was important as up until that time Libya had refused to recognise the NDA. The Tripoli declaration of the NDA called on the Sudanese government to lift the state of emergency, return seized property and release political detainees.
Al-Mahdi referred to the changing international political climate in the post-Cold War period. He pointed out that under the pretext of humanitarian considerations, Washington could intervene militarily in Sudan the way it did in Kosovo. "Sudan cannot ignore the world's, and particularly Washington's, interest in Sudanese affairs. US Senator Sam Brownback, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's tour of the war-torn areas of Sudan and the report he wrote following his visit marked a serious precedent that we Sudanese, both in the opposition and in the government, must take into account," Al-Mahdi said.
Al-Mahdi also highlighted the geopolitical importance of Sudan. "Sudan represents Africa in microcosm. If Sudan breaks up that will spell disaster for the entire continent and widen the division between North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara," he said.
Speaking about his meeting with Hassan Al-Turabi, speaker of the Sudanese parliament and the leading ideologue of the Sudanese regime, Al-Mahdi said: "The meeting took place by chance and was not initiated by myself or by the Umma Party. Kamel Al-Tayib Idriss, a Sudanese national with the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organisation, organised the meeting between myself and Al-Turabi in Geneva. It was an amicable meeting and we both decided to let bygones be bygones. We focused on the present and the future. We agreed not to speak about the bitter past."
Al-Mahdi said that another development that could have wide-ranging repercussions is Sudan's oil exports. Revenue from oil exports would certainly be used to finance the war against armed opposition groups in Sudan. But he said that oil installations would be targeted by opposition groups.
On the day that the seminar took place, the Sudanese daily Akhbar Al-Yom reported that an oil tanker was scheduled to arrive at the newly completed Red Sea port of Beshair to be loaded with 600,000 barrels of Sudanese oil for shipment to East Asia. The $1 billion, 1,600-kilometre oil export pipeline, inaugurated in May, has a total pumping capacity of 450,000 barrels a day. The pipeline was built by a consortium of Chinese, German, Argentinean, British and Malaysian companies to transport oil from Higleig in central Sudan to Beshair.
The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) -- the leading armed group fighting for autonomy for southern Sudan and the secularisation of Sudan -- is determined to disrupt the flow of oil. The SPLA rejected Khartoum's 70-day comprehensive cease-fire commencing 5 August. In a widely publicised broadcast, SPLA leader John Garang warned that disrupting the flow of oil and sabotaging oil facilities was a "legitimate target."
It is for all these reasons that Al-Mahdi said that the current Egyptian-Libyan initiative was a "golden opportunity" for Sudanese reconciliation that must not be missed. If the Sudanese government and opposition forces fail to come to an agreement and work on a negotiated settlement of the country's political crisis, then the Sudanese people will pay the price of the missed opportunity. Al-Mahdi, however, warned that the process could be a long and tedious process.
The seminar was attended by a large number of distinguished Sudanese opposition figures including Ibrahim Dreig, the head of the DarFur-dominated Sudanese Federalism Party and a leading member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the Eritrean-based umbrella organisation that groups together Sudanese opposition parties; Abdel-Rasul Al-Nur, former governor of Kordofan; Agau Deng, former deputy prime minister and minister of transport; Ibrahim Al-Amin, former minister for immigrants' affairs; Ismail Abaker, former minister of housing; and Haidar Ibrahim, director of the Cairo-based Sudanese Studies Centre. Also present were the Libyan Ambassador in Egypt Goma'a Al-Fezzani and the Eritrean Ambassador Mohamed Omar.
