Egypt should look to a new future

BADRU MULUMBA

Managing Editor

Humanitarian organizations in Southern Kordofan last week said they had written to the United Nations Mission in the Sudan alleging that Egyptian troops had joined the Sudan Armed Forces in military operations there.
If true that Egyptian forces have done so, it would not be surprising. At the time of the Sudan Independence, in 1956, Egypt stirred trouble and riots in the Sudan as a strategy to frustrate independence from Britain. A colonial-era US Ambassador Jeffrey Calfrey once said that southern Sudan was not worthy quarreling over with Egypt for the sake of an agreement over the Suez Canal. America’s interests, writes Mansour Khalid in his much-acclaimed 1992 book, The Government they Deserve: the Role of the Elite in Sudan’s Democratic Transformation, were more about securing a sea passage to the East via the Suez Canal. In the intervening six decades, global interests have re-aligned. The Suez Canal does not hold the worth it once did. Yet, Egypt, apparently, is looking back rather than forward.
Now, decades later, Egypt’s power looks ordinary and, with south Sudan Independence, her playground shrinks. South Sudan takes a leap into the future this Saturday despite Egypt’s ex-President Hosni Mubarak’s Administration to enroll the Obama Administration in its attempts to stop this leap forward. That effort failed.
But Egypt, apparently, refuses to let go. The National Congress Party says it brought the Egyptian forces to protect civilians. It is probable that the Egyptian troops have a more sinister objective: to frustrate the Ethiopian mandate in Abyei or the popular consultations in the Nuba. After all, Ethiopian President Meles Zennawi, at the height of the war of words over the Nile waters, warned the Egyptians that if they invaded the country, they would not live to leave (See last issue). Military and economic advances made by other African countries have paled Egypt’s influence. This calls for a more cooperative, rather than a confrontational, strategy.
The world has moved on. Egypt, too, needs to move on.