Following comments by Sudan's President Omar Al-Bashir the disputed border area of Halayeb is once again in the spotlight, reports Dina Ezzat Two weeks after Sudan's new Foreign Minister Ali Kerti criticised Egypt's management of its relations with Sudan, Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir has antagonised Cairo by referring to Sudanese sovereignty over the disputed border area of Halayeb. In an address in Port Sudan last Wednesday Al-Bashir reportedly told the crowds that "Halayeb is Sudanese and will stay Sudanese." During the nadir of Egyptian-Sudanese relations Halayeb was the subject of increasingly harsh rhetoric between Cairo and Khartoum, though for much of the last decade the dispute has been placed on the back burner, with officials from both countries insisting that they are working towards turning the area into a cooperation zone. Little, if anything, has been done in this direction, and Egypt has not sought to pick up the dispute. On the contrary, ahead of the presidential elections in Sudan this year, Cairo turned a blind eye -- "deliberately" as one Egyptian official said -- to Khartoum's attempts to include Halayeb as an electoral district. Khartoum's aim, said the official, was to consolidate the constituency of the Sudanese president as he faced tough competition at the polls as well as war crime charges from the International Criminal Court. Egyptian officials say Al-Bashir's statement came out of nowhere and there had been no signs that he would bring up the issue now. "Nothing was done to antagonise him," said one concerned official in Cairo. "Bilateral relations seem to be fine, overall. There have been no major issues during the past few weeks. Things are normal, really," said an Egyptian diplomat in Khartoum. According to a senior state official "cooperation with Sudan" has been "almost exemplary" over recent months, as both countries face demands from upstream Nile Basin states to reallocate the distribution of Nile water. "There was a moment when we suspected Sudan might conclude an agreement with upstream states without consulting Egypt but this did not happen. And we have been coordinating very well," commented the official. Egypt, according to a cabinet source, "declined to make an issue" out of Kerti's recent statements on Egyptian-Sudanese relations and his allegations that Egyptian mediation between disputing Sudanese factions was ineffective. "We know that Kerti has strong Islamist affiliations. We saw where he was coming from and shrugged the statements off. We got a sort of apology and thought that was that," said the cabinet source. In response to Al-Bashir's statement, Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit made a concise and careful comment. Halayeb, he said, is under Egyptian sovereignty. Cairo does not expect any Sudanese follow-up on Al-Bashir's statement. One Egyptian official said that he expects the matter will be closed on both sides, at least for now, given the challenges the Sudanese regime faces with the referendum on the unity of north and south of Sudan scheduled in January. Though Sudanese officials insist there was nothing wrong and nothing new with what Al-Bashir said, one Sudanese diplomat told Al-Ahram Weekly that "this issue is not meant to be taken further". He added that he did not think "President Al-Bashir has changed his position on turning Halayeb into a zone of cooperation with Egypt". According to statements made in Cairo on Monday by Sudanese State Minister for Foreign Affairs Kamal Hassan, Al-Bashir is "really keen to find a reconciliatory answer to the issue of Halayeb". Hassan added that the "volume of EgyptianSudanese relations cannot be undermined over a statement here or there." So was Al-Bashir's statement a slip of the tongue? Was it meant to appease a political constituency unhappy with Sudanese-Egyptian relations? Or was it a reflection of Khartoum's unease at the contacts Cairo has established with some of Al-Bashir's political opponents in Darfur and the south? "It could be any or all of these," answered a senior Egyptian official on condition of anonymity. "But in the end, what counts most for Egypt now is to maintain cooperation with Sudan on the Nile water file and to consolidate relations with the Sudanese people, from both the north and south of the country, ahead of a vote that could well result in the partition of Sudan, even if it will not be immediately effective."
