The Shylock deal: the meeting of Sisi and Burhan, and the return of Ella from Egypt
by Amgad Fareid Eltayeb
While the forces of freedom and change are in their glorious heedlessness, thinking that the Rapid Support Forces and Hemetti will align themselves with the civil democratic change camp, the masters of the coup continue, without hesitation, to return the Islamists in order to consolidate the pillars of their coup and serve the interests of the foreign countries that move its threads.
On October 1, 2022, Mohamed Tahir Ella returned to Sudan, after three years of escaping in Egypt. Ella is the last prime minister during the era of the ousted Bashir, and before that he held the positions of the governor of the Red Sea State, the State of the Algazira, and several ministries before that. His origins go back to eastern Sudan, and he enjoys the traditional influence that made the NCP recruit him in the first place.
Ella returned and the National Congress Party gathered the crowds to receive him at Port Sudan airport, and he, in turn, addressed them with an impassioned political speech that looked like a plan of action to take over the East and restore the rule of Sudan. All this happened despite the filing of criminal reports against him by the Public Prosecutor and the issuance of arrest warrants requiring every and any policeman to arrest him.
Ella’s return and his confrontational political discourse with everything expressed by the December revolution were not far from Burhan’s meeting with Sisi on his way back from New York on September 23. Which discussed, according to what was announced, political and security coordination and the developments of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam file.
Ella’s return was not far from the planning of Salah Gosh, his companion for three years in the hospitality of Cairo, which refused to hand him over to the judicial authorities in Sudan several times during the transition period. It was not far from the calls of the coup supporters and the remnants of the Islamists in the previous days to accommodate the remnants of the old regime in the transition equation.
Egypt looks at Sudan and its current dynamics only from the point of view of its interests in fuelling the Ethiopian conflict. The turmoil prevailing in the east has disrupted and limited Egypt’s capabilities in supporting and arming the Tigrayan Liberation Front in its war with the federal Ethiopian government.
Moreover, the alliance between Al-Nazer Terik and Hemetti, whom Egypt considers its rival in Sudan, and the close relationship between the rest of the leaders of the Beja Council and Eritrea, who supports Abiy Ahmed in the Ethiopian war, further limits Egypt’s ability to support the Tigrayans. Egypt have been demanding the coup government to protect and support TPLF’s presence on the eastern borders. Egypt facilitated Ella’s return to Sudan and provided him with guarantees from the coup government that he would be well received and not be persecuted. It will consolidate his control over the east to provide a platform and a passable road to support and arm the Tigray Front and further fuel the conflict in Ethiopia. Regardless of the consequences for Sudan, with its direct borders with Ethiopia and Eritrea.
All of these risks are increasing, and the cost of repeating the failure to end or overthrow the coup without learning from failed experiences is multiplied by regional risks extending from the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa throughout the Sahel… Wagner’s recent coup in Burkina Faso is not far from being remembered. But it seems that the international community is turning a blind eye to the increasing cost of not learning from failed experiences based on wrong perceptions about the coup, wrong analysis of the actors, or acceptance of ignoring the political consequences of wrong decisions, or the desire to finish by starting from the end without a gradual and orderly structured political process.
The cost of the putschists continuing to consolidate their coup and the Stockholm complex that hit the international community to blind it or make it ignore the military manipulation of the chances of a solution due to the absence of a political process, and the cost of the increasing return of the National Congress cadres to re-establish their regime, will have dire consequences, not only for Sudan but for the entire region.
As for Mohamed Tahir Ella, we will leave it to the resistance committees of Port Sudan, Kassala and Gedaref, and they will take care of him, as they took care of Bashir before.