Sudan said Tuesday that it cannot identify diplomatic relations with Israel at this time, which accelerated U.S. hopes for rapid progress on a scale through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok told Pompeo that Sudan’s transitional government, which last year replaced the overthrown strongman Omar al-Bashir and is expected to rule until the 2022 election, “has no mandate” to take that step.
The announcement was a setback for a charm offensive across the United States and Israel to forge more ties between the Jewish state and the Arab world following a historic agreement negotiated across the United States on August 13 between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is on a five-day tour with stops in Israel, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, focusing on Israel’s normalization with the United Arab Emirates and pressuring other Arab states to adhere to their photo needs: POOL/DEBBIE COLINA
Israel has been technically at war with Sudan, an East African country that for years supported radical Islamist Bashir forces, and remains blacklisted by US State Department supporters of terrorism.
Hamdok suggested that the United States link “the issue of Sudan’s uprising list of states sponsoring terrorism and the issue of normalization with Israel,” his spokesman said.
The coalition which led Sudan’s protests, the Forces of Freedom and Change, noted “the right of Palestinians to their land and to a free and dignified life” and argued that the government has no mandate to normalise ties with Israel.
Overthrown Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir arrives at the beginning of his trial after the 1989 coup opposite a democratically elected government that took him to the force Photo: AFPTV / Mohammed ABUAMRAIN
Hamdok’s workplace said he did the same with Pompeo, the first leading U.S. diplomat to stop sudan since 2005.
“The prime minister has made it clear that the transitional era in Sudan is driven through a broad alliance with an express agenda: to complete the transition, peace and stability in the country and hold free elections,” government spokesman Faisal Saleh said in a statement. . Training
Hamdok told Pompeo that his interim government “has no mandate beyond those responsibilities or making a decision on normalization with Israel,” he said.
Pompeo will meet with Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok to discuss the United States for its civilian-led transitional government and “to deepen relations between Sudan and Israel,” said the State Department Photo: AFP/ASHRAF SHAZLY
When Pompeo departed on a flight to Bahrain state in the Gulf, a senior U.S. State Department official later said that “no one expects an overnight peace agreement” and that “we were very pleased with the talks we had with Sudan’s political leaders” with the talks expected to continue.
“There is no doubt that normalizing (relations) with Israel would open up huge economic and employment opportunities for the Sudanese people.”
Sudanese protesters joined on December 19, 2019 to celebrate the first anniversary of the start of the uprising that overthrew Omar al-Bashir Photo: AFP/ASHRAF SHAZLY
When Pompeo arrived a few hours earlier, he tweeted that he had flown to Khartoum on a “first nonstop official flight” from Tel Aviv.
The high-ranking U.S. diplomat also met with the head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, for talks that the State Department says would make explicit to “the United States to deepen relations between Sudan and Israel.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (right), noticed in Sochi in May 2019, will meet in Washington on December 10, 2019 Photo: POOL/Pavel Golovkin
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Burhan in February in Uganda and later agreed to cooperate to normalize relations. However, Sudan’s cabinet later denied that Burhan had made such a promise.
The new Sudan has promised to break the Bashir era and introduced radical social and political reforms.
Bashir is being tried by the Islamist coup that brought him more than three decades ago.
The country with the cash expects Washington to soon remove it from its terrorist blacklist as it seeks to fully reintegrate into the foreign network and attract more aid and investment.
Sudan has been on the list since 1993 due to its jihadist past, adding Osama bin Laden, who lived in the country for years in the 1990s before traveling to Afghanistan.
Sudan is in talks about paying victims of The Bashir-era Al Qaeda attacks, adding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the 1998 simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Hamdok wrote on Twitter that he and Pompeo had had a “direct and transparent verbal exchange related to the removal of Sudan” from the terrorist and U.S. government list.
“I keep looking forward to taking positive and tangible steps towards the excellent Sudanese revolution.”
For Sudan, the normalization factor with Israel is incredibly sensitive.
It was in Khartoum in 1967 that Arab leaders, whose nations were reeling from a surprising defeat opposed to Israel in the Six-Day War, followed their standout resolution of “three no”: “no peace with Israel, not Israel’s popularity, not negotiations with it.” . “
Sudanese expert Marc Lavergne of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) called Tuesday’s progress “a failure for Americans, who think they can force a fragile and deficient country like Sudan to normalize relations with Israel.”
“But the Sudanese have reacted wisely, ” he said.
Sudan “is already divided, there is no desire to go up any more with (the consultation of) normalization with Israel, on which there is no consensus. Sudan has other fish to fry with all the disorders it has.”
Sudan is a deep economic crisis, ended with years of U.S. sanctions and the 2011 secession of the oil-rich south.
According to the United Nations, more than 9.6 million people, or nearly a quarter of the population, are severely food insecure.