Early next week, Badr Abdelatty, Egypt’s newly assigned foreign minister, will oversee the conference on Sudan that Cairo is hosting. His goal will be to maximise Egypt’s influence in the management of the political and security crises currently afflicting its southern neighbour.
While relations with Sudan and attempts to contain the ongoing conflict there have been the remit of several state bodies, the Foreign Ministry, under outgoing foreign minister Sameh Shoukri, has played a central role in promoting a negotiation process and in providing a counterbalance to regional and international players whose intentions are not always benign.
Sudan is one of many crucial foreign policy files for Egypt. Abdelatty will also have to deal with the dispute over the management and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. He takes the helm at the Foreign Ministry just as Ethiopia is about to embark on a fifth filling of the dam’s reservoir in the absence of any agreement between Addis Ababa and Nile downstream states.
East Africa will absorb a great deal of the new minister’s attention. Cairo has long been concerned with threats to Red Sea security, the rise of radical militant groups and maintaining Egypt’s security and economic interests in the volatile region.
Having served as Egypt’s ambassador to Germany and later to the European Union (EU), Abdelatty is expected to use his diplomatic connections to promote cooperation projects between Egypt and the countries of East Africa, especially Nile Basin states, with possible financial and technical support from European partners.
The new minister is no stranger to the delicate balancing act involved in ensuring Egypt’s relations with European states further Cairo’s political, security, and economic interests. In the course of his career Abdelatty has had extensive experience of the intricacies of regional and international economic cooperation and was a key player in organising the Egypt-EU conference that Cairo hosted last week. He is also credited with easing tensions between Cairo and Berlin following the removal of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood regime in the politically turbulent summer of 2013.
Abdelatty is also coming to office at a particularly sensitive moment for Egypt’s relations with Israel. The war in Gaza continues, with no obvious end in sight, and Egypt’s economic interests, not least in its capacity as an importer of Israeli gas, are impossibly tangled. Having served as Egypt’s ambassador to Israel early in his career and headed the department of Palestinian affairs at the Foreign Ministry, Abdelatty is well placed to negotiate the complex political topography across Egypt’s Eastern border.
Nor is the incoming minister a stranger to the complexities of Egyptian-US relations. His experience serving at the Egyptian Embassy in Washington in the early 2000s will prove invaluable in maintaining an even keel during a fraught US election year.
Abdelatty also faces a host of challenges ensuing from the merger of the Ministry of Emigration and Egyptians’ Affairs Abroad with the Foreign Ministry. The work of the annulled ministry was huge given the size of the Egyptian expatriate community, not least in Arab Gulf countries with which Cairo’s relations have sometimes been fraught.
Cairo is not only keen to make sure its expat communities face no trouble in their host countries, it also wants to ensure they invest in the domestic economy and continue to remit foreign currency. Egypt is also keen that these communities do not act in a way that contradicts the political narrative of the state, especially when it comes to liberties and human rights.
Abdelatty was born in 1966. After graduating from the Faculty of Political Science at Cairo University he began his career as a researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies before joining the foreign service.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 4 July, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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