Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has made a surprise visit to Khartoum, his first in more than a decade, and held talks with Sudan's president on the conflict in the Darfur region. The talks came a day after Jan Egeland, a top UN envoy, protested over what he called a Sudanese government decision to bar him from visiting Darfur and Khartoum this week.Egeland, the UN undersecretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, said the government was trying to prevent him from seeing the deteriorating situation in the war-torn region. The West Darfur state government acknowledged not allowing his flight to land, though the central government denied barring him. Mubarak and Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, held talks on Tuesday on developments in the situation in Darfur, Sudan's state news agency reported.
| You'd normally guess that the two incidents are tied together, and that Hosni is counselling Omar to bring the Darfur situation under control or risk the Western powers getting damned tired of him and giving him a thump — whether directly, or by means of a "spontaneous" revolution. However, since we're talking about the Arab world, it's just as likely that Hosni's lending moral support and telling Omar to hang in there. |