Will the Saudi-Houthi crisis spill over into the Nile? Riyadh could withdraw its vital financial support to the country in retaliation for Egypt’s refusal to aid the war in Yemen.
The Saudi troops, with a backbone of battle-hardened Sudanese fighters, were defeated in a few hours by the Houthi bands. They are now threatening Saudi security, and their victory is spilling into the entire neighborhood, tilting the fragile peace of Egypt, the largest Arab country.
Why did the Saudi forces dissolve? Why didn’t the Saudis ensure the support of the allies, who didn’t come to Riyadh to support them when the offensive failed? These are all unanswered questions. But the reality is that the effects of the war in Yemen between Saudi and Houthi could help destabilize Egypt.
+++
There is little reassurance about the future of a land that Herodotus rightly called “a gift of the Nile.”
It isn’t so much the fact that a specific, well-defined threat looms over Cairo in a particular sector. What is worrisome is having to acknowledge how many threats there are, how strong they are, and how each could strike at nodes essential to the country’s very survival.
These threats are now gathering over the Nile, home to 120 million people, in an enormous black cloud that could soon erupt into a malignant storm.
There’s the looming concern about the migratory effects a serious crisis could unleash — a crisis destined to involve a country within easy reach of European shores by small boat.
Thinking it through, this could make today’s much-discussed flow of illegal migrants from North Africa look like a trickle, compared with tomorrow’s flow of Egyptian refugees, which could be ten or a hundred times greater.
To prevent this, let’s look at Egypt’s biggest problems right now, and how European countries, Italy certainly among them, might help Cairo and President El-Sisi overcome them.
The first is a security problem. While in no way aligned with Israeli policy, Cairo can never forget that the Muslim Brotherhood — of which Hamas is an offshoot — keeps a Bedouin insurgency constantly smoldering in the Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian forces have been unable to contain it effectively.
This explains why, except in a limited number of cases, Egypt’s northern borders remain closed to the flight of Palestinian refugees from the horrors of Gaza — a flow that, if not strictly controlled, could truly take on biblical proportions.
Still on the security front, Cairo recently rejected a request from Saudi strongman Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who reportedly asked President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to commit Egyptian forces to counter the Houthi advance that Riyadh clearly cannot contain on its own.
This should come as no surprise. Back in the 1960s, Cairo had already committed itself for about six years to a war willed by Nasser, one meant to eventually bring Yemen into the planned Arab Union as well.
The outcome of that conflict was so terrible that the officers who had fought it — I knew several of them a few decades ago — would confess to waking at night, remembering the horrors of the confrontation. Its cruelty and brutality felt far closer to prehistory than to modern times.
The real trouble is that Saudi Arabia — which certainly did not take Egypt’s refusal to participate kindly — has long been the principal support propping up Egypt’s shaky finances. These finances currently appear to be in a particularly severe crisis. They are squeezed between a now sharply reduced volume of Suez Canal transit and a significant drop in tourism, driven by rising airfares and higher transportation costs overall.
Political expediency becomes entangled with security concerns, which in turn merge with economic worries, creating a Gordian knot that is exceedingly difficult to untangle.
To make the overall picture even darker, Egypt should soon also begin to feel the effects of the construction of the Ethiopian dam system, which stands to deprive it of a portion of the water that its great river has provided every year.
So: “Egypt, gift of the Nile” — still true, but unfortunately that gift risks growing smaller and smaller with each passing year, with everything that reduction will entail!
It becomes imperative to find a common cause in Europe to try to help Egypt before the bubble burts.
