Egypt allowed to attend July meetings again.

Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation minister, Bernard Membe.

UAR has been allowed to attend the African Union (AU) meeting expected to  be held in July, thanks to Tanzania’s support for the Cairo government to regain its membership.

 

Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation minister Bernard Membe told The Guardian in a telephone interview yesterday that the decision has been made  roughly three years after Egypt was suspended to attend AU meetings.

 

He said in its appeal to the AU meeting, Tanzania government strongly supported UAR’s bid to regain its AU membership.

 

 He explained that during the recent AU meeting, African countries supported the appeal made by Tanzania for Egypt to regain its membership.

 

“I’m happy to announce that the AU has invited the UAR to attend the meeting scheduled for next July after a three-year suspension of its membership. All these were collective efforts made by the government,” the minister said.

 

Membe pointed out that another reason Tanzania’s appeal was the bilateral relations between Egypt and Tanzania that have existed for decades.

 

According to him, Egypt has direct economic, political and technical relationships with Tanzania go back to early years of independence.

 

For instance, he said, the UAR economy depends entirely on the water from river Nile whose origin is Lake Victoria found in Tanzania.

 

On February 23 last year, the Egyptian foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy, made a public appeal for the Tanzania government to support the UAR bid to regain the AU membership.

 

He said because of losing its AU membership the UAR was keen to seek Tanzania’s support for regaining it, but how that could happen remained unclear. 

 

The UAR minister made the appeal in Dar es Salaam during his tour of Tanzania in diplomatic talks with his Tanzanian counterpart.

 

On July 6, 2013, the AU suspended UAR from all activities following overthrow of the government of the then president Mohammed Morsi. The decision of the 54-member bloc was made while demonstrations in support of Morsi were underway in Cairo. "As mandated by the relevant AU instruments, the African Union Peace and Security Council decided to suspend the participation of Egypt in AU activities until the restoration of constitutional order," Admore Kambudzi, Secretary of the Peace and Security Council of AU, said told the media on July 6, 2013, after a meeting that endorsed the suspension.

 

Membership suspension was the AU's usual response to any interruption of constitutional rule by a member state as what happened to Morsi who was removed from office by the army.