Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Saturday ordered his army to be ready to carry out any mission inside or outside the country to protect its national security.
Sisi on Saturday toured an air base near Egypt’s 1,200 kilometer-long western border with Libya, where state TV showed him watching fighter jets and helicopters taking off and checking hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles.
“Be prepared to carry out any mission, here inside our borders - or if necessary, outside our borders,” he told several air force pilots and special forces personnel at the base.
He declared that the Egyptian military was strong and among the most powerful in the region, “but it protects and does not threaten. It is an army that secures and does not attack.”
Furthermore, Sisi said that Egypt’s national security is connected to the stability of regional countries.
“We will not allow any threat to our western borders,” he announced, while urging a ceasefire in Libya according to the current frontlines.
“Any direct Egyptian intervention in Libya will be aimed at reaching a ceasefire. Any direct Egyptian intervention is now legitimate,” he declared.
“If some people think that they can cross the Sirte-Jufra frontline, this is a red line for us”, he said before an audience that included some Libyan tribal leaders.
“If the Libyan people moved through you and asked us to intervene, this would be a signal to the world that Egypt and Libya are one country, one interest,” he added.
Diplomacy in Nile dispute
Turning to the crisis with Ethiopia over its construction of a giant hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, Sisi said Egypt is committing to using diplomacy to resolve the issue.
The talks over the crisis were halted once again on Wednesday, this time only about a fortnight before the expected start-up of the $4 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is being built near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan.
Cairo said on Friday it had called on the United Nations Security Council to intervene to restart the talks.
“When we moved to the Security Council... that was (because) we are always keen to take the diplomatic and political path until its end,” Sisi said.
“We need to move strongly towards concluding the negotiations and reach an agreement... and solutions that achieve the interest of all,” he said.
Egypt, which is almost entirely dependent on the Nile for its fresh water supplies, is anxious to secure a legally binding deal that would guarantee minimum flows and a mechanism for resolving disputes before the dam starts operating.
The latest talks, which had started on June 9 over video conference, followed a previous round of negotiations in Washington, which ended without agreement in February.
On Saturday, Sisi recalled that in a speech he gave to the Ethiopian parliament five years ago he said that while Egypt respects Ethiopians’ need for development they also should respect its needs for “life”.
