Abdullah Ali Masar Khartoum – Abedalgoum Ashmeag The Sudanese government is currently facing a number of challenges that threaten the health of the government itself, chairman of the National Umma Party Sudan Abdullah Ali Masar told Arabsotday. The former adviser to the Sudanese president, who also spoke about issues with South Sudan, said the challenges were to do with security, the economy, internal party unity, Sudan foreign policy and ideology. Security-wise, Masar cited the armed conflict taking place in South Kordofan. On the economic challenge, he said that the cutting off of petroleum revenues brought on by the secession of the south has caused a serious economic crisis. The situation was made worse, the politician said, by the additional expenditure on security and the political administration of Sudan, coupled with a noticeable reduction in state income. The third challenge, according to Masar, is internal unity within the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) itself and the Islamist movement as a whole. If the government fails to unite its ranks and move past internal disputes, Masar warned, the situation will lead to complications in the running of the country’s affairs. This potential conflict, he added, would reflect in Sudanese political life. The fourth challenge relates to Sudan’s foreign relations, especially with Gulf States, Europe and the Unites States of America. These relations, Masar said, must be drawn with a great deal of attention and transparency and without rushing results. After the most recent Islamic Movement Conference in which Arab Spring countries took part while Salafists and other groups absented themselves, Masar predicts possible inter-Islamic conflicts with more extreme groups. The former presidential adviser stressed the need to create balance in Sudan’s foreign relations to prevent the country from displaying a marked bias towards one force over another. Instead, he advised a basic rule in which the country strives to gain as much as possible out of its foreign links, apart from elaborate political ploys and labels. Sudan, in its current condition, would suffer greatly if it was “labelled as belonging to one specific group,” he said. Yet another challenge comes as the ruling party hold onto its ideology. According to Masar, neglecting the intellectual links with public will give tribalism free reign, limiting the powers of the party as well as the state. One possible way to relieve the pressure on the government is to become more open, he said, referring to the relationship between the centralised authority and the states which he says occasionally become strained due to insufficient funding and local problems in these states. On relations with the newly seceded South Sudan, he said they will not last. The Sudanese government, he said, is focusing on the security issue and severing the ties between South Sudan and rebel elements in the Blue Nile, Southern Kordofan and Darfur. South Sudan, meanwhile, is unable to do this at this time due to the depth of its alliances with these groups. South Sudan, he also added, wishes to restart petroleum production and export it via Sudanese territories, and also wishes for trade between the two countries to return.  Masar, however, said that Sudan will now allow these measures, because they strengthen the south and provide it with money with which to back Khartoum’s rivals. According to Masar, the issue can be solved if both countries took courageous steps apart from mediators. Touching on American influence on events, Masar said that the US wants South Sudan to be a strong and active state, and is therefore willing to present a few proposals to resolve the disputes between Khartoum and Juba. However, according to the senior politician, the US does not have any cards that it can use to pressure either Sudan or South Sudan. This condition, he said, might change if the US granted both parties aid. The current situation in which the US threatened Sudan and demands that South Sudan hold up its end of the agreements signed with Sudan, without giving either side anything, will never solve the problem. The politician believes that the United States has lost, or is losing, the control it once had on Arab states, especially after losing totalitarian rulers in the region. This weakening grasp, he said, is evidenced by the recent events in Gaza. Masar, whose party holds a moderate Islamic ideology, said that the rise of the Islamist current in some Arab countries will expand in the future to engulf the whole Arab world. With the retreat of what he called the secular current and other ideologies loyal to the totalitarian regimes, Masar predicted that the Arab world will dominated by Islamism within the next 20 years.