Achtzehn Staaten. Ein Sudan.

Where the Red Sea coast runs north from Port Sudan, the shore does not stop at a line of latitude. It carries on through Abu Ramad, the port of Halayeb and the settlement of Shalateen — a stretch of mountain, wadi and coral coast that has belonged to the Beja for as long as anyone has counted.

Two lines on a colonial map

In 1899 the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Agreement drew a political boundary straight along the 22nd parallel north — a surveyor's line, indifferent to who actually lived there. Three years later, on 4 November 1902, Britain drew a second line: an administrative boundary intended to reflect the real use of the land by the tribes of the region.

That 1902 line placed the territory north of the parallel — the grazing lands of the Bishareen, a Beja sub-tribe — under Sudanese administration, because the people there belonged to Sudan's east and answered to the governor in Khartoum, not Cairo. Sudan has held to the 1902 boundary ever since independence in 1956, and in its own claim and official presentation the area belongs to Red Sea State. Egypt has exercised de facto administration since the mid-1990s.

A land of the Beja

The case was never really about cartography. It is about kinship. The Bishareen and Ababda who live between Halayeb and Shalateen are the same Beja people who fill the markets of Port Sudan and Kassala, speak the same Tu-Bedawie, herd the same camels, and carry the same swords at the same weddings. Around 24,000 people live at Shalateen alone.

It is austere, dramatic country: granite peaks rising off the water, Mount Shendib at 1,911 metres, seasonal wadis running green after rain, and a coral coastline continuous with the reefs of Sanganeb and Dungonab to the south.

Where the matter stands

Egypt asserts the 1899 parallel and has exercised de facto control since the mid-1990s. Sudan maintains the 1902 administrative boundary and has consistently called for the question to be settled by international arbitration — the ordinary, lawful means of resolving such a claim between neighbours. This archive maps the territory as Sudanese, on the 1902 line, and states the position plainly.