Foreign Minister Amr Mussa said Egypt had been following the situation closely all day Monday and that President Hosni Mubarak had called Beshir "to gain reassurance of Sudan's stability."

Mubarak told Beshir Sudan could expect Egypt's full support, Mussa said in a statement carried by the Egyptian news agency MENA.

"Egypt supports Sudan, the Sudanese government and President Beshir in their steps aimed at (guaranteeing) stability in Sudan," he said.

Beshir declared a three-month state of emergency late Sunday and announced the dissolution of parliament following a power struggle for months with parliamentary speaker Hassan al-Turabi.

Parliament had been due to vote Tuesday to curb Beshir's powers.

Mussa said Mubarak had also spoken with Libyan leader Moamar Kadhafi to discuss the two countries' joint peace drive for Sudan in the wake of Beshir's recent measures.

``It's very quiet outside,'' one Khartoum resident said as the city awoke after Sunday night's surprise television announcement by the president, who took power in a 1989 military coup.

State television began its broadcast Monday with Koranic verses and quotations from the Prophet Mohammad about the holy month of Ramadan. It then showed a short comedy entertainment program, followed by prayer times for Ramadan.

``This relates to a conflict between the president and the National Assembly,'' Deputy Parliament Speaker Abdulaziz Shiddo told Reuters in Cairo by telephone.

``If the president and parliament had acted in a cool way, in a quiet atmosphere, this could have been resolved. There was no need to escalate it to a state of emergency being announced.''

He said a dispute between Bashir, who is chairman of the ruling National Congress Party, and Hassan Turabi, its powerful secretary-general, had been brewing for weeks over constitutional amendments to trim presidential powers.

Turabi, the Speaker of Parliament, is a wily ideologue who backed Bashir's coup and has been the main driving force behind efforts to turn Sudan into a stricter Islamic state.

Bashir, in decrees read on television, ordered a state of emergency for three months and said the general election authority would set a date for new National Assembly elections.

An emergency order suspended some articles of the 1998 constitution, introduced last year ostensibly to reinstate a multi-party system, but told provincial councils and governors to carry on working.

Shiddo said parliament had been expected to pass legislation Tuesday that would have removed the president's role in choosing and dismissing provincial governors.

Bashir, whose government has been accused by the West of supporting terrorism, banned all political parties and declared Islamic rule when he seized power more than 10 years ago.

Bashir and the man whose government he toppled, Sadeq al-Mahdi of the northern-based Umma Party, met in Djibouti on November 26 and agreed to hold talks on how to promote democracy and end 16 years of civil war in Africa's biggest country.

The umbrella National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which groups 12 southern and northern Sudan opposition groups, pledged to work for peace under the Inter-Governmental Authority (IGAD) peace initiative after a two-day meeting in the Ugandan capital.

IGAD groups seven east and Horn of Africa nations. It was originally established to monitor food security in the area but has grown to become the region's leading diplomatic and political grouping.

``We have resolved (that the) NDA will be included in the IGAD peace process subject to the approval of the IGAD countries,'' John Andruga Duku, a spokesman for the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), the dominant member of the group told Reuters.

Duku said the meeting had rejected a parallel move by Libya and Egypt to help end conflict in Sudan. It also denounced a separate peace deal forged by the Umma party -- one of its members -- and the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

``It's a bilateral agreement between Umma and the Khartoum government and does not reflect the NDA position,'' he said.

But he declined to say if any action would taken against the Umma party of former Prime Minister Sadeq al-Mahdi, whose deal with al-Bashir last month has been seen by analysts as weakening the alliance.

The SPLA has been fighting for autonomy or independence for the Christian and animist south since 1983 and an estimated 1.5 million people have died as a result of war and related famines.

The NDA was created in the late 1980s but had been largely dormant since. Duku said the alliance would hold a congress in Eritrea, where it was relaunched in 1995, next March.

The leaders of Uganda and Sudan on Wednesday signed an agreement pledging to end rebel activity along their common border.

Under the agreement Presidents Yoweri Museveni and al-Bashir, whose countries have for years accused each other of allowing rebel groups to operate from their respective territories hope to restore full diplomatic relations by the end of February 2000.

Sudan accuses Uganda of giving sanctuary to the SPLA while Uganda says Sudan harbours rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army.

Tens of thousands of Eritreans have either voluntarily left Ethiopia or have been expelled since the two Horn of Africa neighbours came to blows over border territory early last year.

Many of them were successful traders or merchants who had to leave their businesses in the hands of agents or legal representatives when they left the country.

The state-owned Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) had previously sold Eritrean properties it held as collateral, but Friday's auction was the first witnessed by reporters.

The properties -- which included homes, garages and warehouses -- were sold for around eight million birr (around $1 million).

Mulugeta Gebre-Medhin, Vice President of the CBE, told reporters that the bank had been owed more than 372 million birr in outstanding loans to 386 exiled Eritreans.

He said the bank had recovered over 124 million through negotiations with agents and over 101 million birr through foreclosures.

Many exiled Eritreans and the Eritrean government say Ethiopia summarily confiscated their goods -- a charge Addis Ababa denies. Ethiopia in turn says its nationals lost millions when they left or were expelled from Eritrea.

In Eritrea, over 1,000 deportees from Ethiopia packed into an old cinema in Asmara on Friday to appeal to the international community to protect their rights.

``We have been the victims of gross human rights violations,'' said Gebreselassie Tsegaye, one of the organisers and a member of a committee that campaigns to highlight the deportees' woes.

``We call on the international community to bring forth justice, stop the expulsions, stop the confiscation of property,'' he said.

The Eritrean Relief and Refugee Commission says over 65,000 Eritreans had been deported since the conflict began.

Ethiopia and Eritrea have been locked in an 18-month-old border war that has taken tens of thousands of lives and seen hundreds of thousands more displaced on both sides.

Although there have been no reports of significant fighting since June, efforts to resolve the dispute through negotiation have so far failed.

The Rahanwein Resistance Army has become the fourth group in Somalia to set up its own administrative area.

The RRA has established a local government for the central region of Bay, based in the town of Baidoa.

The former RRA spokesman, Mohamed Ali Aden Qalinleh, was installed as governor today, and other fighters appointed to senior positions.

The new governor said his first priority was too restore water and electricity services. Backed by Ethiopia, the RRA captured Baidoa in June from Mohammed Hussein Aideed, one of Somalia's most powerful warlords. The other areas which have declared themselves independent or autonomous are Puntland, the town of Beletwein and Somaliland, a self-declared republic.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service