Ethiopia seeks UN intervention in Nile dam dispute

Addis Ababa hopes to revive African Union-led talks with Egypt and Sudan

Over a decade of talks has reached no conclusion on the dam. AFP

Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had written to the UN Security Council asking that it persuades Egypt and Sudan to return to African Union-led talks and negotiate “in good faith” on their long-running dispute over a hydroelectric Nile dam Addis Ababa is building.

Nearly a year of AU-sponsored talks on Ethiopia’s Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam have failed to make any progress. They broke down in April in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, when a proposal by Egypt and Sudan to involve the UN, the United States and the European Union as mediators was rejected by Ethiopia.

The breakdown was immediately followed by an escalating war of words, with Egypt and Sudan accusing Ethiopia of stalling and intransigence, and Addis Ababa claiming the two downstream nations were making unreasonable demands or seeking to internationalise the issue.

Egypt says the dam will rob it of a significant portion of its share of the Nile waters, on which it depends for more than 90 per cent of its fresh water needs. Sudan says the GERD would disrupt work on its own power-generating Nile dams, as well as its water treatment facilities unless Addis Ababa shared details of the dam’s operations and the filling of the water reservoir behind it.

The letter to the UN Security Council decried attempts by Cairo and Khartoum to seek the intervention of the 15-member body in the GERD dispute. It also denounced what it called attempts by the two to internationalise the dispute and involve the Arab League.

The Cairo-based Arab League called last week on the UN Security Council to persuade Addis Ababa to enter a legally binding deal on the operation of the dam.

This week, Sudan wrote to the UN Security Council demanding that it discusses the GERD’s effects on the “safety and security” of millions of Sudanese and to stop Ethiopia from going ahead next month with a second filling of the dam without first reaching a deal with Khartoum and Cairo.

A satellite image of the much disputed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia. Reuters

Ethiopia accuses Egypt and Sudan of colonialist 'whims'

“The two countries [Sudan and Egypt] have tried to suffocate the AU-led process by injecting unrelated issues in the discussion, by unnecessarily securitising and internationalising the matter, and dragging the Arab League into the situation to further complicate the issue,” the Ethiopian letter said.

The talks, said the letter, were meant to promote co-operation between the three nations rather than “serve the colonial and monopolistic entitlements as well as their whims and wishes on Ethiopia”.

That was a reference to what Addis Ababa sees as colonial-era treaties giving Sudan and Egypt the lion’s share of the Nile waters, while denying other Nile basin countries a fair share.

Ethiopia controls the source of the Blue Nile, which is located in its highlands. The Blue Nile thunders down into Sudan and meets the much less voluminous White Nile just outside Khartoum before the two travel north through northern Sudan and all the way through Egypt to the Mediterranean. The Blue Nile accounts for more than 80 per cent of the river’s waters.

Curiously, the increasingly anti-Ethiopia rhetoric in recent months from Egypt and Sudan follows assertions by experts that, due to construction delays, the second filling would involve much less water than the 13.5 billion cubic metres declared by Ethiopia.

The National cartoonist Shadi Ghanim offers his take on the impact of the Nile Dam talks.

Ethiopia has remained silent on the size of the filling, but Cairo and Khartoum recently said that, regardless of the volume, the second filling would be an intolerable act of defiance.