CAIRO, May 25 (NNN-MENA) – Egypt urged Ethiopia, to respect the Nile River downstream countries’ water rights, over the handling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).
Egyptian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Ahmed Abu Zeid, said in a statement that, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry has made a “misleading” assertion, by saying, agreements signed in the colonial period were “defunct.”
He urged the Ethiopian side to stop using such a claim, to evade its international obligations to downstream countries, over its operation of GERD.
On Monday, the Ethiopian ministry issued a statement, protesting a new resolution adopted by the Arab League (AL), calling on Ethiopia to abandon its “unilateral filling and operation” of the dam, which would harm Egypt’s and Sudan’s interests.
The ministry slammed Egypt for exerting pressure on Ethiopia, via the AL forum, calling Egypt to stop citing “defunct colonial agreements,” as the basis of its claim, without detailing.
As a response, Abu Zeid said, the “colonial agreements” were signed in 1902 between Britain, as the representative of Egypt and Sudan and Ethiopia, when the latter was “a fully sovereign state.”
“The Ethiopian FM statement is a desperate attempt to drive a wedge between the Arab and African countries, by portraying Arab support for Egypt’s just and responsible position, as an Arab-African dispute,” Abu Zeid added.
Ethiopia started building the dam in 2011, which was expected to produce more than 6,000 megawatts of electricity, while Egypt and Sudan, both downstream Nile Basin countries, are concerned that the dam might affect their share of the water resources.
The GERD negotiations between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia have been suspended since Apr, 2021, following marathon talks that lasted for years without yielding results.– NNN-MENA
