CAIRO – 9 July 2020: The spokesperson of the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohammed El Sebaei said, Thursday that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) negotiations between the three countries still have ‘essential points of contention’.
He added that negotiations will be resumed on Monday, noting that the contention points basically on the legal and technical sides.
In it’s sixth statement regarding the GERD talks, Ministry of Water explained that Egypt’s delegation reviewed the ‘points of contention’ from it’s point of view, especially in the technical and legal sides, and the failure to address measures to confront droughts and scarce years of water resource during both filling and operation phases.
The points also included; rules for refilling after periods of extended drought, as well as the annual operating rules for the Dam, future projects on the Blue Nile and it’s legal regulating articles, the existing agreements between all three parties, and the conflict resolution mechanism-which Ethiopia refused to include in the agreement with its adherence to changing operating rules in a unilateral manner.
Sebaei said that, main while Ethiopia still insisting on its demands and position of the technical and legal parts of the agreement, ‘this reduces the chances of reaching an agreement,’ noting that these technical and legal parts considered as ‘the agreement’s backbone’ to Egypt.
In statements to Sada al-Balad private channel, Sebaei said that main points of disagreement are divided into two parts; which are the technical and legal sides; specifically reaching a mechanism to handle the drought periods.
On Wednesday, Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister Gedu Andargachew told Saudi Al-Arabiya that Ethiopia will not be a cause for “thirst” for any Egypt and Sudan by filling and operating the Grand Renaissance Dam.
This comes days after Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry in a speech at a United Nations Security Council meeting warned that filling and operating the dam without an agreement will endanger the lives of 150 million Egyptian and Sudanese citizens.
Andargachew said Egypt and Sudan should not be afraid of the “water flows” due to the dam, and slammed some “exaggerations and incorrect demands” by the Egyptian side.
Andargachew cited “negotiations with good intention” as the only way to resolve the issue of the massive dam. This comes while Egypt’s irrigation minister said earlier that Ethiopia does not have the real desire to reach an agreement on GERD.
The Ethiopian minister also referred to the role of the US, saying that his country welcomes the US participation in GERD issue as an observer “not a mediator”.
Andargachew in June said controversial remarks to Associated Press on GERD that angered many political figures in Egypt.
“For us it is not mandatory to reach an agreement before starting filling the dam, hence we will commence the filling process in the coming rainy season,” he said.
Moreover, Andargachew accused Egyptians of “exaggerating their propaganda on the dam issue and playing a political gamble,” and said that some of them even “seem as if they are longing for a war to break out.”
The conflict between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia dates back to May 2011 when Ethiopia started building the dam; Egypt voiced concern over its water share [55.5 billion cubic meters]. Three years later, a series of tripartite talks between the two countries along with Sudan began to reach an agreement while Ethiopia continued the dam construction.
In 2015, the three countries signed the Declaration of Principles, per which the downstream countries should not be negatively affected by the construction of the dam. In October 2019, Egypt blamed Addis Ababa for hindering a final agreement concerning a technical problem, calling for activating Article No. 10 of the Declaration of Principles, which stipulates that if the three countries could not find a solution to these disputes, they have to ask for mediation.
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