In 2010 Egypt discussed taking military action in
cooperation with Sudan against Ethiopia to protect their stake in Nile River,
according to internal emails from
the U.S. private-security firm Stratfor.
Egypt and
Sudan get 90 percent of the river’s water under
colonial-era accords while upstream countries including Uganda, Rwanda,
Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia have been clamoring for a new deal during more
than a decade of talks.
The
Nile flows south to north, making it one of only a handful of
rivers in the world to do so and one of only two in Africa.
So,
rather than Cairo sitting at the mouth of the massive water supply, it sits
dead last—subject to all the whims and fancies of each upstream nation. With
several factional governments upstream and the premium on fresh water,
diplomacy only goes so far.
A
dispatch from May 26, 2010, that cited information from a Egyptian
diplomatic source points to the country’s frustration:
Sudanese
president Umar al-Bashir has agreed to allow the Egyptians to build an a
small airbase in Kusti to accommodate Egyptian
commandos who might be sent to Ethiopia to destroy water facilities on the
Blue Nile… It will be their option if everything else
fails
The Blue
Nile, which begins in Ethiopia, contributes about 85 percent of the flow
that passes through Egypt to the Mediterranean.
Ethiopia became an even bigger threat a
month after the Egyptian Revolution toppled President Hosni Mubarak in
February 2011 when they announced new details about
the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.
In April of this year Bradley Hope of the The
National reported that construction had begun and that
the massive project ”could destabilize Egypt in a way that would make
the last year of political upheaval look minuscule.”
“It
would lead to political, economic and social instability,”
Mohamed Nasr El Din Allam, Egypt’s minister of water and irrigation
until early last year, told Hope. ”Millions of people would go
hungry. There would be water shortages everywhere. It’s huge.”
Ethiopia
is also currently struggling to fund the dam, which would need foreign aid to
be completed. Egypt and Sudan have lobbied foreign donors to refrain from
funding the project while they try to find a diplomatic solution to the
increasingly dire water situation.
A
dispatch from June 1, 2010, that cited a “high-level Egyptian security/intel
source, in regular direct contact with Mubarak and [then-intelligence head
Omar] Suleiman” said:
The only
country that is not cooperating is Ethiopia. We are continuing to talk to
them, using the diplomatic approach. Yes, we are
discussing military cooperation with Sudan. … If
it comes to a crisis, we will send a jet to bomb the dam and come back in
one day, simple as that. Or we can send our special forces in to
block/sabotage the dam… Look
back to an operation Egypt did in the mid-late 1970s, i think 1976, when
Ethiopia was trying to build a large dam. We blew up the equipment while
it was traveling by sea to Ethiopia.
A dispatch from July 29, 2010, that cited the Egyptian
ambassador to Lebanon said that Egypt and leaders of the soon-to-be independent southern
region of Sudan “agreed on developing strategic relations between their
two countries,” including Egypt training the South Sudan military, and noted
that “the horizons for Egyptian-southern Sudanese cooperation are
limitless since the south needs everything.”
In 1979
Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s second president, said: “The only matter
that could take Egypt to war again is water.”
The
government of current Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi described the
Stratfor emails as hearsay “designed to disturb Egyptian-Ethiopian
relations.”
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