Egypt and Sudan’s double identity as both belonging to the Arab entity and to Africa has always influenced the decisions of their leaders on major issues in the context of the Nile dispute and forced them to jump from one extreme position to the other without achieving a principled, consistent and mature stance. It has also impacted their relationships with non-Arab countries in Africa because they often look at African or regional issues through the prisms of their specific identities as belonging to the Arab world.
From its inception nine years ago to the present, Ethiopia’s GERD project has further exposed the two countries’ spineless posturing as a result of which they could not produce a tangible and well-articulated African position on the basis of a broader regional interests that include all the Nile riparian states. The fact that the majority of the Nile riparian states are not involved in the ongoing GERD dispute, neither supporting or opposing the stance of the three disputants may show that Ethiopia’s cause might be enjoying some kind of sympathy from the lower riparian states who have nothing to lose but everything to gain from the GERD while.
Now that 73% of construction the GERD is completed, the time table and engineering work on filling it is fully under Ethiopia’s control. However, Sudan and Egypt have not desisted from adopting one position after another, sometimes favorable and at other times hostile, in their impossible bid to stop construction, delay it or force Ethiopia accept their formula for filling the dam. The two countries must now realize that trying to stop the filling of the dam by any means would be a lost cause and that the more palatable alternative from their point of view might be to delay the time table through prolonged talks and other delaying tactics.
The attitudes of the two countries towards the GERD project in general has evolved in the last few years as regime changes in Cairo and Khartoum have led them to abandon their previous positions in the dispute. Sudan’s attitude in particular has undergone dramatic evolution.
Starting as supporter of the project, Khartoum has gone through a middle-of-the road position between Cairo and Addis Ababa and has now adopted a relatively more pro-Cairo stance. Egyptian diplomacy too has gone through two phases, namely a period of ‘soft diplomacy; when its leaders were talking about cooperation and even joint financing of the dam and the present ‘hard diplomacy’ when they are trying to delay the construction and the time table for filling it by creating all kinds of pretexts and alibi that are based on flimsy grounds.
And more recently, one can observe the emergence of a kind of convergence of interests between the two countries as they refused to accept Ethiopia’s time table for filling the dam without however producing an iota of scientific evidence to the contrary. This convergence of position may be explained by the nature of the two regimes and the values and interests they might be sharing as the two countries most directly concerned about how the waters of the Nile are managed and what the prospects for the future look like. Their change of stand now and then might only be the result of the frustration they may be feeling as they prove unable to trust Ethiopia’s good intentions.
Both the Sudanese and Egyptian regimes are presumed secular and are pursuing pragmatic politics. However, they often act as if they are bound by some kind of common ideology. Both regimes are products of failed popular uprisings and they are both led by military strongmen without democratic legitimacy. These factors may be responsible for the increasingly converging positions of the two countries on regional issues. As foreign policy is generally a reflection of domestic politics, it does not come as a surprise if Egypt and Sudan try to coordinate their hostile attitude towards the GERD project.
There is no doubt that Egypt has a political ambition in north Africa sometimes portraying itself as the champion of Arab solidarity, particularly during the Nasser era, when it went as far as calling itself the Arab Republic of Egypt including Syria and Libya within the larger pan-Arab identity. The author and executioner of this particular project was Egypt which was at that time a presumed progressive and anti-imperialist force in the region allied to the former Soviet Union whose financial and technical support was key in the construction of the Aswan Dam, the biggest hydropower and irrigation project in the region. The GERD is going to be bigger than Aswan and this might be taken as something that will cast a dark shadow on Egypt’s most prestigious dam construction so far.
Egypt’s pan-Arab vision or ambition however died with Nasser and the politicians or leaders who succeeded him made a U-turn and turned their attention to African and Arab politics without however achieving Nasser’s Pan-Arabic dream. From being an advocate of anti-imperialist interests in the region, Egypt turned into the most dependable ally of Western interests in the Middle East.
When the Egyptians solicited American diplomatic intervention in their dispute with Ethiopia over the GERD, they counted not on the legitimacy of their cause but on their alliance with the West which they tried to use to arm-twist Ethiopia into accepting Washington’s one-sided mediation in favor of Cairo. This plan was aborted not only because of changing political fortunes but because it was fundamentally unsustainable as it is basically wrong.
In the last forty or fifty years, the attitudes of Egyptian authorities took as its center of gravity Egypt’s unquestioned quasi-monopoly over much of the Nile river as expressed in the anachronistic British colonial-era treaty. This treaty and the inability of Nile riparian states, Ethiopia in particular, to challenge Egypt’s claims, led Cairo to live in the illusion that no country in the region would stand against its claims and that its domination over the Nile issue was unshakable.
The myth of Egypt’s exclusive and presumably indisputable right on the waters of the Nile however came to a sudden end when Ethiopia decided to launch its GERD project as part and parcel of its larger development aspirations in the new millennium which is articulated as an Ethiopian Renaissance. In the 30 years between the end of Nasser’s pan-Arabic and anti-Western policies and the launching of the GERD project, Egyptian politicians lived in a kind of dream world shrouded in the self-proclaimed myth of ‘undisputed lords of the Nile’. Their hard awakening came when they realized Ethiopia was not joking when it decided to do the unimaginable with its own resources.
Sudan, which is slowly evolving as a junior partner in Egypt’s ambitious and hegemonic plan over the Nile river, is relatively distancing itself from Ethiopia’s plan for filling the GERD dam maybe because under its presently strained economic condition, it might have found beneficial to toe the Egyptian line in exchange for some urgent economic benefits or long term strategic cooperation as both are bound together by the Arab and Islamic roots of their identities.
Egypt’s recent diplomatic flip-flopping is evident in its appeal to the UN Security Council for a possible resolution against Ethiopia’s dam filling plan. Sudan has also made a similar appeal to the UNSC in an apparent attempt to sandwich Ethiopia between them and force it to wobble under pressure.
The convergence of interests between Sudan and Egypt is nowhere more evident than their joint appeal to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) against what they wrongly perceive as Ethiopia’s unilateral decision to fill the dam as scheduled as if this were a violation of the UN charter or a breach of international law. Then came Egypt’s recent announcement that it is willing to get back to the negotiation table with Ethiopia now that the UNSC did not embrace its appeal against Ethiopia’s time table for filling the GERD.
Ethiopia’s steadfastness in pursuing its objective and working hard to meet the deadline may be taken as another factor that has discouraged Cairo to launch a more aggressive diplomatic offensive. Ethiopia has long made it objective clear. it wants to finish building the dam and filling it as scheduled. Egypt and Sudan on the contrary, could not come up with a better and constructive alternative without infringing upon Ethiopia’s right to use the Nile to do away with centuries of poverty and backwardness.
Egypt which has always remained almost the sole and dominant force wants more advantages from the Nile waters to launch additional farming projects on top of its already developed agriculture.
Ethiopia has not so far used a drop of water from the Nile to develop its economy and it would be unfair for Egypt to try to torpedo Ethiopia’s attempt to claim its fair share of the Nile water. Neither international law nor common sense and human morality would support Egypt’s selfish attitude and distorted approach. That is why international public opinion is apparently in favor of Ethiopia’s development aspirations, seeing in Egypt’ selfish and exaggerated claims as a victim of history a hidden attempt to mislead the world into believing Ethiopia is culprit.
Fortunately, world opinion is turning in favor of Ethiopia whose objective is clear, simple and legitimate as anyone with a sense of fairness can realize. Egypt and Sudan should therefore join Ethiopia in collaborating with the filling of the dam and its eventual completion instead of engaging in endless flip-flopping diplomacy that may delay things but will not prevent Ethiopia from completing its flagship project.
The Ethiopian Herald Sunday Edition 14 /2020
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
