Ethiopia says it has begun the next phase of filling a controversial mega-dam on the Nile, Egyptian authorities said on Monday, raising tensions ahead of an upcoming UN Security Council on the issue.
Egypt said the move was “a violation of international laws and standards governing projects built on the common basins of international rivers”, and had expressed its “firm refusal to take this unilateral action”, its Ministry of Irrigation said in a statement late Monday.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which will be Africa’s largest hydropower project when completed, is the source of an almost decadelong diplomatic shutdown between Addis Ababa and the downstream nations of Egypt and Sudan.
Ethiopia says the project is important for its development, but Cairo and Khartoum fear it could restrict their citizens’ access to water. Both countries have pushed the capital Addis Ababa to ink a binding agreement on the filling and operation of the dam and have called on the UN Security Council to address the issue in recent weeks.
Tunisia requested Thursday’s meeting on behalf of Egypt and Sudan, a diplomatic source told Agence France-Presse (AFP). But France’s ambassador to the UN said last week that the council itself could do little but bring the sides together.
In a note to the UN, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the negotiations were at a dead end and accused Ethiopia of adopting “a policy of infidelity that undermined our collective efforts to reach an agreement.”
Addis Ababa had previously announced that it would move on to the second phase of the filling in July, with or without a deal.
The Nile of about 6,000 kilometers is the longest river in the world. It is an important source of water and electricity for dozens of countries in East Africa. Egypt, which depends on the Nile for about 97% of its irrigation and drinking water, sees the dam as an existential threat.
Sudan hopes the project will regulate annual floods but fears its dams would be damaged without an agreement on the Ethiopian operation. The 145-meter-long dam, which construction began in 2011, has a capacity of 74 billion cubic meters (bcm).
Filling began last year, with Ethiopia announcing in July 2020 that it had reached its 4.9 bcm target – enough to test the dam’s first two turbines, an important milestone on the road to actually producing energy.
The goal is to add another 13.5 bcm this year. Egypt and Sudan wanted a trilateral agreement on the dam’s operations to be reached before any replenishment began. But Ethiopia says it is a natural part of the construction and therefore impossible to postpone. Last year, Sudan said the process caused water shortages, including in the capital Khartoum, a claim that Ethiopia questioned.
In April, Sudan’s water minister, Yasser Abbas, warned that if Ethiopia went ahead with the second stage, Sudan “would sue the Italian company that built the dam and the Ethiopian government.” He said the trials would highlight that “environmental and social consequences, as well as the dangers of the dam,” have not been sufficiently taken into account.
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