This Tuesday, June 15, an extraordinary summit with the Foreign Ministers of the Arab League dedicated to the Great Pond of the Ethiopian Renaissance will be held in Doha, Qatar. Sudan and Egypt want to warn of the “risk” that Ethiopia’s unilateral measures pose to the region, while talks have stopped.
It was Sudan and Egypt that demanded this emergency summit. It will be about, in the words of a former adviser to the head of Egyptian diplomacy, “the danger of leaving this strategic region under the influence of Ethiopian impatience”. At a special meeting, ministers from Khartoum and Cairo will outline their common position for the member states as tensions escalate as summer approaches.
As the deadline to start the second phase of filling the Ethiopian dam is announced in July, at the beginning of the rainy season. But diplomatically, this is the status quo. The mediation of Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi on behalf of the African Union has so far not been decisive.
The battles in Tigray changed the game
But in Doha, there will also be a question of the discreet mediation of Qatar, whose envoys have traveled extensively and who specifically received US President Joe Biden’s special envoy in early June, before his trip to Saudi Arabia.
Just like in 2020, the Gulf countries took with them their support for Sudan and Egypt, it is likely that they will repeat it this Tuesday. But it will still be necessary to follow the positions of Somalia and Djibouti, Ethiopia’s allies, who had already distanced themselves from final communication at a similar summit in 2020. At that time, Qatar also adopted this line. But its quarrels with other Arab countries have since subsided. And the fighting in Tigray and on the Sudanese border has changed that.
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