Dam Egypt has accused Ethiopia of violating the law after it received a notice saying that Ethiopia’s dam upstream on the Nile is now filling up with water for a second year. The hydroelectric dam has long been a source of tension within the region. Egypt, which relies almost entirely on the Nile for its water, sees it as a possibly existential threat. Ethiopia says it’s vital for its development. Decade-long negotiations over the dam have did not reach a final agreement. Recent African Union efforts have stalled and now Egypt and Sudan, which also sits downstream of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd), have asked the UN SC to debate the difficulty. They want firm commitments over the timetable of the filling similarly because of the volume of water the Gerd will release. Egypt said it had been informed by Ethiopia that the second year of filling had begun. This is going on because the season near the dam site gets underway. In response, Egypt’s Irrigation Minister Mohammed Abdel Ati said he had sent a letter to his Ethiopian counterpart informing him of “Egypt’s categorical rejection of this unilateral measure”, an announcement said. He also said it violated a 2015 agreement which said that the event of the dam should be supported by “mutual understanding”. Sudan also received the notification from Ethiopia, the Bloomberg press association reports. “They sent a nonsense letter,” its chief negotiator on the dam, Mustafa Hussein, is quoted as saying. The foreign ministers of both countries, who are in big apple earlier than Thursday’s council meeting, called Ethiopia’s “unilateral move… a heavy escalation [revealing] Ethiopia’s bad intention”. “The second filling also violates international laws and norms about the usage of resources of transboundary rivers,” they added. But Ethiopia says that it’s not deliberately filling up the dam. “Filling goes in tandem with the development,” a senior Ethiopian water ministry official told the AFP agency. Once fully operational, the Gerd is predicted to produce 65 million Ethiopians with electricity. The authorities say it’ll transform people’s lives and also the country’s development. In a letter to the safety Council on Tuesday, Ethiopia’s foreign ministry expressed its irritation about a number of the diplomatic moves around the dam. It accused the international organization, which appears to be backing Egypt and Sudan, of meddling. Ethiopia says that it’s a problem for the African Union and not the world organization.
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