Egypt reaction to Ethiopia dam result of misinformation: David H. Shrinn Press TV has conducted an interview with David H. Shrinn, former US Ambassador to Ethiopia, Washington, about the two-year building of a dam by the Ethiopians that will be the largest on the Nile and one that the Egyptian side has only just become aware of. The following is an approximate transcript of the interview. Press TV: The US has offered to mediate. Ambassador, can the US be an honest broker here because of course it’s had a long term alliance with Egypt for a variety of reasons to do with the Middle East, but of course in recent years it’s got very close to Ethiopia because of the, quote, ‘war on terror’? Shrinn: Well, clearly the parties involved, which also includes Sudan are the ones who need to sort out their differences and I think there has been an enormous amount of misinformation particularly in the last month or so that has led to the heightened rhetoric and emotion, particularly that coming out of Egypt. Basically what you’re talking about is a hydropower dam that only blocks the water for the time frame that it takes to fill the reservoir behind the dam. Now this is a very large reservoir and it will take a number of years to fill and this is a legitimate concern to Egyptians as to how long a time it takes and how much water is removed from the river for each year that the reservoir is filling. That needs to be negotiated. But once that reservoir is filled the water continues to flow as before - the only distinction being you’re going to have a little bit of evaporation in the reservoir, which will remove some water from the Nile, but it will remove far less than if that water were evaporating in Lake Nasser. Press TV: But the Head of Egypt’s National Water Research Center said Ethiopia, with this dam, could reduce the flow of the Nile River by ten billion kiloliters a year and he claims that one billion kiloliters of reduction will take around 200,000 acres of Egyptian farmland out of production. You can see if that’s at all true why the Egyptians are extremely worried. Shrinn: Well, I’m not a hydrologist, but I go back to the basic statement that once the reservoir is filled I would highly question that that much water is removed from the Nile permanently. I don’t see how that can happen. You’re going to get some reduction by evaporation, but not that much. So I’m really very dubious about that remark. Press TV: How closely do the positions you’re hearing from our guests in the studio mirror what you think is going on in Addis Ababa and Cairo at the moment? Does it give you any hope of a resolution without violence? Shrinn: Yes I have some hope that this can be resolved in a peaceful manner. To my knowledge there has never been a war anywhere in the world that has been a result exclusively of a fight over water - not a major war. And I don’t think this is going to become the first one. It’s a very contentious issue. There’s a lot of emotion involved, particularly on the Egyptian side. But the fact is that dams have been built on tributaries that feed the Nile for many years. The Merowe dam recently opened up in Northern Sudan; the Tekeze dam opened up on the Tekeze river in Ethiopia several years ago; dams have been built in Uganda in the last decade. It just happens that this is the largest dam that has ever been built on this system and that’s why it has attracted so much concern. But these are issues that can be dealt with so long as they are hydro-power projects that allow the water eventually to flow again pretty much as it did before. There is a natural flow issue on the Nile where it varies enormously from one year to the next. In 1985 the flow on the Nile at Dongola in Sudan in the upper part of Sudan was about 40 billion cubic meters, which is a very low flow. By the time you get to 2000, it was well over 100 billion cubic meters. So even in the natural scheme of things there is enormous variation on this river system. Press TV: And Ambassador, one gets the impression that this has been simmering for quite a long time, for many, many years, not just 1929, but possibly before that. Did you notice this during your period as the US ambassador to Ethiopia, during your three years in Addis Ababa - did it come up? Shrinn: It did and I raised it with the former prime minister Meles Zenawi. I tried to get my own government more interested in the issue. Quite frankly I was totally unsuccessful in that effort. It was not as emotional an issue at the time that I was in Ethiopia, but it struck me as being an issue that cried out for attention. I’m fully supportive of the Nile Basin Initiative, which at the technical level has done an enormous amount of positive things for improving use of Nile water. And there is very little discussion of that in this current sort of war of words between Addis Ababa and Cairo. But a lot can be done to simply make better use of Nile water today. And one has to be very careful about large irrigation systems that are sometimes horribly inefficient and just literally waste water and that needs to be looked at very closely. Press TV: The Americans are trying to broker; they want a kind of working party between Egypt and Ethiopia. Can that work do you think? Shrinn: It’s not clear to me what role the US is going to play in all of this. I think clearly any effort to engage in more discussion more dialogue more transparency of information - and here I would be sometimes critical of the Ethiopian side where they have not been sufficiently transparent - is clearly called for and I think it will help the situation. The United States and other international players can play a useful role in trying to provide good council to both sides so that this does not get out of hand. But I really doubt that the United States is in a position to ‘mediate’ this dispute. I think it’s gone far beyond that point.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 07:39:30 +0000
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