*
nternational
The News
Saturday January 29, 2005-- Zil Haj 18, 1425 A.H. ISSN 1563-9479
* *Mubarak to attend first AU summit to fight for Nile waters*
CAIRO: Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak will attend his first African summit for nearly a decade next week with one item on his personal agenda, to stop other countries taking the waters of the Nile.
*Mubarak last mingled with the continent’s other heads of state in 1995, when he escaped an attempt on his life at the summit of the Organisation of African Unity at Addis Ababa.* *This weekend he will be in Abuja, Nigeria, for the biannual meeting of the OAU’s successor, the African Union, to defend Cairo’s corner against other countries upstream of Egypt on Africa’s longest river.*
The Nile provides more than 95 per cent of Egypt’s water needs, and even this is not considered enough. It is considered a strategic resource, which must be protected at all costs.
Under a 1929 agreement, when most countries concerned were underdeveloped British colonies or protectorates, Egypt was given a right of veto over any works upstream on the White Nile or the Blue Nile, which merge at Khartoum that might divert or hamper the river’s flow. But now there is strong pressure to revise this accord, while some countries have begun simply ignoring it. States bordering the White Nile, which flows out of Lake Victoria; Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda want the 1929 agreement scrapped and a new one negotiated.
In the meantime Tanzania has begun major irrigation projects using Lake Victoria’s water, without consulting Egypt, and Kenya intends to do the same. The five countries, which will number some 150 million people by 2015, already have a free-trade agreement and want to form a closer political association, which would give it more weight against Egypt.
At the source of the Blue Nile, which contributes 85 per cent of the combined river’s flow, Ethiopia has also been tapping the river for irrigation since 1981, again without consulting Egypt. The Egyptian press regularly accuses Israel of being behind these projects.
* At present Egypt has a right to use 55 billion cubic metres of water from the Nile per year and Sudan has 18 billion cubic metres. The rest, which also include Democratic Republic of Congo and Eritrea, are left with some 10 billion cubic metres. Even with the lion’s share, officials estimate that Egypt, with a population that has more than tripled since 1959 to 72 million inhabitants, are 20 billion metres a year short. Cairo is behind a programme, funded to a tune of 140 million dollars by the European Union and international bodies, aimed at getting the maximum out of the Nile, while guarding it against pollution. *
Egypt has strengthened links with its neighbours upstream in training staff, seeking new drinking water sources and supplying remote areas. With a peace agreement now signed between Khartoum and the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Cairo wants to see the marshes of southern Sudan drained and the water sent to the Nile through the 360-kilometre Jonglei Canal.
While Egypt is putting out peace feelers to its neighbours on this issue, Irrigation Minister Mahmud Abu Zeid insists that its "historic rights" are "not negotiable." But war is being ruled out, only a year after Cairo called a Kenyan threat to abrogate the 1929 pact a "casus belli."
_______________________________________________ Ugandanet mailing list Ugandanet@kym.net http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/ugandanet % UGANDANET is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/
