Was the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Mediation Doomed to Fail? by Yasmine Ahmed Hafez

In September 2023, Ethiopia finished the fourth filling of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). This comes after years of rejections (El-Tablawy, 2023), followed by “endless, and often byzantine, negotiations on the completion of the recommended studies” (Helal, 2020). It is estimated that, “when completed, the GERD will be the largest hydropower facility in Africa, with a power capacity of 5,150 MW and reservoir storage of 74 billion cubic meters (bcm)” (Basheer, et al., 2021). The issue has created tension and antagonism between Egypt and Ethiopia for years. Being the downstream country and having to depend heavily on the Blue Nile for water consumption, Egypt framed the risk of affecting the water quantity as an existential matter (Schwartzstein, 2017). Through the past decade, Egypt tried to ensure that Ethiopia filled the dam without significantly harming its share of water. At the same time, Ethiopia needed to fill the dam as efficiently and quickly as possible to meet its expectations and export the surplus. Both countries—as well as Sudan—failed to agree on the dam’s operation and filling.

The Egyptian government announced that the tripartite negotiations had failed in October 2019, which coincided with the anniversary of the October 6 victory in 1973. This announcement stirred profound nationalistic emotions and security concerns in the country. Then, a U.S. mediation failed in February 2020, which coincided with Ethiopia’s celebration of the Adwa triumph against the Italians in 1896. Both events connected past and present, creating a resonance between the fights for independence and the risk of water insecurity during GERD negotiations. In this article, I explain why U.S. and World Bank mediations were doomed to fail due to timing and hydro-nationalism in both countries; this failure meant that any further attempts at mediation triggered even more nationalistic reactions.

Did we pass the ripe moment, or was the moment never ripe to begin with? Mediation is a “conflict management process wherein disputants seek assistance or accept help from an individual, group, state, or organization to settle their conflict without resorting to violence or legal authority” (Svensson, 2020). With this rationale, Article 10 of the Declaration of Principles (DoP), signed by Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan on March 23, 2015 in Khartoum, lays the ground for mediation requests and states that the three countries would address disputes through consultation or negotiation. If unresolved, they may jointly seek conciliation or mediation or involve the heads of state or of government (DoP, 2015). The need for the three countries to approve the suggestions for mediation is necessary to adhere to the DoP. It is listed as one of the factors that enhances mediation effectiveness. According to Zartman (2001), a ripe moment depends on the conflicting parties’ perception of a Mutually Hurting Stalemate (MHS), where both parties experience a painful deadlock in the conflict and are unable to achieve victory (Zartman, 2001) and thus seek mediation on an equal ground and as a mutual need. Accordingly, the parties need to be on equal footing to reach a satisfactory resolution, and the “right” timing of the mediation is necessary to increase its chances of success (Tawfik, 2023). When asked in 2018 about the neutrality and the experience of the World Bank in water disputes, Ana Cascao, who is an expert on transboundary management on the Nile, said that “the question is not if the World Bank has the experience or credentials to be a mediator, but rather if there is a logic for third-party intervention at this stage. Because a golden rule for successful mediation is that it must be requested and carefully mandated by all parties involved” (Aman, 2018).

This condition was never met when Egypt requested mediation and sought help from the international community. During a December 26, 2018, meeting in Addis Ababa with his Ethiopian counterpart, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry proposed to add the World Bank as a “fourth impartial party” in the negotiations (Aman, 2018). Once again, on October 14, 2019, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry rejected on the international community the responsibility to solve the issue (Ahram-Online, 2019).

A few days later, Egypt sought U.S. intervention in the negotiations, and the White House declared that “the United States supports Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan’s ongoing negotiations to reach a cooperative, sustainable, and mutually beneficial agreement on filling and operating the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. All Nile Valley countries have a right to economic development and prosperity” (Press-Secretary, 2019). Egypt welcomed this statement, adding that the deadlock needed an effective international actor to “overcome the current stalemate in negotiations, bring the view of the three countries closer, and reach a fair and balanced agreement” (Egypt-Today, 2019) based on respect for the International Law and river management principles. But even with U.S. and World Bank mediations, negotiations failed when Ethiopia walked away before signing, while notifying only Sudan and the United States. This failure was met with backlash and the mediation attempt deepened the conflict. Egypt has argued that the negotiations failed because Ethiopia adopted “intransigent policies” (ECSS, 2019) to speed up dam construction. Ethiopia had called on Egypt to “abandon its insistence on preserving its self-proclaimed historical rights and current use and desist its relentless efforts to politicize and internationalize the remaining technical negotiations” (Ahram-Online, 2020).

The insistence on bringing third parties has been used internally to trigger Ethiopia’s fear of a foreign intervention and was framed as an attempt to delay its prosperity and development. The resistance to external — in particular U.S. — intervention peaked, especially after President Donald Trump’s statement that Egypt would “blow up” the GERD (Meseret, 2020). On the Egyptian side, Ethiopian reluctances to mediation were framed as a threat to Egyptian water security, and therefore national security. Thus, attempts to include an international party meant reinsurance for its national security. It is hard to understand the position of the two countries unless we know how nationalism has been portrayed and framed in the two countries’ history and its relation to its water management and dam construction premises.

A Heavily Antagonistic Nile

Nationalism is notoriously hard to define (Anderson, 1983, p. 3). Starting with Egypt, Mosallam (2012) argued that Nasserist ideas of nationalism became hegemonic when they were seen as “common sense though being negotiated, re-articulated, and contributing to, rather than enforced on, a people suppressed” (p. 3; Guha, 1997). Salem (2020) employed Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and explained the Nasserist moment as the only hegemonic project in Egypt. Nasser’s “haunted” moment had been closely tied to the construction of the High Aswan Dam (HAD) in 1958-1970, whose hydraulic mission was the epitome of nationalism and nation-building in Egypt. Egypt viewed and defined the Nile within its national boundaries; any attempt against the river was seen as a national security threat that required the highest measures to combat it. Attempts to threaten the Nile are seen as a direct threat to Egyptian nationalism.

On the Ethiopian side, the haunting historical moment can be traced to the abolishment of the monarchy by the student revolution between 1964 and 1974, a “cultural earthquake […] which continues to haunt scholars, if not indeed all Ethiopians” (Zeleke, 2020). Elleni Zeleke’s book understands Ethiopian politics through the political, social and emotional depth of the Tizita music genre. One old Tizita song about the memory of loss goes (p. 37):

“Outdoing yesterday.. shouldering on today
Borrowing from tomorrow … renewing yesteryears
Comes the memory … hauling possessions.”^[1]

Understanding the formation of the state and the attempts to shake and reformulate the state during the generative moment of the student revolution becomes essential in understanding Ethiopia today and the struggle to unite people from different ethnicities and regions. In Ethiopia, there are still attempts to reconcile and/or sometimes fight the past with its grievances and burdens while discussing modernization, renaissance, and economic development.

These contradictions, as explained through tizita (memory, nostalgia), become relevant to understanding the GERD as a renaissance and modernization project from traditional farming and fishing lifestyles. Ethiopia’s internal and ethnic divisions have deepened throughout the years, and GERD has been thought as a unifying project through the rupture it introduces in the course of time. Ethiopians repeat that they “were never colonized before” as the expression of a solid belief in their independence. Thus, attempts to place external  — especially U.S. — pressure on Ethiopia in GERD negotiations are always used to trigger strong nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments.

Consequently, Ethiopia has framed its perception of the dam in terms of grievances from the past and painted the GERD as the tool to reclaim these earned rights. The dam is hence afforded key symbolic importance (Hafez, 2019). The relative deprivation theory explains the buildup of grievances pushing people to “become angry and […] motivated to redress the perceived inequity” (Walker & Smith, 2002, p. 288). It is essential to situate the dam within each side’s grievances; the main issue or argument is not whether the grievances are true or real or not; it is how easily grievances appeal to the national identity and how instrumental they could be in water conflicts. Ethiopia’s Dam has been framed as a renaissance of dignity after a decades-long famine and war (Deribe, 2021). More significantly, these grievances have been increasingly expressed under the two countries’ current regimes. As the public became more engaged with the issue through social media platforms and public spaces, there has been an emphasis on these grievances and the emotions associated with them (Seide & Fantini, 2023). The awareness of this relative deprivation “stimulated upward counterfactual thoughts about how outcomes could have been better” (Olson & Roese, 2002, p. 272).

Shifting the conflict from a macro-level transboundary management issue to personal melancholy, these grievances fuel the public sphere, pushing people to voice their frustrations on social media (such as the #itismyDam government-sponsored public campaign), newspapers, and correspondence. This complicates further attempts at mediation.

Checkmate Mediation on the Nile

After the failure of the Washington agreement, Ethiopia pushed for an agreement that “commits Egypt and Sudan to sign a comprehensive basin-wide water sharing agreement within ten years in accordance with the CFA principles, a suggestion that Egypt and Sudan categorically refused” (Tawfik 2023, 7). This complicated the issue even further and showed that both parties had different objectives. For Egypt, negotiations targeted GERD management, whereas, for Ethiopia, they had to do with Nile water redistribution. Thus, Ethiopia pushed for the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) principles to revoke previous historical agreements and start a new status-quo for the Nile. This complicated the negotiations and mediation efforts, as the issue went beyond the management of the GERD.

The GERD was placed within a national security framework in both countries, thus triggering a nationalistic backlash. Egypt’s insistence on bringing a third party would not change the situation. The ideological and nationalistic ideas associated with the Nile were too obvious to be ignored. In this particular case, paradoxically, attempts at mediation harmed the negotiation outcome and increased the distance between the two countries, turning the negotiations into a zero-sum boxing match. Egypt insisted on third-party mediation, which was initially met with an Ethiopian rebuff; when accepted, however, the mediation was doomed to fail. However, a year after the failure of the Washington negotiations in April 2021, the mediation of the African Union (A.U.) also failed. Ethiopia still did not allow the A.U. to intervene with its full capacity to solve the issue, and allowed it to act only as an observer (Tawfik, 2023). Moreover, the late timing of the mediation meant that not all actors would be equally impacted if no agreement was reached (Tawfik, 2023).

Early mediation during conflicts has proven more successful (Bercovitch & DeRouen, 2005). With the delays induced by the inclusion of mediators and more than a decade of negotiations, the vicious cycle of negotiations over GERD failed. Mediation had been complicated in this case because of two elements. 1) There was never a ripe moment for mediation. The mediation was suggested by Egypt when the negotiation failed; it was then resisted by Ethiopia, which reluctantly accepted the United States as only an “observer” to the negotiation, not a mediator (Helal & Bekhit, 2023). 2) Egypt’s nationalism is connected to the Nile in the post-colonial Nasserist moment, whereas Ethiopian nationalism revolves around “Tizita” and grievances over the past internal wars that had stalled its development and modernity, The “development state” model for the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the party’s legitimacy were rooted in the need to expand electricity and achieve modernization through the construction of the GERD (Lavers, Terrefe, Gebresenbet 2021).

Within this context, bringing in a third party fueled further nationalistic reactions, which fed on Egyptian fears regarding national security and Ethiopian fear of external interventions hindering development and modernity. Understanding both partiess’ internal grievances and the difficulties facing foreign third-party intervention at this late stage of the conflict makes us understand the nationalistic reactions.

The nationalistic makeup in both countries shows why mediation is further complicated in this case and is unlikely to lead to a possible resolution. It is important to re-centralize grievances and national turmoil. While these factors are often overlooked or dismissed in favor of more macro-level elements, I argue for the significance of micro-level factors in understanding the conflict and its roots and in reaching any breakthrough in addressing it. The Dam itself is not the end of the story; it is merely the magnifying glass to observe blind spots and gaps in the historical, economic, and political relations between the two societies, which caused the current deadlock and will likely complicate current and future attempts of mediation on the issue.

Conclusion

I did not look into the technicalities of the negotiations; I focused instead on why mediation in this context and timing had fueled further nationalistic reactions on both sides. The region’s geopolitics are changing drastically and violently and extreme national voices are growing along with the war on Tigray (November 2020), the war in Sudan (April 2023), the war in the Amhara region (summer 2023), and the war in Gaza (October 2023) that are changing the power dynamics in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Resumed negotiations are still announced, as well failed agreements, and the GERD continues to be discussed and locked in a zero-sum game format. But some questions remain. Will we be stuck in the same cycle? Will no agreement be the agreement? Is it true that, as a negotiator in the Egyptian team said, “no deal is better than a bad deal — we cannot sign to a deal that would compromise a strategic interest like water security” (Soliman, 2020)? With four fillings finished, has “the ripe moment” passed for Ethiopia? How can this issue be solved if bringing third-party actors or mediators triggers further internal nationalistic reactions against independence in a currently complex and shattered region?

Special thanks to Prof. Pascal Menoret, Prof. Rawia Tawfik, and Dr. Ahmed El-Adawy, who advised on the earlier draft of the paper. I am grateful for the numerous discussions I had throughout the years with brilliant researchers working on this issue from different points of view and fields. Thanks to Prof. May Darwich, who encouraged the argument and the earlier draft of the article in the “Ideational Dimensions of Mediation in the 21st. Century” in 2019. Finally, I am very thankful to Roger Anis for approving the use of his picture in the article; his ability to channel the Nile issues virtually and artistically is always inspiring.

Yasmine Ahmed Hafez

 

Key dates related to GERD mediation

• April 2011: Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi lays the foundation stone for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD; originally named the Millennium Dam).
• September 2011: Agreement to establish an international committee to evaluate the impact of the GERD’s construction.
• May 2013: Egypt opposes forming a technical committee without international experts.
• June 2014: Negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan resume.
• September 2014: First tripartite negotiation meeting on the GERD.
• October 2014: Agreement to hire two consultancy firms (one French, one Dutch) for a technical study of the dam.
• March 2015: Signing of the Declaration of Principles (DoP) on the GERD by Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
• October 2019: Tripartite negotiations declared unsuccessful.
• December 2018: Egypt proposes the World Bank as a neutral mediator in the GERD negotiations.
• October 2019: During the United Nations General Assembly meeting in 2019, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi stressed that the international community should be involved in urging all parties to reach an agreement over the GERD issue (Sakr, 2019).A round of antagonistic statements between the two leaders of the countries was exchanged amid the first declaration of the negotiation’s failures at the beginning of October.However, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed met in Russia to discuss the dispute during the Africa-Russia summit (Reuters, 2019). During this summit, Russia proposed being a mediator to solve this conflict.
• November 2019 – Feb 2020: US-facilitated negotiations on the GERD

Dates and locations as cited in (Helal and Bekhit 2023)

• November 6, 2019: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• November 15-16, 2019: Meeting of the Ministers of Water Affairs – Addis Ababa
• December 2-3, 2019: Meeting of the Ministers of Water Affairs – Cairo
• December 9, 2019: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• December 21-22, 2019: Meeting of the Ministers of Water Affairs – Khartoum
• January 8-9, 2020: Meeting of the Ministers of Water Affairs – Addis Ababa
• January 13-15, 2020: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• January 22-23, 2020: Meeting of the Legal and Technical Working Groups – Khartoum
• January 28-31, 2020: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• February 3-10, 2020: Meeting of the Legal and Technical Working Groups – Washington D.C.
• February 12-13, 2020: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• February 27-28, 2020: Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Water Affairs – Washington D.C.
• May-June 2020: On the 1st of May, Egypt sent letter to the Security Council asking for its support to protect Egypt’s rights, “adding that Ethiopia had employed a “policy of obstructionism and prevarication” (Marks, 2020).

This was met by a 22-page letter from Ethiopia on the 14th of May (Alaa-El-Din, 2020), followed by another letter from Sudan.

“Despite the adamant rejection by the two countries, Ethiopia told the UNSC it “does not have a legal obligation to seek the approval of Egypt to fill the dam” (Alaa-El-Din, 2020). “Ethiopia’s foreign minister responded on May 14 by saying Egypt should “halt its relentless obstruction” to the GERD. (Marks, 2020).

The UN-SC recommended that the three countries reach a consensus/agreement before filling the dam to avoid escalating the issue.
For further analysis on UNSC, check: (Bréthaut, Ezbakhe, Vij, & Venturini, n.d.) https://gerd.controversy.genevawaterhub.org/controversy-mapping/

For further analysis on African Union’s role, read: Regional Mediation in African Transboundary Rivers Conflicts: Assessing the African Union’s Role in the Renaissance Dam Negotiations (Tawfik, 2023).
For reading on Egyptian officials’ reflections on the US negotiations, read: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02508060.2023.2230851

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^[1] https://www.ethiopiaintheory.org/new-page-2?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3a7itumItePzYjQi1Ytvs4ctPquDk8l4K5NbVZyT76x4Zop4fIxtwH8tI_aem_Ad8Nnj6PIFhv1S7tAMQdUcoHGyLaXV_lrd1EdzPfpa1gOnYmuqFI4FtUTNghgRYom-fyNdq1-7tZMWdMqlU0bQS6

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