Egypt’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday supported quartet mediation for the talks on the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) that is being built on the Blue Nile, reported Xinhuanet.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukry said the government is in support of the formation of an international quartet including the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States to facilitate reaching a deal on the filling and operation of the Nile dam.
“Egypt agrees to the Sudanese proposal that involves the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States,” the foreign ministry’s ministry’s spokesman Ahmed Hafez said in a statement.
The dispute between the three countries is concerned about how much water Ethiopia will release downstream if a multi-year drought occurs and how future disputes related to the dam will get solved. Egypt and Sudan have also called for a legally binding agreement on the dam’s filling and operation.
Shukry said Egypt wants to develop the negotiating mechanism to reach a legally binding agreement as soon as possible.
Earlier on Wednesday, Sudanese Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Yasser Abbas appealed to all the parties concerned about the Nile dam issue to consider GERD a means for regional cooperation and not political tension between the three countries.
Egypt’s statement came after a meeting between Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Soukry and the visiting Alphonse Ntumba Luaba, the coordinator of the unit in charge of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s chairmanship of the African Union.
The second filling of the GERD is scheduled for July.
Ethiopia started constructing the GERD in 2011. Egypt fears that the dam might affect its 55.5-billion-cubic-meter annual share of Nile water. Sudan has also raised similar concerns over the 4-billion-U.S.-dollar dam as a “direct threat” to the country’s national security.
Over the past few years, tripartite talks on the rules of filling and operating the GERD, with a total capacity of 74 billion cubic meters, have been unsuccessful.
