Tag Archives: Egypt

Hydropolitics Between Ethiopia and Egypt: A Historical Timeline

June 18, 2013 Tadias Magazine 2 Comments

Tadias Magazine

By Tadias Staff

Published: Tuesday, June 18th, 2013

New York (TADIAS) — Hydropolitics flare up is not new to Africa’s Nile Basin region. The world’s longest river, which flows northwards and criss-crosses eleven countries, has been a particular point of tension between Egypt and Ethiopia for a long time; especially when it comes to the equitable sharing of the water resource for economic development.

In 1959, the colonial-era Waters Agreement between Egypt and Sudan was signed before all the upriver countries had achieved independence — namely Tanzania (1961), Uganda (1962), Rwanda (1962), Burundi (1962), and Kenya (1963) — excluding Ethiopia from the deal. Emperor Haile Selassie who was incensed by the snub, responded by ending the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s 1,600 year relationship with the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria.

According to a newly launched historical data visualization web site, TimeLine Ethiopia, the colonial era agreement had allocated 55.5 billion cubic meters of water annually to Egypt while Sudan was given 18.5 billion cubic meters, which represented 99% of the average annual flow of the Nile river.

That same year Haile Selassie decided to commission a $10 million American-led study entitled “Land and Water Resources of the Blue Nile Basin: Ethiopia.” The seventeen volume report finalized in 1964 served as the blueprint and beginning of Ethiopia’s mission to build multiple dams on the Blue Nile and its tributaries.

Egypt, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser, retaliated against Haile Selassie’s initiative by clandestinely supporting armed insurrections in the northern parts of Ethiopia in order to foment civil war and unrest in the country. According to Wikipedia Nasser was also simultaneously busy overseeing the construction of a high dam in Egypt to satisfy his country’s “ability to control floods, provide water for irrigation, and generate hydroelectricity seen as pivotal to Egypt’s industrialization.”

Fast forwarding to current times, when Ethiopia’s former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi re-initiated the project to accomplish unrealized ambitions for Ethiopia, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, did not welcome the effort.

In 2013 Ethiopia’s diverting of waters to complete the Grand Renaissance Dam project has been met by high-level Egyptian agitation including discussions of sabotage on live television.

Below is an interactive timeline of the Nile dispute courtesy of TimeLine Ethiopia.

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Egypt’s Nile Threats Weaken Case to Secure Water: Shinn (Bloomberg)

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Ethiopia & Egypt: Visualizing Nile Data – Access to Electricity vs Fresh Water

June 14, 2013 Tadias Magazine 1 Comment

Tadias Magazine

By Tadias Staff

Updated: Saturday, June 15th, 2013

New York (TADIAS) – In 2009, over 99% of Egypt’s residents had access to electricity, while in Ethiopia, a country of 80 million, less than 18% of the population had access to power. In neighboring Sudan 35% of its roughly 30 million inhabitants received energy generated by the Nile river.

In 2011 the annual fresh water withdrawal in Egypt was recorded as 68.30 billion cubic meters. The same year Sudan also took in 37.14 billion cubic meters of fresh water. In comparison, Ethiopia’s withdrawal of fresh water for the same period was a meager 5.56 billion cubic meters.

These statistics come from the World Bank’s “World Development Indicators” and are now compiled by a newly launched website that employs data visualization and creative interactive timelines of Ethiopian history and current affairs.

“While working on my first historical item to publish, on the Solomonic Dynasty, the whole Nile issue exploded into the international news scene,” said Jomo Tariku, the site’s founder, who works as a designer and publishing officer at the World Bank’s Development Data Group in Washington, D.C. that includes the Open-Data team. “So I thought that was a perfect vehicle to do a data-based analysis, as much as possible, on facts and not emotions.”

Ethiopia and Egypt, next to Nigeria, are both among the top-three most populated countries in Africa. Jomo told Tadias that research driven stories are something he deals with on a daily basis, and he hopes that this would particularly assist journalists in providing a balanced coverage of the rather heated current exchange between the two nations on the Nile matter.

“Our main site and the most visited one at the World Bank is under our wing at data.worldbank.org,” Jomo said. “Our other popular asset that really makes the World Bank stand out compared to any organization that has vast amounts of data is our databank tool that lets you query our indicators and build your own analysis.”

Graph: Access to Electricity vs. Total Fresh Water Withdrawals (Source: data.worldbank.org)

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“What inspired this project?” we asked Jomo. “Even though I have been meaning to do a data visualization site on the continent and Ethiopia, discovering a similar Ghanaian site really got me off my lazy chair,” Jomo said.

So what’s the next topic he is researching? “I will publish one on Abebe Bekila by Monday,” Jomo said. “I am sticking with Wikipedia and World Bank but I will be using any free data source I can find to generate the visualizations.”

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You can learn more and add to the information at www.timelineethiopia.com.

Law Professor Urges Ethiopia to Take Nile Issue to International Court (TADIAS)

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Tom Campbell: Law Professor Urges Ethiopia to Take Nile Issue to International Court

June 11, 2013 Tadias Magazine 2 Comments

Tadias Magazine

By Tadias Staff

Published: Tuesday, June 11th, 2013

New York (TADIAS) – In the late 1990s, long before the Egyptian cabinet got caught on live television discussing to sabotage Ethiopia’s $4.7 billion Grand Renaissance hydroelectric dam project, a law professor and his students at Stanford University were quietly researching the legal case that could assist Ethiopia in the event that the inter-country conflict ended up at the International Court of Justice for resolution.

“I was very happy when I learned Ethiopia was going ahead with the Blue Nile Gorge project; and then very concerned when the Egyptian cabinet meeting conversation leaked, referring to Egypt’s going to war against Ethiopia,” said former Congressman Tom Campbell who is currently the Dean of Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California. “What totally irresponsible statements.”

In a recent interview with Tadias Magazine, Mr. Campbell recalled that two of his Stanford law students, Paul Epstein and Ken Fleuriet, had prepared a draft brief that dealt with just these questions.

“International law requires upstream and downstream users to engage in equitable use of a river’s water,” he said.

Egypt, which operates its own multiple dams built on the Nile, is vigorously opposing Ethiopia on the basis of a colonial era agreement that served only the interest of Egypt and Sudan. In a review article entitled “Who Owns the Nile? Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia’s History-Changing Dam” published at Ohio State University, Andrew Carlson notes that “After achieving its independence in 1922, Egypt negotiated the Nile Waters Agreement of 1929 with the East African British colonies. This accord established Egypt’s right to 48 billion cubic meters of water flow, all dry season waters, and veto-power over any upriver water management projects.” Despite that over 85% percent of the waters flowing to Egypt came from the Blue Nile originating in Ethiopia, Carlson states that Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie “was not consulted.” An additional colonial-era agreement between Egypt and Sudan, which Egypt claims should be followed today also left out five other upriver countries from fair use.

“Does Ethiopia have the legal right to dam the Nile?” we asked. The answer, Mr. Campbell gave is a resounding “Yes.”

“Unquestionably Ethiopia has the legal right to build the dam,” he replied. “The issue had been one of funding: the U.S. had supported Egypt at the World Bank, and the World Bank had not funded the project. I believe Ethiopia found alternative funding from China.”

Mr. Campbell added. “While Egypt wants more of the Nile to be diverted to new settlements in the Sinai, Ethiopia wants water to prevent the devastating drought that occurs every seven years. This favors Ethiopia. Further, Ethiopia’s storage of water in the Blue Nile gorge will result in far less evaporation per cubic meter of water than Egypt’s storage in Lake Nasser, a shallow lake with huge loss to evaporation.”

Mr. Campbell emphasized that this essentially means sharing the river, based on traditional uses, and the value of the proposed new use. “The International Court of Justice exists for just this kind of dispute resolution,” he argued.

In their brief Epstein and Fleuriet asked: “Beyond the broad notions of fairness and justness embodied in the concept, just what are the particulars of ‘equitable utilization?’ In very large measure the modern doctrine of equitable utilization is nothing more than a compromise between the two extreme positions. Equitable utilization recognizes a right of upper riparians to develop and exploit their water resources, but also imposes upon them a burden to take the needs of their downstream neighbors into account.”

“My advice is for Ethiopia to commence a legal process in the International Court of Justice.” Campbell urged. “The sooner this goes to the ICJ the better, as any military threat would, on top of being highly irresponsible, then be perceived by the world community as an attempt to short cut the process of the ICJ.”

How Egypt Might Try To Stop Ethiopia’s Dam Project (Forbes)

Egyptian warning over Ethiopia Nile dam (BBC News)

Ethiopia rejects Egyptian protests over Nile dam (The Guardian)

Ethiopia says Nothing Will Stop Nile Dam Project (AP)

Watch: Communications Minister Bereket Simon on the Nile issue (Al Jazeera English)

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The Nile Project: Connecting Nations Through Music

January 8, 2012 Tadias Magazine

Tadias Magazine
Art Talk

Updated: Monday, January 9, 2012

New York (TADIAS) – The last time we spoke to Meklit Hadero, she was in Addis Ababa, inaugurating UN Women’s campaign for gender equity with a free concert at the UN compound. A week earlier she had been named a 2012 TED Senior Fellow.

Meklit’s collaborative research as a TED Fellow is entitled The Nile Project — an ambitious undertaking to create a multicultural musical platform for artists residing in the Nile basin countries. The Nile is the longest river in the world running through ten countries including Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt; the Nile countries also share a complex history of hydropolitics.

The Nile Project takes inspiration from The Silk Road Project, founded by Cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, with the vision to form international and interdisciplinary collaborations among artists and musicians worldwide.

Meklit’s partner in The Nile Project, Mina Girgis, was born in Egypt and is an ethnomusicologist who serves as Director of a community music center in northern California. “I grew up in Cairo and as a young kid I used to cross the Nile everyday to go to school,” he said in a fundraising video released on kickstarter.com. “As a kid you just take the Nile for granted and you think about it as a barrier than a river that connects Egypt to a lot of other cultures.”

Meklit’s connnection to the Nile grew out of her trip to Ethiopia in 2001. “My mom took me to the city of Bahir Dar in Northern Ethiopia to the shores of Lake Tana, which is the source of the Blue Nile,” she shares.

Meklit and Mina met last summer and came up with the idea to assemble a band composed of musicians from the various Nile basin nations. They plan to play and record music while touring the river on a boat made of recycled water bottles. In addition, they would like to bring along historians, scientists and other experts interested in the Nile Project to share information about the river through TED talks.

“Our floating caravan is going to include more than just musicians,” says Meklit. “We’re bringing together hydrologists, anthropologists, climate scientists, fishermen, all people whose life and work centers around the river.”

In the long term, they hope to lanuch an international tour with the new musical ensemble. The first step is to promote their kickstarter campaign to raise funds for their trip on the Nile as they audition and select local musicians to join the project.
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For more information, read about the kickstarter campaign here.

WATCH:

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Related:
The Irresistible Meklit Hadero Blends Ethiopia and San Francisco

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How to Bypass Internet Shutdown

February 2, 2011 Tadias Magazine

Above: Using word of mouth coupled with old technology like
dial-up, Egyptians are circumventing Internet shut down. (AP)

Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff

Published: Wednesday, February 2, 2011

New York (Tadias) – News agencies worldwide were quick to dub the recent protests in North African and Middle Eastern nations as the “The Facebook Revolution.” Fearing the resourcefulness of young people using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to organize the toppling of regimes, government authorities decided to turn off mobile and internet connections.

In the case of Egypt, a nation that is home to Africa’s largest blogging community and where a quarter of its 80 million people enjoy online access, the impact of the lock-down was immediate. “We’re seeing a uniquely draconian measure by the Egyptian authorities to completely cut off an entire country which was previously integrated into the Internet,” says Neil Hicks, policy advisor of the non-profit advocacy group Human Rights First. “It shows the level of desperation the government currently has in face of the protests.” As a result, leaders have turned to traditional methods of organizing says Hicks: “They’re using old-fashioned word of mouth…They’re aware of the possibilities of surveillance if they use these technologies. So they get on a motorbike or car, and go to the next neighborhood and arrange things.”

Companies such as Google and an international group of savvy techies are also working hard to put more tools at the hands of those being silenced. On Monday, Google announced that it had launched “Speak to Tweet“, a collaborative effort by three companies – including Twitter and SayNow, which is designed to bypass the internet censorship.

“Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,” said Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and North Africa. “Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”

According to the group’s blog post: “anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.”

In his article entitled “5 Ways the Protesters Are Beating the Blackout” Steven Hoffer of AOL News highlights landlines as another method that Egyptians have employed to bypass the net blockade: “That’s right, dial-up. International numbers to connect through this seemingly outdated method of accessing the Internet are circulating throughout Egypt,” writes Hoffer. “After a little static, pinging and waiting, the dial-up numbers are allowing some users to hop back on the Internet.” Among those providing such a service is the Paris-based French Data Network, which has extended dozens of lines to Egyptian users.

A global network of free speech activists on the Internet under the umbrella organization Telecomix are also utilizing new media tools to bypass the information blackout. Per The Huffington Post, the group is organized using chat rooms, wikis, and collaborative writing tools. This largely decentralized group of activists has worked “to inform Egyptians about their communications options while receiving incoming messages from them. Telecomix has previously worked on free speech efforts in Tunisia, Iran, China and other countries who have tried to censor or block parts of the Internet.”

The Canadian company HootSuite, which offers users a social media dashboard for posting to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks, is also helping Egyptians overcome Internet shutdown. The venture has reported a sevenfold increase in Egyptian subscriptions during January.

As Google noted: “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.”
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Video: In Egypt, new media is part of message

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch: Mubarak Resigns, Hands Power to Military (AP)

Watch scenes from Tahrir Square: The Revolution Victorious

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Millions of African Women Mutilated

August 5, 2008 Tadias Magazine

Source: Independent Online (South Africa)

Published: Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Cairo – The age-old tradition, also known as female genital mutilation (FGM), is primarily performed on girls ages four to 14, though in some countries it is done on infants. It involves removing a girl’s clitoris and sometimes other external genitalia.

FGM is done out of beliefs that it controls a woman’s sexuality, enhances fertility, initiates her into womanhood or is required by religion, although both Muslim and Christian leaders have spoken out against it.

FGM is also performed for hygienic and aesthetic reasons in some places where genitalia are believed to be dirty.

Countries where more than 50 percent of girls and women ages 15 to 49 are mutilated include: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan (north).

Countries where 10-50 percent of females aged 15 to 49 are mutilated include: Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Yemen. – Sapa-AP

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This article was originally published on page 2 of Cape Times on August 05, 2008

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