CAIRO — The Ethiopian delegate to the United Nations, Ambassador Taye Atske Selassie, has accused Egypt of unilaterally using Nile River waters. His charge comes as Cairo and Addis Ababa continue to have heated exchanges about control over the waters of the Nile after Ethiopia announced June 27 its plan to begin filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam within two weeks, without agreeing to rules about storing water and the dam's operation with Egypt and Sudan.

“Egypt took an individual decision to dispose of the waters of the Nile in 1995, and implemented the Toshka Project, which consumes a lot of water,” Selassie said during a UN Security Council videoconference meeting June 29. “Ethiopia filed a complaint protesting this matter in 1995, but there were unilateral steps from Egypt, and participation in the river was not fair, and perhaps we were not listening to each other.”

Egypt's unilateral use of Nile water, including moving it from one place to another, has long been cited by Nile upstream countries as a reason for undertaking projects to exploit the Nile's water without consulting the downstream countries of Egypt and Sudan. This was the motive behind the decision of Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi to sign the Nile Basin’s Cooperative Framework Agreement (known in the media as the 2010 Entebbe Agreement), which Egypt and Sudan rejected since it says upstream countries have the right to build projects on the river without coordinating with or even notifying downstream countries.

Egypt started implementing the Toshka Project, in the south of Aswan governorate, in January 1997, with the aim of developing the valley’s south and to transfer Nile water from Lake Nasser to a 200-meter-wide (656-foot wide) canal that passes through the Toshka Depression and marine oases, reaching the Qattara Depression.