Eritrea weighs role in Egypt-Ethiopia dispute over Nile dam
Eritrea’s president visited Cairo against the backdrop of the faltering talks on the Nile dam dispute, raising questions about Eritrea’s role in helping reach an agreement between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan.
CAIRO — During his two-day visit to Cairo on July 6-7, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki held bilateral talks with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, focusing on the dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) and security in the Red Sea, with the aim to support regional security and stability, spokesman for the Egyptian presidency Bassam Radi said.
This is the fifth visit Afwerki has paid to Cairo since Sisi took office in 2014. This time, however, his visit came as Egypt failed to reach a binding agreement with Ethiopia on the filling and operation of the GERD, which Cairo believes will damage its interests in the Nile waters.
Afwerki had previously visited Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on May 2, and Khartoum, Sudan, on June 25. Observers believe that such visits are part of Eritrea's mediation efforts to resolve the dispute between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan.
The Egyptian-Eritrean rapprochement over the decades has always been a source of trouble for Ethiopia, which has repeatedly accused Egypt of using Eritrea as a pressure card and of destabilizing the situation in Ethiopia. This rapprochement has also furthered the Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict that dates to the Eritrean War of Independence in the 1990s, while the situation of “no war, no peace” between the two countries has constantly fueled regional tension in past years.
