Egypt has joined its southern ally Sudan in asking the UN Security Council to discuss their dispute with Ethiopia over the massive Nile dam it is building, said Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.
Cairo and Khartoum say the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will gravely harm their interests and cut their share of the Nile’s water.
“It was important for us to bolster Sudan’s position and make our own request,” he told a television interviewer late on Saturday.
“The strongest mechanism in the Security Council is a resolution, followed by a presidential statement and finally a press release. Any one of these will do.”
Mr Shoukry said he did not expect the Security Council to discuss the dispute over the dam before the second week of July because of the 15-member body’s busy schedule.
Egypt wrote to the Security Council earlier this month, reviewing a decade of fruitless negotiations with Ethiopia over the dam and blaming the Horn of Africa nation for their failure to reach a legally binding deal governing the operating and filling of the dam, which is 80 per cent complete.
Sudan wrote to the Security Council last week requesting that it meets to discuss the Gerd.
Egypt fears the hydroelectric dam would rob it of a significant portion of its share of the Nile’s water, wiping out hundreds of thousands of jobs in its agricultural sector and upending its delicate food balance.
Sudan says the operation of its power-generating dams and water treatment facilities would be affected unless Ethiopia shared real-time data on the Gerd’s operation and filling.
Mr Shoukry was elusive when asked what Egypt would do if Ethiopia refused to comply with the decision made by the UN Security Council.
“Surely, if Ethiopia does that it will be another piece of evidence that it lacks the political will … and the international community will find it necessary to deal with this intransigence.
“Sudan and Egypt will then have exhausted all methods available in the political sphere,” he said.
Ethiopia has also written to the UN to ask the body to persuade Khartoum and Cairo to return to African Union-led talks.
In a separate development, South Sudan's deputy foreign minister told The National this week that his country planned to build a major dam on the Nile to provide cheap, reliable electricity and help stop recurring floods.
The report kicked off a storm in Egypt, where it was widely shared on social media and discussed on night-time television talk shows.
Egypt’s official reaction appeared chiefly designed to reassure the population that the country was not about to become embroiled in another crisis like its dispute with Addis Ababa. It cited a dam that has yet to be built and to which Cairo contributed feasibility and engineering studies back in 2015.
That dam, according to Egypt’s Water Ministry, will be built on the Jur River, which is a tributary of the Bahr Al Ghazal River that flows into the White Nile.
It will be built near the South Sudan city of Wau and have a storage capacity of about two billion cubic metres of water.
Mamdouh Antar, a senior ministry official in charge of the Nile, said in a television interview that the dam, when built, would not affect Egypt’s share of the river’s waters.
But the senior South Sudanese official talked about a major new dam on the White Nile, with new studies being made by the Ministry of Irrigation.
He was asked by The National whether the move could antagonise Egypt and Sudan as well as spark a new controversy in the Nile basin region, but said it was his country's sovereign right to think and plan for its future.
The Blue Nile thunders down into eastern Sudan from the Ethiopian highlands and joins the White Nile in Khartoum before they jointly flow across the desert of northern Sudan and through Egypt all the way to the Mediterranean.
The Blue Nile accounts for more than 80 per cent of the Nile’s water, while the much less voluminous White Nile shares the rest with other tributaries.
“We stand by our brothers in the Nile basin as long their river projects don’t negatively impact on our water resources,” Mr Antar said.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Schedule:
Friday, January 12: Six fourball matches
Saturday, January 13: Six foursome (alternate shot) matches
Sunday, January 14: 12 singles
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Results
2-15pm: Commercial Bank Of Dubai – Conditions (TB) Dh100,000 (Dirt) 1,400m; Winner: Al Habash, Patrick Cosgrave (jockey), Bhupat Seemar (trainer)
2.45pm: Al Shafar Investment – Handicap (TB) Dh80,000 (D) 1,200m; Winner: Day Approach, Ray Dawson, Ahmad bin Harmash
3.15pm: Dubai Real estate Centre – Handicap (TB) Dh80,000 (D) 1,600m; Winner: Celtic Prince, Richard Mullen, Rashed Bouresly
3.45pm: Jebel Ali Sprint by ARM Holding – Listed (TB) Dh500,000 (D) 1,000m; Winner: Khuzaam, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson
4.15pm: Shadwell – Conditions (TB) Dh100,000 (D) 1,600m; Winner: Tenbury Wells, Royston Ffrench, Salem bin Ghadayer
4.45pm: Jebel Ali Stakes by ARM Holding – Listed (TB) Dh500,000 (D) 1,950m; Winner: Lost Eden, Andrea Atzeni, Doug Watson
5.15pm: Jebel Ali Racecourse – Handicap (TB) Dh76,000 (D) 1,950m; Winner: Rougher, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson
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THE CLOWN OF GAZA
Director: Abdulrahman Sabbah
Starring: Alaa Meqdad
Rating: 4/5
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Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
Torque: 678Nm at 7,250rpm
Price: From Dh1,700,000
Available: Now
MATCH INFO
Aston Villa 1 (Konsa 63')
Sheffield United 0
Red card: Jon Egan (Sheffield United)
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Asia Cup 2018 Qualifier
Sunday's results:
- UAE beat Malaysia by eight wickets
- Nepal beat Singapore by four wickets
- Oman v Hong Kong, no result
Tuesday fixtures:
- Malaysia v Singapore
- UAE v Oman
- Nepal v Hong Kong
Cricket World Cup League 2
UAE squad
Rahul Chopra (captain), Aayan Afzal Khan, Ali Naseer, Aryansh Sharma, Basil Hameed, Dhruv Parashar, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Farooq, Muhammad Jawadullah, Muhammad Waseem, Omid Rahman, Rahul Bhatia, Tanish Suri, Vishnu Sukumaran, Vriitya Aravind
Fixtures
Friday, November 1 – Oman v UAE
Sunday, November 3 – UAE v Netherlands
Thursday, November 7 – UAE v Oman
Saturday, November 9 – Netherlands v UAE
The specs
- Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
- Power: 640hp
- Torque: 760nm
- On sale: 2026
- Price: Not announced yet
Draw:
Group A: Egypt, DR Congo, Uganda, Zimbabwe
Group B: Nigeria, Guinea, Madagascar, Burundi
Group C: Senegal, Algeria, Kenya, Tanzania
Group D: Morocco, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Namibia
Group E: Tunisia, Mali, Mauritania, Angola
Group F: Cameroon, Ghana, Benin, Guinea-Bissau
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EEric%20Barbier%26nbsp%3B%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarring%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EYoussef%20Hajdi%2C%20Nadia%20Benzakour%2C%20Yasser%20Drief%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%204%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
More on Quran memorisation:
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
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COMPANY PROFILE
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Total funding: Self funded
Labour dispute
The insured employee may still file an ILOE claim even if a labour dispute is ongoing post termination, but the insurer may suspend or reject payment, until the courts resolve the dispute, especially if the reason for termination is contested. The outcome of the labour court proceedings can directly affect eligibility.
- Abdullah Ishnaneh, Partner, BSA Law
