Modern Middle East
Israel & West Bank
Paranoid fears about Nile water cutoffs by upstream nations, particularly Ethiopia, have been ingrained in the Egyptian psyche for many centuries, and at times became feverish, one example being when mass famine in 1200 caused by disastrous, low floods killed one-third of Cairo’s population. Verdi played upon this angst in Aïda by featuring two tragic lovers caught up in a war between Egypt and Ethiopia; in 1875–1876 his story was partly enacted as a bloody reality when Egyptian soldiers were annihilated by 60,000 Ethiopian troops after making several disastrous imperialistic forays into Ethiopian territory. The triumphant achievement of the Aswan Dam, ironically, exacerbated Egypt’s national security fears by whetting their poor, upstream neighbors’ desire to utilize more Nile waters for giant dams of their own. Thus, while most of the world viewed Egyptian policy through the lens of the Suez Canal and the Arab-Israelis wars, Egyptian leaders themselves were clear-sightedly focused on their own overriding national security objective—safeguarding their disproportionate consumption of Nile waters—and enlarging the river’s overall available flow at Aswan. In May 1978, just prior to making his historic peace treaty with Israel, and with a telescoped eye on Ethiopia, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat declared with typical bluntness: “We depend upon the Nile 100 percent in our life, so if anyone, at any moment thinks to deprive us of our life we shall never hesitate to go to war because it is a matter of life or death.”
From the dawn of ancient Egyptian civilization, farming along the Nile had operated unchanged as a natural, one crop, seasonal basin agricultural system able to support a peak population of 4 to 5 million. That ceiling had doubled in the nineteenth century with the introduction of barrages and year-round, multicrop irrigation. Under the advances of British hydrologists after 1882, population soared again. It was 25 million on the eve of the Aswan high dam’s opening.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British-built low Aswan Dam perpetuated the Nile basin’s natural, self-sustaining irrigation system by permitting the passage of silt during flood season, while also protecting Egypt for the first time from disastrously large inundations. Yet the dam’s reservoir system was too small to store enough water to deliver Egypt from multiyear droughts. In the ensuing decades, British water engineers conceived plans for massive storage dams in highland lake plateaus of equatorial East Africa and at Lake Tana in Ethiopia where evaporation rates are low. They also attempted to augment the Nile’s total flow by building a long diversion canal to bypass the huge, stagnant Sudd swamps in British-controlled southern Sudan, where the White Nile loses half its volume to evaporation. But when the era of British hegemony yielded to national independence after World War II, Britain’s ambitious Nile plumbing projects were still mostly unfulfilled. With the end of British rule, the basin devolved politically into a fractious cluster of impoverished watershed states unable to undertake cooperative Nile development. The positive sum potential of maximizing the river’s productive resources through optimal, nonpoliticized, placement of waterworks vanished with it.
The father of the Aswan Dam, Egyptian president Nasser, had come to power in 1952 with the transcendent dream that a giant dam at Aswan would, at a single stroke, give Egypt economic control of the Nile waters, insulate it from the caprices of nature and the disruptive political machinations of upstream Nile nations, deliver food security and economic modernization, and restore the independent, sovereign glory of Egyptian and Arab civilization. When American secretary of state Dulles withdrew his previous support, Nasser had in 1956 signed a deal with the Soviet Union to build the high dam, which quickly became the incarnate symbol of swelling Egyptian patriotism and a new political phenomenon, pan-Arabism. Although the Soviets desired to make a successful Aswan a beckoning symbol of socialist possibility for the entire third world, the first two years after construction began in 1960 seemed to confirm Dulles’s doubt that the Russians had the technical proficiency to meet the challenge. The dam fell behind schedule; despite the availability of a large, cheap Egyptian workforce, less than 10 percent of the rock and sand needed to fill it had been excavated. Nasser got the project on track, however, by breaking his pledge to the Russians and buying superior Western construction equipment to finish the job.
Nasser did not live to see the completion of the Aswan Dam. He died five months before its official opening in January 1971. By 1975 it became fully operational. The high dam itself was a landmark engineering achievement, and influential political symbol of hope for Egypt and newly independent third world nations everywhere. Standing over 360 feet high and sweeping in a great curve for over two miles, it was the world’s highest rock-filled dam. If it were ever to burst, the torrential cascade downstream would strike with the destructive fury of a biblical plague, obliterating modern Egyptian civilization in its path. Its immense, 344-mile-long, eight-mile-wide Lake Nasser reservoir, which submerged land and ancient monuments and displaced over 100,000 inhabitants of southern Egypt and Sudan’s Nubia as it filled, stored over two times the average annual flow of the Nile. With some 30 times more storage capacity than the low dam it replaced, it protected Egypt for the first time in history against both extremes of drought and flood. Its 12 generators produced half of Egypt’s electricity when it opened. The effective gain in controlled Nile flow increased cultivated watered-desert cropland by 20 percent, as well as more extensive double and triple cropping on existing farmland. The ultimate proof of the dam’s success was that from the time it opened to 2005, Egypt’s population tripled to 74 million.
Critics who warned that it was the wrong dam at the wrong place due to its many technical and environmental drawbacks were drowned out in the triumphal nationalism. Nasser’s insistence that it be located in the scorching desert on Egyptian national territory, for instance, caused its giant reservoir to lose a huge amount to evaporation—12 percent of the Nile’s estimated average 84 billion cubic meter flow at Aswan. The high dam also blocked the passage of fertilizing silt, transforming the Nile from a natural, self-sustaining irrigation system to an artificially managed river totally dependent on heavy chemical fertilizer and for the first time prone to salinization and waterlogging. Due to the dam, the natural Nile of history died at Aswan. Like America’s Colorado, the Egyptian Nile became a glorified irrigation ditch in which every drop was regulated. But when the dam opened with fanfare in the 1970s such problems were but an afterthought. They were left for future generations to contend with.
Indeed, Nasser’s monumental legacy at Aswan seemed immediately providential by insulating Egypt from the terrible regional drought of 1979–1988 that resulted from the lowest Niles of the twentieth century. At a time when over a million upriver Ethiopians and an unknown number of Sudanese died of famine, Egypt’s growth continued unabated. During the decade-long drought, the average volume of Nile water reaching Aswan plunged 40 percent below normal. By July 1988, Lake Nasser contained so little water that it was within a dozen feet of reaching the total shutoff levels for the dam’s hydroelectric turbines, and was able to produce less than one-fifth of Egypt’s needs, forcing the country to rely more heavily on costly fossil fuels. Most alarming of all, Egypt was down to its last seven months’ reserve of irrigation water. Then, in August 1988, heavy rains providentially began to pour down in Ethiopia and Sudan. The great drought ended with the highest Nile flood of the century. Over the next few years, the man-made lake behind Aswan began gradually to refill. Egypt was saved.
The great 1980s Nile drought, and the humanitarian tragedy it wreaked on Egypt’s southern neighbors, highlighted Egypt’s paramount national security priority in securing its near-monopolistic usage of Nile waters and the Aswan Dam’s linchpin role in delivering it. At the same time, it painfully exposed the dam’s military vulnerability, and the unimaginable devastation that would occur if its towering barrier were breeched in an attack. This double-edged geopolitical reality of the dam was pivotal to the historic decision of Nasser’
s successor, Anwar el-Sadat, to boldly break Arab taboo by traveling to Jerusalem and set the stage for signing the 1979 peace treaty with despised enemy Israel. Egypt had been the key Arab military leader in the wars with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and, under Sadat’s presidency, 1973. Yet despite some initial military success, Egypt saw the latter war end with Israel again astride the Suez Canal and holding enough air power superiority to make its rumored readiness since 1967 to bomb the Aswan Dam a palpable threat.
Although it infuriated his Arab brethen, Sadat’s strategic decision to make peace with Israel brilliantly secured Egypt’s paramount national security interest over the waters of the Nile. At a stroke, it earned Egypt a diplomatic windfall of international goodwill, made it the second largest recipient (after Israel) of U.S. foreign aid, safeguarded the Dam, the Suez Canal and Egyptian territory against Israeli attack, and freed Egypt to redirect its otherwise superior regional military and diplomatic muscle to assert its commanding influence over developments in the vital Nile basin. Upon making peace with Israel, Sadat in 1979 famously highlighted Egypt’s shift in national security focus by declaring, “The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” He even briefly broached the idea of a peace pipeline to bring a small amount of Nile water to Palestine and Israel, in an effort to ease water tensions and facilitate peace between Palestinians and Israelis.
In his memoirs of the period, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Sadat’s minister for foreign affairs, explicitly confirmed, “Preserving Nile waters for Egypt was not only an economic and hydrological issue but a question of national survival…Our security depended on the south more than on the east, in spite of Israel’s military power.”
Sadat’s strategic focus on the Nile’s water was also informed by strident declarations of intent to dam the headwaters of the Blue Nile from Ethiopia’s new communist military leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had seized power in 1974. Adding to Sadat’s unease was that Israel had been sending military support to Ethiopia throughout the 1970s to help it battle internal and neighboring rivals and that the two nations had long-standing affinities through Judaism, history, and a suspicion of Egypt. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began surveying Ethiopia’s immense, untapped, hydraulic potential at the behest of Emperor Haile Selassie. Still stinging from Nasser’s alliance with the Soviets on Aswan, America’s Cold War leaders had been happy to oblige. The result was an exhaustive, 17-volume bureau report identifying over two dozen irrigation and hydroelectric power projects, the latter with the potential to generate three times the hydropower of Aswan. By capturing and storing Blue Nile and tributary waters in the cool Ethiopian highlands where evaporation loss was only one-third as great as at Aswan, the bureau concluded, Ethiopian projects could vastly boost the region’s hydroelectric output and actually increase the overall available net downstream flow to Sudan and Egypt. In theory, it seemed like a win-win situation for all countries. But it put Ethiopia, not Egypt, in ultimate control of the amount of water reaching Aswan—precisely the nightmare that had haunted Egyptians for centuries. Egypt would have none of it. Desperately poor Ethiopia could not finance such ambitious projects itself. Through its far superior international diplomatic political influence, Egypt wielded an effective veto over Ethiopia’s multilateral financing and other potential avenues of water development it didn’t abide.
Despite the fact that Ethiopia was the source of four-fifths of the waters of the Egyptian Nile, Egypt claimed an historic right of prior use over the lion’s share of the river’s volume. Upon launching the Aswan Dam project in 1956, Nasser had simultaneously moved to try to secure a Nile water sharing agreement with its southern neighbor, newly independent Sudan, within whose border part of the Aswan reservoir had to be situated. In late 1958, he found an accommodating negotiating partner in a kindred military Islamic leader who had just seized power in Sudan.
The result was the Nile Waters Agreement of 1959. With breathtaking audacity, the accord divided up all the waters of the Nile between Egypt and Sudan: Egypt got three-quarters, or 55.5 billion cubic meters, of the estimated available flow after evaporation; Sudan received one-quarter, or 18.5 billion cubic meters, which, at the time, was far more than it could use. So Egypt effectively got use of the bonanza. The 1959 agreement totally excluded the water claims of Ethiopia and the seven other upriver states—it was, in effect, a Muslim Arab solution involuntarily imposed upon the sub-Saharan Nile basin. Moreover, Egypt and Sudan agreed to move jointly against upstream nations that acted to challenge them. Ethiopia, which used but 1 percent of the Nile basin’s water, vociferously rejected the treaty’s validity. In 1956 and in 1957 Selassie had obtained public declarations of support for Ethiopia’s Nile water rights from American president Eisenhower and vice president Richard Nixon, respectively. Yet in practice Ethiopia was powerless to prevent Egypt’s water grab. In the late 1970s, these tensions flared into bellicose exchanges between Sadat and Selassie’s communist successor, Mengitsu. Sadat nakedly threatened military reprisals if Ethiopia dared touch the waters of the Nile. The Arabic press in Egypt was soon aflame with anti-Ethiopian rhetoric, including menacing revisionist interpretations of the prophet Muhammad’s well-known directive to Muslims to leave Christian Ethiopia alone because its Axumite king had granted refuge to his early followers when they were forced to flee Mecca in AD 615.
Ancient, proud, and never occupied or colonized, Ethiopia’s civilization dated back to the days of the Pharaohs. It was to the Ethiopian Land of Punt in the Horn of Africa that Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BC sent her famous Red Sea expedition that brought back myrrh and live frankincense trees. Ethiopian lore told that King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’s son brought the Ark of the Covenant to Axum in northern Ethiopia for safekeeping, where it purportedly remains under guard to this day. The Axumite Empire rose to prominence as an important link in the sea trade that Greek sailors opened around 100 BC between Egypt and India; at its peak its borders reached to southern Egypt and crossed the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula. The empire adopted Christianity in the same period of Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintained close ties to the Christian Copts in Alexandria until the mid-twentieth century. Despite Muhammad’s goodwill, Ethiopia began to decline after the seventh century as Islamic sailors took over more and more of the best trade routes to India and the Orient. From the mid-twelfth to early sixteenth centuries, Ethiopia underwent a golden period of expansion and revival, which put renewed emphasis on its linkages to Jerusalem, King Solomon, and its destiny as the legitimate successor to the Israelities. But by the late twentieth century, it was one of the world’s poorest countries with life expectancies of only fifty-three years. The extremely difficult, hydrological conditions on its highland plateaus were one of its most formidable obstacles to economic development. Rains were seasonal and varied unpredictably, while the flash nature of the muddy Blue Nile, which roiled torrentially a hundred feet high in its gorges in wet season and trickled almost uselessly in dry season, made dam control, bridge building, and other waterworks highly complicated, and several times costlier than comparable projects in gentler, temperate, and invariably richer nations.
The confrontation between Ethiopia and Egypt abated after Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by Muslim fundamentalists. The new Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, pursued the more conciliatory approach long advocated by a senior Egyptian adviser, Boutros-Ghali, who favored joint, cooperative development of the Nile basin in order to derive its positive sum potential of increased storage capacity, reduced evaporation loss, untapped hydroelectricity, and, above all, more Nile water for irrigation.
Despite Egypt’s more diplomatic tone, all the Nile basin plans and technological and financial assistance it offered remained inviolably predicated upon the other river states’ acquiescence to the one-sided 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, and gave Egypt an overgenerous share of all new water supply. Political and environmental obstacles also
impeded the Nile basin development that was undertaken. Work on the 224-mile-long Egypt-Sudan diversion canal to nearly double White Nile flow by re-rerouting southern Sudan’s huge Sudd swamps was abruptly terminated in 1984 with only 70 percent excavated when it was attacked by black, southern civil war rebels who regarded it as a disenfranchising theft of a vital local natural resource and climate regulator for the benefit of Sudan’s northern Muslim rulers and their Egyptian ally. In early 1990 Egypt blocked an African Development Bank loan for Ethiopia over concerns that it would consume too much water. Not surprisingly, Boutros-Ghali’s Nile diplomacy yielded no major breakthroughs. The decade ended almost as it had begun. When Boutros-Ghali learned that Israeli hydrologists and engineers were doing feasibility studies on a number of dam sites in Ethiopia, with the potential to store as much as half the volume of water reaching Aswan, he summoned Ethiopia’s ambassador to the foreign office in Cairo in November 1989 and sternly warned that any damming of the Blue Nile would be taken as an act of war by Egypt unless it had its consent.
Another cycle of water diplomacy began auspiciously in the early 1990s. Egypt and a new democratic government in Ethiopia led by Meles Zenawi agreed in principle that Ethiopia was entitled to an equitable share of Nile waters and to work cooperatively on Nile development. In 1999 Nile countries launched the World Bank–supported Nile Basin Initiative, a model in use in many international river basins around the world. Yet the real motivation behind the diplomacy was Egypt’s own ambitious plans to water its desert to ease the explosive population pressures building along its narrow, fertile Nile corridor. In 1997 it had inaugurated the controversial twenty-year New Valley Project, a large water transfer scheme akin to the one that helped transform Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s that required the diversion of an additional 5 billion cubic meters from Lake Nasser through an ancient channel of the Nile—water Egypt did not have and which it needed the cooperation of upriver states to obtain. To entice Ethiopia’s cooperation, Egypt offered support for Ethiopian hydropower dams, terracing of Ethiopia’s highlands that improved water usage, augmented river flows, and reduced troublesome silt loads arriving at Aswan, and for some small-scale irrigation projects. But any water storage that significantly enlarged Ethiopia’s capacity to expand its less than 1 percent of irrigated farmland was still not open to serious negotiation.
Steven Solomon Page 44