4 COMMENTS
In move that signals thawing military relations with Uganda, Egypt was last week finalising plans to post a military attaché to its embassy in Kampala.
Egyptian Ambassador Ahmed Abdel Aziz Mostafa said Uganda stood to reap benefits from the move, including enhanced military training and advice. The Ugandan military would also diversify its expertise and avoid overreliance on “certain” technology.
“We have a delegation already here finalising the arrangements, which means Egypt and Uganda are entering a new phase of their relationship at the moment,” said Ambassador Ahmed during a visit to The Observer.
Accompanied by First Secretary Mayada Essam, Ahmed hoped that enhanced cooperation would help Uganda build a strong national defence institution, borrowing a leaf from the Egyptian Army, which he said never interferes in politics.
The reference may sound rather odd, given that the Egyptian military literally removed the elected Islamist president Mohammed Morsi only five months ago.
Asked if by this action, the Egyptian military was not rejecting democracy, Ahmed said Morsi was removed by a “very democratic” protest of 33 million Egyptians keen to protect 7,000 years of history.
“It’s the people, not the army,” Ahmed said. “Morsi was taking the country into darkness. He was changing the character of the country. Instead of being Egyptian, he wanted it to be Islamic.”
Nile and survival
Ambassador Ahmed was also asked about the standoff over the river Nile basin, where his country has refused to sign the Entebbe Accord, a cooperative framework agreement on sharing of the Nile waters. The agreement was first signed in 2010 and has since been endorsed by six states.
Egypt has repeatedly cited treaties dating back to 1929 and 1959, entitling it to as much as 87 percent of the Nile’s flow, including power to veto harmful projects in upstream countries. But riparian states have described the agreements as colonial, and Egypt’s insistence on them as imperialistic.
Ambassador Ahmed said Egypt was willing to sign the Entebbe Accord but the other states had to first include a clause committing themselves to avoid schemes that could hurt Egypt’s interests.
Ahmed, who previously worked in Egypt’s ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, argued that if Tanzania and Kenya started taking so much water from Lake Victoria that the electricity dams in Jinja stopped working, Uganda, too, would protest.
Egypt is involved in a standoff with Ethiopia, which wants to build a 6,000 Megawatt Renaissance power dam on the Blue Nile. Ahmed explained that despite technical evidence that the dam would deprive Egypt of dangerously huge amounts of water (up to 70 billion cubic metres over several years), Ethiopia was insisting on going ahead with the $4.7bn dam.
“And this is one of four dams they want to build on the Nile,” Ahmed said. “These will make Egypt a desert and children will start playing football [where the Nile now is].”
With neither country apparently willing to compromise, what will Egypt do?
Ahmed: “When it is a matter of survival, no nation can accept its civilization to be destroyed because another nation needs to develop. We are trying to make the Ethiopians to come to their senses and discuss the matter logically.”
The ambassador was asked if his country could go to war over this “matter of survival”, and his answer was diplomatic but firm: “No. It is not our plan to go to extremes. We shall continue trying to talk sense to the Ethiopians. And if that does not work, we shall talk to friendly nations like Uganda to talk to the Ethiopians.”
That may well explain why it is in Egypt’s interest to build closer diplomatic ties with Uganda, as evidenced with the impending arrival of the defence attaché.
