KHARTOUM: Sudan’s President Omar Bashir said on Thursday that the construction of Ethiopia’s controversial Grand Renaissance Dam on the Nile River would not impact water supplies to Egypt as feared by Cairo.
Visiting Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, for his part, said the project was a “win-win” for the peoples of all three countries if it was not politicized.
Construction of the massive dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia has poisoned relations between Cairo and Addis Ababa, with Egypt fearing its share of water from the Nile will be hit once the project is completed.
“We are fully committed to ensure that the Egyptian share of the Nile water will not be affected because of the building of the Renaissance Dam,” Bashir said at a joint press conference in Khartoum with Desalegn.
Egypt, which is almost totally reliant on the Nile for agriculture and drinking water, says it has “historic rights” to the Nile guaranteed by treaties from 1929 and 1959.
The treaties grant it 87 percent of the river’s flow, as well as the power to veto upstream projects, according to Cairo.
The Blue and the White Nile rivers converge in Khartoum and from there run north into Egypt as the Nile.
Desalegn called for the issue of the dam not to be politicized.
“This is more of a technical issue and it is not political,” he said. “If we don’t politicize it, then we will reach a conclusion that is a win-win for all our people.”
Bashir said Khartoum too had concerns initially about the safety of the dam, which when complete will be the largest in Africa.
“If anything happens to the dam, it will be crisis for Sudan because of the huge amount of water the dam will be storing,” said Bashir.
“But Ethiopia has made some changes to the dam’s structure, and now we are satisfied.”
French firms Artelia and BRL are currently carrying out technical studies on the project.
The dam is designed to feed a hydroelectric project that would produce 6,000 megawatts of power — tantamount to six nuclear-powered plants.
Ethiopia began building the dam in 2012 and initially expected to commission it in 2017. Ethiopian media reports say that only about 60 percent of the construction has so far been completed.
Sudan’s president aims to ease Egypt concerns over Nile dam
Sudan’s president aims to ease Egypt concerns over Nile dam
Egypt’s El-Sisi urges accelerated aid into Gaza Strip
CAIRO: Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi pointed on Wednesday to the “importance of accelerating the entry of urgent humanitarian aid” into Gaza as he welcomed a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
El-Sisi, whose country neighbors Gaza and whose government helped negotiate the truce, said the deal came after “strenuous efforts over more than a year of Egyptian, Qatari and US mediation.”
Syrians work to avoid return to dictatorship
- Exiled activists have returned home and Damascus public spaces are abuzz with previously banned meetings
DAMASCUS: In a Damascus courtyard, Syrian activists brainstormed strategies to ensure their country does not return to authoritarianism, in a scene unimaginable under president Bashar Assad’s rule.
Since opposition fighters ousted the longtime ruler last month, the Syrian capital’s public spaces have been abuzz with previously banned civil society meetings.
Exiled activists have returned to the country for the first time in years, often leading to moving reunions with friends who stayed behind throughout the civil war.
Now, with Assad out, the activists who spearheaded the revolt want to ensure their voices count.
In the arched courtyard of a traditional Damascus home, Syrian activist Sawsan Abou Zainedin recounted meeting the country’s new leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa earlier this month.
“We stressed the essential role that civil society needs to play in the political transition,” said the director of a coalition of dozens of nongovernmental groups called Madaniya.
And “we insisted on the need to not only name people from the same camp” to form the interim authorities, she added of the Jan. 4 meeting.
Al-Sharaa, who leads a group called Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, has named people close to him to key ministerial posts.
His armed group severed all ties with Al-Qaeda years ago, and his authorities have sought to reassure Syrians and the international community that they will respect the rights of minorities.
The new Damascus authorities have suspended the Assad-era constitution and the parliament.
Al-Sharaa last month said it could take four years before elections could be held, and up to three years to rewrite the constitution.
He said HTS would be disbanded at a so-called national dialogue conference to bring together Syrians of all political stripes.
His Foreign Minister, Asaad Al-Shaibani, said last week a committee is to be set up to prepare the meeting, for which no date has been announced.
Abou Zainedin said she and Asfari had requested “absolute transparency” in the preparation of that conference.
The Damascus authorities have appointed new officials to head other bodies too.
Lawyer Abdulhay Sayed said the conference would be “crucial” as long as representatives of civil society and unions were invited. Their inclusion would allow for “checks and balances” to prevent a return to authoritarianism, Sayed said.
The lawyer is among more than 300 people to have called for free and fair elections at his profession’s bar association after the new authorities replaced an Assad loyalist with a man of their choice.
“We’re in a constitutional void, in a transition period after 62 years of the Baath party’s rule,” Sayed said.
The national dialogue “conference has to establish a roadmap for an electoral law toward electing a constituent assembly in a year,” he added. “This assembly will be tasked with drawing up a permanent constitution and later could become a parliament.”
Syrian feminists also insisted on participating in all discussions toward building the country at a gathering earlier this month.
They are concerned that HTS’s ideology will exclude women from politics and public life.
Lawyer Joumana Seif said women had “a great role to play” in the new Syria and wanted to “actively” take part in the national conference. “We dream of rule of law,” said the rights advocate, whose father parliamentarian Riad Seif was jailed under Assad’s rule.
Wajdan Nassif, a writer and activist, spoke to fellow feminists after returning from exile.
“We don’t want a new oppressor ... We don’t want to see any more prisons,” she said.
“Syrian women need to take part (in discussions) in their own right ... We don’t want a repeat of the past.”
The journalists behind Sarkozy’s Libya corruption woes
- Sarkozy, a conservative with two convictions in other cases, has always maintained he is innocent and points to his key role in ousting Qaddafi
PARIS: Every day at the Paris court trying ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy over alleged corruption with Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, the journalists who helped uncover the extraordinary allegations are following proceedings.
Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske have spent 14 years documenting the links between Sarkozy’s entourage and the late Qaddafi, who is alleged to have funded the rightwinger’s 2007 election campaign with cash and offshore bank accounts.
The pair from the Mediapart news outlet have traveled the world for secret meetings with sources, tracked money to a host of tax havens, and been sued five times over their reporting — always unsuccessfully.
What is arguably the most shocking corruption trial in modern French history is the pinnacle of their work, sparking pride but also pressure for a duo with a track record in uncovering financial crime. “When you see a former president and three former ministers sat together on four folding chairs, with the justice system asserting ‘you were corrupted by a dictator,’ you know you are a witness to a historic event,” Arfi said in an interview.
“I don’t know what the outcome will be — it’s not down to me to say if they will be found guilty or not — but it shows that our work was not for nothing.”
Pushed on whether he thought the trial would have taken place without his and Laske’s relentless digging, he awkwardly conceded that “they played a role.”
“With all due modesty, without our investigation, prosecutors might not have opened their case,” added Arfi, the 43-year-old son of a police officer whose regular scoops have helped turn Mediapart into a profitable independent news site.
The Libya investigation began in 2011 when an individual contacted the newsroom, offering confidential information.
Arfi and Laske traveled abroad — Arfi withholds all of the details to protect the source — and received a computer hard drive said to belong to an infamous Franco Lebanese arms dealer called Ziad Takieddine.
When they returned to their hotel, they realized they had been given a potential goldmine — “Ali Baba’s cave,” Arfi says — containing Takieddine’s personal diary, emails, bank transfers and even photographs.
While French investigators were already looking at Takieddine’s role as a middleman in French arms deals in the 1990s, Arfi and Laske began verifying and confirming his more recent dealings with Qaddafi.
“We didn’t understand everything to start with. There are bits that are like pieces of the puzzle that only make sense once you have found the others,” he explained.
The first articles on Takieddine’s ties to Sarkozy allies made a few waves but the allegations would become more serious as Arfi and Laske dug deeper.
In 2012, during the presidential election campaign in which Sarkozy was seeking a second term, they published a document that caused a political earthquake — and a lot of professional soul-searching.
“We published in the middle of an election campaign, which is a difficult time for a news outlet,” Arfi explained. “But withholding it would have been worse.”
The document, handed over by a source with access to Libyan archives after the 2011 fall of Qaddafi, purported to show an offer of $50 million from the dictator to fund Sarkozy’s campaign, signed and stamped by Libyan intelligence chief Moussa Koussa. Sarkozy lost the election and sued, alleging the document was fake.
It, along with other evidence unearthed by Mediapart, will be presented during the trial which is scheduled to last until April 10.
Takieddine’s hard drive was also handed over to police by Arfi’s source.
Sarkozy, 69, alleges that he is the victim of a conspiracy between politically biased judges, police and left-leaning Mediapart.
In his first comments in court last week, Sarkozy called Arfi and Karl Laske “thugs” and angrily told judges that “you will never ever find a single euro, a single Libyan cent in my campaign.”
Arfi claims Sarkozy has been successful in deflecting public attention, using the same playbook as other right-wing populists.
Talks underway to open Egypt-Gaza border crossing for aid: Egypt state media
CAIRO: Egyptian state media reported Wednesday that coordination was underway to “open the Palestinian Rafah crossing to allow the entry of international aid” into Gaza, citing an Egyptian security source.
Egypt was “preparing to bring in the largest possible amount of aid to the Gaza Strip,” following news of a ceasefire deal reached between Israel and Hamas, state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram said.
It cited a report from Al-Qahera News, which is closely linked to state intelligence.
Mediators said Israel and Hamas agreed Wednesday to a ceasefire and a deal to release hostages held in Gaza, but Israel cautioned that the final sticking points needed to be ironed out.
Pressure to put an end to the fighting had ratcheted up in recent days, as mediators Qatar, Egypt and the United States intensified efforts to cement an agreement.
The Rafah border crossing has been closed since May, when the Israeli military seized the area and closed the Palestinian side of the crossing.
Egypt has repeatedly said it will only recognize Palestinian authority over the crossing.
Al-Qahera News on Wednesday said the framework agreement comprised of three interconnected phases.
The first would last 42 days and involve a temporary halt to military operations on both sides.
It would also require the withdrawal of Israeli forces away from population centers and toward Gaza’s borders, as well as the temporary cessation of flyovers by Israeli warplanes and reconnaissance aircraft for 10 hours each day.
International reaction to Gaza ceasefire deal
Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal on Wednesday, mediators said, pausing a devastating 15-month war in Gaza and raising the possibility of winding down an Israeli military operation that has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians.
The deal, coming after weeks of painstaking negotiations in the Doha, promises the release in phases of dozens of hostages held by Hamas since it led an attack on Israel in October 2023 that killed at least 1,200 people.
International response to the deal, which is yet to be confirmed by Israel, overwhelmingly welcomed the agreement.
US President Elect Donald Trump welcomed the deal ahead of US official comment and focussed his comments on the Israeli hostages.
"We have a deal for the hostages in the Middle East. They will be released shortly. Thank you!" he said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told reporters in Ankara that the ceasefire deal was an important step for regional stability. Fidan also said Turkish efforts for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would continue.
More to follow ...
*With AP and Reuters
