CHAPTER THREE

THE PSYCHO-POLITICAL HURDLE OF PROPAGANDA

The Adverse Impact of  Propaganda on  the Climate of Negotiations 

Several factors have contributed to the delayed negotiations on the Nile. For instance, the adverse effect of negative propaganda on the psycho-political mood for negotiations was significant. Nevertheless, considerable improvement have been made during the Mubarak presidency, compared with the period before it. 

Earlier the adverse polemics of Egyptian leaders had become roadblock to negotiations.  Some of the Egyptian leaders had, in fact, tried to flex their military muscle to prevent  Ethiopia from engaging in development work on the Nile.  For instance, Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat is quoted as having said, “Egypt would never permit Ethiopia to exploit the waters of the Blue Nile”⁶ and concluded by appealing to Arab countries to shoulder their historical responsibilities. 

In the above coded message which lends itself to different interpretations, Sadat may have intended to convey at least two key messages.  One is to appeal to the Arab States to emulate the example of Egyptian support to the Palestinians.  His second message may have been intended to appeal to Arab countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and other, to follow Egypt’s example and support the Eritrean insurrection in order to destabilize Ethiopia. Similar propaganda was paraded through the national news and print media and external broadcasts which had listeners and readers in the Arabic world as target groups. 

At times, similar propaganda had also found outlets in English newspapers and magazines. One very recent example of this is the coverage on Ethio-Egyptian relation carried in the paper Al Hayat published on August 16, 1996 in Lodon.⁷ 

Any one who reads the article published in Al Hayat will not find it difficult to form some opinion on its content.  The general impression one gets is that the article has an official blessing, and that it is intended to elicit official Ethiopian reaction.  Further, its time of release suggests that it was clearly intended to drum up Arab League support for the Egyptian views on the Nile.  

Coming as it did at a time when the Arab world was at a loss about which strategy to adopt on the deadlocked Israeli-Palestinian negotiations which following the victory of the Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Natenyahu, it was intended to have a better attention in the Arab world. 

The Nile also generally seems to have had an upper hand in other contexts. For instance, the above reaction came at a time when Ethiopia and Egypt were collaborating over sanctions to be applied on the Sudan. But all things taken into account, it is by no means surprising that propaganda has generally had an adverse effect on the mood for negotiations.  

The above was, for instance, true of the case of the assassination attempt on the life of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak which the Ethiopian security officers brilliantly foiled. The immediate reaction of sources close to Government circles was that the rescue operation was the work of Mr. Mubarak’s body guards. It thus took the strong reaction of the Ethiopian Government for the Egyptians to concede the truth most reluctantly and agree on strategies of hunting down the terrorists. Such propaganda is not likely to strengthen the goodwill for negotiations. Another example is Egypt’s change of heart on the comprehensive economic and military sanctions proposed to be applied on Sudan which flew in the face of the UN resolution tabled by Ethiopia. 

Propaganda has also played a negative role on the chances of improvement of the climate of cooperation on the Nile which could have led to some form of modus vivendi. One  reason for such reaction is that Egypt is unduly anxious about potential action by the Nile countries including Ethiopia.  Such reaction surfaces even when the most minimalist suggestion of using a fraction of the water of the Nile which will not have any bearing on the total flow of water to Egypt is raised. 

At times, such propaganda might be prompted by fear of the historical links between  Ethiopia and Israel.  An attempt to give the Nile issue a Zionist garb, for instance, surfaces in the Al Hayat article published at the time of acrimony in the Arab world. Mention is even made of a deal between Israel and Ethiopia. 

The Egyptian Government is fully cognizant of the fact that a deal between Ethiopia and Israel is non-existent. In fact, contrary to the suggestion of Al Hayat, some Middle Eastern analysts suggest that the idea of building a canal to transport the water of the Nile to the Gaza Strip was taken up during deliberation at the Camp-David Accord of 1978 and 1979. 

Naturally, propaganda that rouses emotions of national fervour and territorial sovereignty is likely to invite a similar reaction.  Hence, Ethiopia’s response was one of accusing Egypt of expansionist ambitions; and of "creating the so-called Eritrean Liberation Front, of training and arming the terrorists assembled in that organization to help Cairo achieve its designs, at Ethiopia’s expense, of realizing its dream of controlling the sources of the Nile; and of beating cold war drums to use first the Soviet Union and then the United States for the realization of its sinister agenda.” It was also noted that in the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt was an ally of the USSR, when the name of the game was fighting “Zionism and Western Imperialism.”⁸ 

Unfortunately the hysteria of the Egyptian leaders was not deterred by change of ideology or ideological alignment.  It, thus, took long for the Egyptian leadership to switch from the so-called anti-imperialist polemics to a pro-west one. 

When Sadat, who served as Nasser’s deputy, came to power, “Egypt’s policy changed 360 degrees and yesterday’s anti-imperialists’ became  champions of western ‘democracy’ and free enterprise. In both cases cold war drums were beaten but the drums cleverly concealed one essential truth¾preventing Ethiopia from building dams on the Blue Nile River.”⁹

However, despite the de-stabilizing effect of the Eritrean conflict, the first phase of Ethiopia’s $300 million Tana Beles Project began in 1988.  The project was aimed at doubling Ethiopia’s hydroelectric power and to provide irrigation for a settlement scheme that would take water from Lake Tana to the Beles River across which five dams were to be built.  Some 200,000 farmers were also to be settled after the completion of this project.¹⁰

However, Egypt blocked a loan from the African Development Bank because Cairo feared that the Tana Beles project could harm Egypt. 

Thus, propaganda also had sometimes taken the character of falsification or distortion of facts.  For instance, when Water Resources Minister Abdul Hadi Radi informed a stormy parliamentary session in Cairo that the drought was due to meager rainfall in Ethiopia and not due to the diversion of the waters of the river Nile, he was not telling the whole truth.¹¹   

Indeed, the long drought in Ethiopia had lowered the water in the Aswan High Dam’s Lake Nasser to levels that threatened the complete stoppage of the turbines.  While moving to impede Ethiopia’s expanded use of Blue Nile waters, he should have also mentioned that Egypt had began an expanded use of its own.¹² 

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It must also be noted that digging had begun for the Salam (peace) Canal¾at a cost of $1.4 billion. The project was aimed to carry 12.5 million cubic meters a day of fresh water from the Nile into the Northern Sinai, by traversing the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in order to irrigate 400,000 acres of new farmland.¹³  

The canal is aimed to open the way for three million or more Egyptians to eventually populate a region that is now home to only some 250,000. This is the second largest public works project in Egypt’s history; second only to the Aswan High Dam.  The massive project entails constructing a canal from Lake Nasser to carry water for a distance of 1856 miles to the north west.  The project could cost as much as $90 billion; by 2000 it is supposed to bring under cultivation 500,000 acres of land around the Bars Oasis.  “We must expand beyond the narrow valley we have lived in for centuries.  Our population is now 60 million and there are only 8 million acres of agricultural land,” says Hosni Mubarak. Egyptian scientists like Farous Elba oppose the project on the ground that the waters of the Nile are not inexhaustible.  Tony Allen of the University of London calls the plan a “national fantasy.”¹⁴ 

It is also suggested that the issue of the canal was taken up during the Egyptian-Israeli discussion over prospects of economic co-operation in the Middle-East in 1993. In fact, some sources allege that Mr. Arafat had pointedly suggested that the reaction of Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on the idea of building the said canal to pump water from the Nile to Gaza Strip be solicited. 

This background partly explains the strong desire of the Egyptian Government to prevent Ethiopia from utilizing the Nile waters clearly mirrored in Al Hayat. Further, it underpins that it inevitably generates counter-reactions which colour the psycho-political mood for effective negotiations. We need only discern between the lines of the following passage to understand the intended message. One of the paragraphs in Al Hayat reads:  

The Ethiopian government under President Meles Zenawi sees its future relation with Egypt as the most important component of its foreign relations.  Predicting future tension in its relations with Egypt, it has designed strategies based on various strategic axes: defense-oriented military power, economic strength, arranging relations with active countries inside and outside the region, and preparing for building dams to control the Nile water as Turkey has done with the Euphrates water flowing to Iraq and Syria, except the Ethiopian water plans are more shrewd and clear of the Turkish chauvinism. ¹⁵

CHAPTER FOUR

REGIONAL AND SUB-REGIONAL ROADBLOCKS  TO AN ACCORD 

The Middle Eastern Leverage of Egypt 

Heretofore, Egypt has successfully used its Middle Eastern role and international clout which derives from the first condition to obtain the support of some conservative Arab states and Mediterranean countries and a few countries of the East and West for different reasons.  Some of them are:

1. Its Middle Eastern role as a historical provider of essential leadership to the Arab world under the charismatic leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser;

2. Its role of mediation under President Mubarak in the  search for a negotiated solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has made considerable progress, but is still not entirely problem-free;

 To the above may be added two recent sub-regional roles of mediation which Egypt unsuccessfully tried to play.  They include:

3. The Somali Crisis in which Egypt tried to play a role by supporting the Ali Mahdi group against General Aideed with the assistance of the U.S. and the UN which had an immediate negative effect on Ethiopia’s negotiation efforts; and

4. Egypt’s desire to carve out a role of mediation in the conflict between Yemen and Eritrea over some Red Sea islands;

5. Egypt's overtures for membership in IGAD which most of the Horn countries were wary to accept due to its covert and overt design wanting to play the role of the Big Brother in the politics of the Horn sub-region which was rejected on grounds of Egypt's geographical distance from the Horn;

6. It current membership in COMESA.

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The Alliances And Links of Egypt with the West 

One reason for the grand role which Egypt wants to play is that it capitalizes too much on its newly won friendship with the west. This, according to some analysts, is exaggerated so much that it seems to lose sight of its regional friends on the following counts:

1. A key factor in this is Egypt's grandiose image of itself which has seriously blunted its ability to realistically assess its relation with the constellation of countries around it. Take for instance its relationship with Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia which it has tended to view from a pedestal of a superpower

2. It had also played down the implications of the 1989 Sudanese coup due to its denigrating attitude toward Sudan which it still views as an impoverished country incapable of exerting influence in the Arab world and the Horn of Africa.

3. Yet, according to some analysts, contrary to the Egyptian assumption, however, through much of the 1990s the Government of Sudan led by NIF seems to have enjoyed good contacts with individuals as well as institutions of influence and financial clout.  For instance, it has good contacts with Sunni Gulf Millionaires, Islamic banks, businesses and a wide network of voluntary supporters who make substantial financial contributions to boost its efforts as the region’s only Sunni state. How else could the NIF have survived the increasingly well orchestrated pressure of the west which has cut off aid to it.

4. To the above may be added the psychological boost which the NIF has been receiving from religious ideologues and Islamic militants who have been shuttling in and out of the country from Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, Tunisia, Pakistan and other areas of Jihad Converts. This implies that Egypt also seems to have less leverage on the attitude of financial institutions than is generally believed.

5. One evidence of the above is that Sudan has even been able to woo over some western countries like France and had managed to strike a stand-by deals with the World Bank and IMF. The same applies to the EU which until recently had adopted a carrot and stick policy of conditional support to it vis-à-vis isolation.

6. Further, Sudan has had good ties with Saudi Millionaires and with Russia and is canvassing hard to lure western investors from Europe and North America to its mineral and energy sectors.

7. Yet, despite this startling evidence in favour of Sudan, the Egyptian Government seems to naively gloss over the above facts or underestimated its vulnerability because of the Nile waters with which Hassan El Turabi threatened when Egypt began massing its troops along the contested Sudanese-Egyptian border following the assassination attempt on the life of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in June 1995.

8. Turabi’s threat was not taken seriously last time but it may not be dismissed with the same impunity next time except that the NIF is losing ground.¹⁶

9. Equally significant is Egypt's attitude toward the other riparians. Egypt might believe, and rightly so, that it is the gift of the Nile because as most old geography text books put it, “the Nile is Egypt and Egypt is the Nile.” While the first part may be true, nevertheless, arguably, other Nile countries like Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia may not agree with the second part. They are bound to ask: a gift from whom?

10. They are also bound to ask: Egypt may be a gift of the Nile but is not the Nile also a gift to the riparians where it originates and from where it carries rich alluvial soil to its terraced fields ?

11. Undoubtedly, the Nile is a large enough gift to be shared, but  it must be shared fairly and equitably. The imperative of the same justice should entitle the other Nile countries to harness parts of it to develop their agriculture and improve their food security. The bilateral talks underway between some of the other Nile countries underline the importance of this issue which Egypt needs to address together with the other Nile basin countries sooner rather than later.

The Sudan Factor in the Middle Easternization of the Nile 

The history of the relations between Egypt and Sudan, despite the 1959 bilateral agreement on the Nile which apparently brought the two countries together, has historically been punctuated by a series of conflicts stemming from divergent views and interests. 

The convergence and divergence of interests between the two countries goes back to a period of the emergence of modern Sudan in the 16^th century when it became part of North Africa, the Arab-orient and Hajjaz under the Fonji kingdom which advocated Islam and Arabic.  This was made possible by the peaceful penetration of Arabs and their intermingling with the local population. Here, the Egyptian concern over the Nile and the idea of turning Sudan into a state under it or consanguine to it cannot be ruled out. 

After the fall of the Allola kingdom of Nuba and later Saba, the Arabs are said to have gotten entrenched in the Sudan. 

The north-south split in Sudan was also underlined by the Nile concern of maintaining a dehumanized south.  This, not surpassingly, arose when the Egyptian leader Mohammed Ali Pasha occupied Sudan in 1814 and he was quick to introduce slavery.  In fact, it was Keidev Saeed who later banned slavery, but even so it did last very long.  Thus, slave trade remained a lucrative trade and the south was simply reserved as only a source of slaves.  In fact, according to Samuel Baker who visited the Sudan between 1870-73, the south for all intents and purposes was not linked with the North in social or political terms.  

A consideration of the control of the Nile must have also figured prominently when Egypt persuaded Britain to support the annexation of south Sudan to the North following the scramble for Africa of 1884.¹⁷ 

After the defeat of the Mahdists who ruled Sudan in the late 19^th century by the Ango-Egyptian army, Britain and Egypt signed the Condominium Agreement of 1890 which gave them joint control over Sudan.  Here again, the Nile issue had figured prominently in the minds of British and Egyptian leaders who had an even bigger colonial design for the Nile basin at large.  In fact, the significance of the Ango-Egyptian Condominium of 1890 which turned Egypt into an Afro-Arab colonial power-broker which collaborated with metropolitan, colonial powers like Britain and Italy was, as we shall see later in the section on Eritrea and Somalia, to be a significant feature of Egyptian foreign policy in the decades before the independence of Sudan in 1956 and even later.¹⁸  

It is also well-documented that the south was excluded from such vital negotiations in which the union of Sudan and Egypt was considered.  This, for instance, was true of the 1952 Cairo meeting.  It is also worthy of note that Egypt, more than Sudan, was more keen on the Union of the North and the South because of the Nile.  Thus, while the Northern Government encouraged a policy of separation for the south in 1932, it was at the insistence of Egypt that the British Colonial Secretary, James Robertson, wrote to the British Government in 1946.  Not surprisingly, again because of Egypt’s generalized concern over the Nile, Britain made a decision on the annexation of the south in December 1946.¹⁹ 

Again, as alluded to above, the Nile issue was a pivotal consideration in the attempt at creating a union of Egypt and Sudan which was finally rejected by the unionist government of the North in 1955. Bilateral agreement on the Nile and Egypt’s activities of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were also guided by the Nile issues.²⁰