BOOK EXCERPTS

Ethiopians had to wait over a thousand years to be able to use their waters for their own development. Ethiopian emperors and leaders have tried to build a dam on the Nile River as part of their development efforts (regardless of the ideology they followed, when it comes
to the Nile, they all had the same vision).

Created in 1920 after the First World War, the League of Nations was an international organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that sought to provide a forum for resolving international disputes. In 1923, three years after the League’s formation, Ethiopia was admitted with the unanimous vote of the assembly.

About five kilometers before we got there, Tadele announced that we were going to be in Gish Abbay soon. I was excited that we were finally going to see the Nile’s source. I thought of what the ancient “discoverers” had been feeling when approaching places that they then thought were never treaded before by outsiders. I thought of how John Hanning Peke and Richard Burton had fought to be recognized for discovering the White Nile, an undertaking that ultimately claimed Peke’s life. The same competition was true of the Jesuit priest Pedro Paez and James Bruce for discovering the Blue Nile.

Several books have been written and documentaries made on the sub-ject of who discovered the Nile. It is said that the word ‘discovered’ was coined by the Royal Geographical Society which played such an outsized role in Britain’s expeditions, explorations, and the scramble for new territories. The missionary David Livingston (1813-1873), and the adventurers Richard Burton (1821-1890) and John Hanning Speke (1827-1864), were closely tied up in explorations of the White Nile

At the beginning of the twentieth century the European powers interested in Ethiopia were rivals for influence at the Emperor Menilek’s court. The French government had alienated Italy and Great Britain, and ultimately Menilek, by attempting to use the French-financed railway to gain political and economic control of Ethiopia. Italy still dreamed of absorbing northern Ethiopia into her colonial Empire, but was opposed by Britain, who viewed Italian political control of the north, without treaty guarantees, as a threat to British control of the affluents and sources of the Nile, and by France, who regarded Ethiopia as her private economic preserve.

According to many analysts, this meeting was different from the previous 8000+ meetings held by the Council. For the first time, a transboundary river case was brought to the floor. The two key stake-holders on the issue (Ethiopia and Egypt) provided their sides of the story. An excerpt from Ambassador Haske Selassie’s speech (from the Security Council press release) reads:

Our next stop was the Pyramids of Giza, considered one of the world’s most iconic cultural landmarks. Standing at the foot of the pyramid, we were but specks of dust compared to the massive structure completed around 2560 BCE. There is no river or water body in the area where the pyramids are located. I asked our guide where the water had come from to build the pyramids and she told us how, at the time of the construction of the pyramids (it took them 20 years to build it), a branch of the Nile River used to come to the Giza area.

On April 2, 2011, months after the signing of the CFA, Ethiopia announced its plan to build the GERD, the largest project in Africa for producing electric power. This move by Ethiopia was believed to be triggered by several geopolitical events happening in the region, including the Arab Spring (Ash-sha’byuridisqat an-nizam, translation ‘The people want to bring down the regime’). Towards the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011, a series of anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions spread across much of the Arab world.

On the morning of Saturday, January 8, we all met at Bole International Airport. Everyone was excited as we had been following the progress of the dam project from its inception. About half of the team are engineers by profession while the rest of us were mostly project and program managers, so visiting the project site meant a lot to all of us. Captain Solomon Gizaw, the pilot, and Captain Tsegaye Mesessa (co-pilot) flew the Cessna Grand Caravan that took us to the GERD site. Capitan Solomon knows almost every village and city along the way, and he was telling us their names as we flew over them. As we approached the site, we started to see the reservoir at a distance, stretching out for hundreds of kilometers.

In 1970, Nasser died of a heart attack after attending a session of the Arab League and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat. Nasser was able to gain the attention of both the U.S. and USSR. He played the game to keep them both engaged until he moved fully toward the Soviet Union. Sadat, on the other hand, wanted to start his own legacy and departed from the economic tenets of Nasserism, launched his own Infitah economic policy, reinstated a multi-party system, and signed a peace-agreement with Israel that won him the Nobel Peace Prize. His activities and tendencies moved Egypt toward the West.

Over the last half century, the number of Ethiopian immigrants living in the U.S. has increased significantly, mainly the result of the oppressive conditions the country suffered under for the last 50+ years. Aside from a small number of Ethiopians who came to the U.S. during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, the majority of the Ethiopian dias-pora fled for political reasons. A good number of educated professionals who studied in the Eastern bloc, Europe, and Asia moved to the U.S. after completing their studies

Khedive Ismail Pasha, who ruled Egypt from 1863 to 1879, at-tempted to invade Ethiopia on several occasions. His military expeditions did not produce the results that he had expected or anticipated. The battles of Gundet and Gura were a showdown between an Egyptian army trained and led by Ex-Confederate generals who had graduated from West Point, and the Ethiopian Army, who fought to defend their country. William Loring, one of the generals hired by Khedive Ismail Pasha to lead the Abyssinian expedition, captured the situation in his memorial entitled A Confederate Soldier in Egypt: