The Foreign Minister of Sudan Mariam Sadiq al-Mahdi called on the UNSC to meet soon discuss GERD’s ‘impact on the safety and security of millions of people’…reports Asian Lite News
Sudan has formally asked the United Nations Security Council to hold a session as soon as possible to discuss the dispute over Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) being built by Ethiopia on the Blue Nile, according to media reports.
The Foreign Minister of Sudan Mariam Sadiq al-Mahdi called on the UNSC to meet soon discuss GERD’s ‘impact on the safety and security of millions of people’, according to a government statement.
The minister called on the council head to urge Ethiopia to stop the ‘unilateral’ filling of the dam ‘which exacerbates the dispute and poses a threat to regional and international peace and security’, the statement added.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia is hoping of a huge economic development and power generation on the the dam, while Egypt and Sudan – the two downstream countries – are concerned about it and seeking a binding agreement on the filling and operation of the dam, it was reported.
Earlier, the Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit had said that the role of the League in the dam issue is not new, and there is an Ethiopian attempt to claim that there was an Arab-African clash over the matter, the Arab News reported citing a local TV report.
The secretary-general explained in television statements to the local Sada Al-Balad TV channel that the Doha meeting raised important points, the first of which was that the water security of Egypt and Sudan was part of Arab national security and the second was the request of the Security Council to hold a meeting about the issue, it was reported.
He said that the intervention of the Arab League in the issue of the Renaissance Dam was not new. It had previously formed a committee consisting of several countries, in addition to the league’s envoy at the UN, to follow up on the issue.
He said that there was an urgent need for a member state of the Security Council to adopt the demand for holding a session on the issue, similar to Tunisia, explaining that the matter would come at the request of Egypt or Sudan.
Aboul Gheit said that there was an Ethiopian attempt to claim that there was an Arab-African clash, explaining that this was not the case, especially since Egypt and Sudan were part of Africa, and two-thirds of Arabs lived in Africa, according to the report appeared in the Arab News.
Last week, the foreign ministers of the Arab region countries joined calls for intervention of UN Security Council in the dam issue.
ALSO READ; Pentagon to pull out missile defence from Saudi, M-E