(Sudan Tribune)Ethiopia’s Prime Minister declined a call by his Sudanese counterpart for a tripartite meeting to break the deadlock over the stalled talks on the filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).
After the failure of a meeting held in Kinshasa earlier this month, Abdallah Hamdok called his Egyptian and Ethiopian counterparts for a video conference meeting on 23 April to reach a compromise on the stalled talks.
Hamdok said his call for the meeting was based on the Declaration of Principles (DoP) of 2015 which provides that in the case of failure to solve a dispute, the parties “Can ask for mediation or refer the matter to their heads of states or prime ministers”.
In a statement released on Wednesday, the Ethiopian foreign ministry stated that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed rejected Hamdok’s call for a tripartite meeting because there was no failure in the negotiations.
Abiy said “that assuming the negotiation process as a failure is not right because we have seen some tangible results” before pointing to the signing of the DoP, and the establishment of the National Independent Scientific Research Group to discuss the filling of GERD’s 74 billion cubic metre reservoir.
Instead, he suggested that “the way forward on the GERD negotiations is to request the Chairperson of the African Union, H.E President Felix Tshisekedi to call the meeting of the Bureau of the Assembly of the AU”.
