UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC: Divvying Up the Nile

Cajolery and wheedling were unsuccessful. Bullying and intrigue did not work. So Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, having used up all his other stunts, and being more moderate these days anyway, tried reasonable compromise on his southern neighbor, the Sudan. It worked. Last week the two nations finally got together over the division of the waters of the Nile. Nasser had urgent reasons for settling the long dispute: this month Soviet engineers arrive to start work on the first stage of the huge Aswan High Dam project—a scheme designed to expand Egypt’s farmland by 30% and multiply its electric power eightfold. Since the Nile travels 1,900 miles through the Sudan before reaching Egypt, the Sudanese were strategically placed to cut off Nasser’s water if they chose.

They did just that last year when, tired of arguing with Egypt over a new pact to revise the old Anglo-Egyptian Nile treaty of 1929, Sudanese officials simply began diverting Nile water into their own irrigation system eleven crucial days before the date stipulated for such annual action. As a result, the Egyptian rice crop was damaged; Cairo protested hotly, and the Egyptian press cried that the Sudan was guilty of all kinds of crimes, including genocide.

Egypt also needed Sudanese approval of the huge reservoir that will back up 100 miles into the Sudan behind the big dam, engulfing the land of thousands of Sudanese farmers. When talks broke down last year, the Sudan was demanding $100 million in compensation and Nasser was offering only $25 million. The two sides were also far apart on the proportion of river water each would get in a new pact.

The political climate between the two nations improved this year, and after months of polite suggestions from Cairo that talks resume, the Sudan’s military strongman, Lieut. General Ibrahim Abboud, finally sent a new delegation north to discuss the matter. The Sudan had a reason of its own to settle with Egypt: it, too, was planning some big irrigation projects, could get World Bank loans only if the Nile dispute was ended.

Nasser himself greeted the Sudanese and put them up at Tahra Palace. From then on, it was merely a matter of the routine haggling that each side expected of the other. Nasser stepped in personally to raise Egypt’s compensation offer to $43 million, and the Sudanese were happy to accept after getting a greatly increased share (18.5 billion cubic meters v. 4 billion in the 1929 pact) of the increased water supply to be accumulated when Egypt’s Aswan High Dam holds back the vast amount of wasted water that normally goes down into the Mediterranean every year. The successful talks were capped with a tidy $31 million bilateral trade agreement. General Abboud cried, “Thanks be to Allah!”, and a grinning Nasser sent his mabruk—”Congratulations!”—to the negotiators.