Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and General Al Burhan, head of the Sudanese junta
The head of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council and the ruling junta, General Abdelfattah Al-Burhanreceived Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed yesterday Wednesday, January 25, in the midst of disputes between the two countries on the borders and the renaissance dam.
Sign of the warming of relations between the two countries, Abiy Ahmed was accompanied by a strong high-level delegation for his 24-hour express visit to Khartoum. The delegation includes the ministers of defence, peace and interior, the national security adviser and the director of intelligence, as well as the minister of the government press office and the deputy minister of foreign affairs.
In Khartoum, the Sovereignty Council (note: the executive body of the Sudanese junta) indicated in a statement that “Abiy Ahmed met with Al-Burhan on ways to strengthen and improve relations between the two countries as well as ways to advance the prospects for joint cooperation”. It is therefore a sign of appeasement between Addis Ababa and Khartoum given the tensions that had marked Sudanese-Ethiopian relations over the renaissance dam and border disputes.
Negotiations between Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia on the Renaissance Dam are, for their part, frozen. Cairo and Khartoum insist on first reaching a tripartite agreement on the filling and operation of the dam, to ensure the continued flow of their annual share of the Nile water, while Addis Ababa rejects this and confirms that its dam, whose construction began about a decade ago, was not intended to harm anyone.