Relations between Egypt and Ethiopia have improved since the toppling of the regime of former President Mubarak, a retired Egyptian diplomat has said.
During a seminar at the Egyptian Embassy in Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, Abdel Rauf al-Reidy, a former Egyptian ambassador to Washington, said Mubarak was largely responsible for previously cold relations between the two nations due to his negligence of African affairs and failure to attend African summits, state-run news service MENA said in a Tuesday report.
Reidy's statement coincided with a visit by the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, a government consulting body, to Ethiopia. The first post-uprising visit by an official Egyptian delegation was last year, when a group of civil society activists and revolutionary figures traveled to Ethiopia.
The stalled relations have cast shadows on a Nile water dispute that erupted after the signing of the Entebbe framework agreement in 2010, Reidy added.
The Entebbe agreement, signed by Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, and joined by Tanzania a year later, sought an equitable redistribution of Nile water. This has rattled upstream countries Egypt and Sudan, who enjoy the lion's share of river water based on a treaty signed in 1959.
Reidy said he met with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi during the latter's visit to Cairo in 2011, and suggested that both countries strengthen communication on the civil society level.
The former diplomat said contacts had been made between the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs and the Ethiopian International Institute for Peace and Development, noting that both have agreed to hold future meetings to discuss bilateral relations.
