ENVIRONMENT:
Water Returns to Iraq's Eden
Katherine Stapp*
NEW YORK, Apr 28 (Tierramérica) - Fifteen years after the former Iraqi government
used old blueprints dating from the British Empire to drain a vast wetland,
the area is slowly creeping back to life.
For millennia, the Mesopotamian Marshlands were an isolated and swampy oasis
in the desert, covering more than 20,000 square km of interconnected lakes,
mudflats and bayous. Some believe it is where the biblical Eden was located.
But after the end of the 1991 Gulf War, waged against Iraq by a U.S.-led
coalition, the native Ma'dan people of the area, partially located in
southern Iraq, saw themselves caught in a failed Shi'ite uprising against
the Saddam Hussein regime (1979-2003).
The relatively inaccessible marshes became a safe haven for political
opponents and army deserters from Hussein's defeated army.
To quash the rebellion, the Iraqi government built an extensive and
elaborate system of drainage and diversion structures, using detailed
engineering plans designed but never implemented by the British in the
1950s, during the period of their colonial domination.
In just two years, the marshes were almost completely desiccated.
"The onslaught was so devastating that less than 10 percent of the original
marsh areas miraculously survived," Dr. Hassan Janabi, of the Iraqi Ministry
of Water Resources, told a meeting on the marshes held last week at United
Nations headquarters in New York.
The damage, however, had begun even earlier. The centre of the Mesopotamian
watershed, traversed by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers - the main sources
of water and streams connecting to the marshland -, is shared by Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Turkey.
Turkey and Iran, located upstream in the vast basin, began to build dams to
hold water and provide hydroelectric energy in the 1950s. But the problem
took on catastrophic proportions in the early 1990s.
The area once constituted the largest wetlands ecosystem in the Middle East,
and the U.N. has called its draining one of the world's greatest
environmental disasters, comparable to the destruction of the Amazon
rainforest.
It was also a human tragedy. Rights groups say that the drainage projects,
combined with direct persecution of the 5,000-year-old Ma'dan community,
virtually wiped out the Marsh Arab economy and reduced the local
population - who lived on artificial mud-and-reed islands - from more than
250,000 to just 40,000.
This parched landscape persisted for 15 years, until March 2003, when the
United States led the military invasion of Iraq. Dykes north of Basra at the
Messhab River were breached. So far, about 20 percent of the original marsh
area has been reflooded, although the extent of true restoration is unknown.
The Ministry of Water Resources is coordinating the work of numerous
non-governmental organisations, U.N. agencies and others, with financial
support from Canada, Italy, Japan and the United States.
Janabi expects some four million Iraqis to benefit economically from the
eventual rehabilitation of the Mesopotamian marshes, in productive areas
like fishing, agriculture, tourism and education.
"When we started, there was a big vacuum of data because information (about
the condition of the marshes) had been declared a state secret" by the
Hussein regime, explained Azzam Alwash, director of the U.S.-based Eden
Again Project, which has led the charge to rejuvenate the marshes.
Alwash's work has focused on creating a hydrologic model to determine how
much water will be needed to restore various parts of the marshlands.
Initial results suggest that enough water is present in southern Iraq to at
least partially restore the marshes, if the water diversion structures built
in the 1990s are removed.
The Iraqi-born engineer explained that development of the basin will require
about 100 new water treatment plants and a centralised power supply. One
idea is to harness energy from flared gas sites that is now being wasted.
This would also help Iraq meet targets of the Kyoto Protocol on climate
change, an international treaty to mitigate so-called greenhouse gas
emissions that entered into force in February.
Harnessing 4,500 megawatts of power could save about 30 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas) emissions, Alwash explained, in
addition to significantly improving the quality of life for the marsh
dwellers.
The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), which first alerted the world via
satellite images that the marshes were vanishing, is playing an active role
in capacity-building and promoting sustainable development in the area.
The agency created the Marshland Information Network, comprising the
Marshland Arabs Forum, various government ministries and the U.S.-based Iraq
Foundation, which runs the Eden Again Project.
"We're targeting smaller communities with projects for drinking water,
sanitation and water quality management," said Chizuru Aoki of UNEP. "The
goal is to support environmentally sustainable technologies."
(* Katherine Stapp is IPS regional editor for North America and the
Caribbean. Originally published Apr. 23 by Latin American newspapers that
are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news
service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development
Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)
(END/2005)
Send your comments to the editor
|
