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.)