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Water Returns to Iraq's Eden |
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By Katherine Stapp*
The
rehabilitation of wetlands in the region known since ancient times
as Mesopotamia stands to benefit four million people.
NEW YORK - 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 up 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 center of the Mesopotamian
watershed, delineated 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 organizations, 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 centralized
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
tons 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 Program (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.
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