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| Iraq |
| The Marsh Arabs Return |
| 2003-06-13 |
| Registration Required-Edited for length Link courtesy Instapundit. HAWR AL HAMMAR, Iraq — It's 100 degrees at noon, the hour when the sky itself seems to melt into chrome-colored lakes—rippling pools that shimmer like mirrors in the vast salt pans of southern Iraq. These days, however, those liquid sheets of light are no mirage. They are real water—and one of the most poignant symbols of liberation since the fall of Saddam Hussein. "This will bring back the fish, the birds and the animals," said Jawad Mutashir, a grizzled Marsh Arab who came to watch, for the pure joy of it, water from the Euphrates River gurgling back into the long-dead swamp that had been his ancestral home. Bands of impoverished villagers upstream had cut the levees that Hussein built expressly to destroy Iraq's sprawling wetlands. Unshackled for the first time in years, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were now refilling thousands of acres of dry marsh. "Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!" More than two months after Baghdad fell to coalition troops, an extraordinary act of cultural defiance is unfolding almost unnoticed on the burning plains of southern Iraq. The last ragged remnants of one of this war-bruised nation's most persecuted minorities, the fabled Marsh Arab nomads, are breaking dams, dikes and levees in a haphazard bid to restore their homeland, a wetlands of global worth. It is a desperate and even wrongheaded effort. Most of the vast Iraqi swamps drained by Hussein for military purposes are gone forever, and uncontrolled flooding could poison those left with soil salts. But the quixotic gesture of the tribesmen isn't completely hopeless, because they enjoy the backing of a powerful if unlikely friend: the Bush administration, which few environmentalists view as an ally. (Envirothugs-"It's allll about the oilll [sounds of projectile vomiting on the Marsh Arabs]) "The destruction of Iraq's marshes involved a genocide," said Emma Nicholson, a British parliamentarian whose group, Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees, has been trumpeting the plight of the region for years. "The best way I could describe it is an open-air Auschwitz." The Iraqi regime's assault on the Mesopotamian Marshes is a well-documented tragedy, and it began with the Shiite rebellion against Hussein that erupted on the heels of the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price. Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime—Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple—the Marsh Arabs' population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps. Their vast wetlands, crawling with deserters and rebels, fared no better. According to the UN Environment Program, 7,000 square miles, or a staggering 93 percent, of the Mesopotamian Marshes were bled dry by Hussein's engineers between 1991 and 2000. Gone are the 1 billion migratory birds—flamingoes, storks, cranes—that used to stop over on flights between Asia and Africa. Gone are the 500-pound fish that tribesmen used to haul to market in trucks. Vanished, too, probably, are endangered species such as the smooth-coated otter. So thorough was the destruction, ranked by the UN as "one of the world's greatest environmental disasters," that coalition troops hardly knew they were driving across a former swamp larger than the Everglades when they invaded Iraq from Kuwait in March. For those of you who remember Murat, the Turks are involved in this eco-crime as well But other researchers question even that modest goal. They say that problems with soil salinity, the erosion of the Marsh Arabs' aquatic traditions, and competition with oil and farming pale against the Mesopotamian Marshes' single biggest enemy after Hussein: Turkey. Turkey controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which supply 100 percent of Iraq's water. In a demonstration of its power, Turkish officials literally shut off the flow of the Euphrates for 29 days in 1990. Today, the government in Ankara is building an even bigger series of dams, called the Southeast Anatolia Project, which threatens to choke off the downstream flow further, skeptics say. "To pour Iraq's precious water on the ground for marshes and tribespeople seems a pretty sentimental impulse in this rough environment," said Robert Giegengack, a Middle Eastern water expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's going to be a hard sell." |
| Posted by:Ernest Brown |
| #1 This is some sad stuff. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2003-06-13 18:48:19 |