Channel 4 reporting in Gaza

http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/bring-israelis-palestinians/24316

Friday 25 Jul 2014

Gaza is not just about them, it’s about us, too

Jon Snow

She lay in my arms. Just weeks old, a tiny baby. Her Palestinian father had just handed her to me at the infernal steel border building at the exit of Gaza into Israel. She did not cry. She just looked at me with her beady, dark eyes.

Her father was trying both to open her pram, and steady his wounded wife in her wheel chair. Their luggage was scattered at the final entry gate as if just thrown through it.

We shared no common language, it had just seemed inevitable that as the only other able-bodied human in this absurd transit room, I should care for the baby.

I know not their story, nor how, alone seemingly, they were the only Palestinians, in that brief half-hour of Israeli aerial ceasefire, to have been allowed across.

But holding this girl baby connected me again to the wardfuls of small children so brutally smashed by this odious war. Connected me too to the ever-present reality that the average age in Gaza is 17 and that a quarter of a million are children are, like the babe in my arms, small children.

I could see the young Israeli IDF guards peering at me through the steel room’s bullet-proof glass. They were the same women who, from another glass window, had barked commands at me though a very public address system.

“Feet apart!” they said. “Turn! No, not that way – the other!” Then, in the next of five steel security rooms I passed through - each with a red or green light to tell me to stop or go – a male security guard up in the same complex above me shouted “Take your shirt off - right off. Now throw it on the floor… Pick it up, now ring it like it was wet” (it was wet, soaked in sweat).

From entering the steel complex until I reach the final steel clearing room where I held the baby, I was never spoken to face to face, nor did I see another human beyond those who barked the commands through the bullet-proof windows high above me.

Finally, even a little reluctantly, I handed my little bundle of humanity back to her father. At that point, the nicest of Israelis, a British-born captain greeted me by name and then moved straight to the aid of the arriving Palestinians.

My own bags came through, my lightweight laptop lying askew with the screen open on top of them. The people behind the glass had had it for fully half an hour.

As I waited for my camera crew and waved goodbye to my Palestinian family, I pressed the laptop on. There was my familiar screen saver but suddenly imposed over by a sequence of pretty black and yellow tartan-like barcodes and a wide top-to-bottom stripe of white, edged with vertical coloured lines.

When I remonstrated later with the senior Israeli military PR officer, he didn’t deny that “they” had probably done it. He added: “You never know, it may all go away.” It hasn’t.

Palestinians mourn relatives killed in an attack on a UN-run school in Gaza

Nor has Gaza’s agony, which deepened with the UN school attack as I was crossing. I feel guilty in leaving, and for the first time in my reporting life, scarred, deeply scarred by what I have seen, some of it too terrible to put on the screen.

It is accentuated by suddenly being within sumptuously appointed Israel. Accentuated by the absolute absence of anything that indicates that this bloody war rages a few miles away. A war that the UN stated yesterday has reduced 55 per cent of  Gaza’s diminutive land to a no-go area.

Go tell that to the children playing in the dusty streets or the families forced out of  shelters like the UN school compound, to forage for food beneath shells and missiles.

In and out of an Israeli transit hotel for a few hours in Ashkelon, an hour from the steel crossing-point from Gaza, there were three half-hearted air raid warnings. Some people run, but most just get on with what they are doing.

They are relatively safe today because  Israel is the most heavily fortified country on earth. The brilliant Israeli-invented, American-financed shield is all but fool-proof; the border fortifications, the intelligence, beyond anything else anywhere.

This brilliant people is devoting itself to a permanent and ever-intensifying expenditure to secure a circumstance in which there will never be a deal with the Palestinians. That’s what it looks like, that is what you see. It may not be true.

The pressure not to go on this way is both internationally and domestically a minority pursuit.

Smoke rises from the Gaza Strip after an Israeli air strike

Leaving Israel and beleaguered Gaza far below me, I lay back in my BA seat headed for London. I donned my headphones and listened to Bach’s heavenly violin concerto in E major, and wept, as I rarely have as an adult.

I wept for two peoples with remarkable similarities. Two peoples of extraordinary gifts and ability. Two peoples living in an area far smaller than England, one of which besieges the other, both of which target each other’s civilians.

This is humankind’s most grievous cancer, for its cells infect conflicts in every corner of the world. We fail as humankind if we do not devise a coming-together. Our leaders, as a vast priority, have to try and try again to use every mechanism in our rare animal capacity - our considerable intellects – to bring these peoples to resolution whatever the cost.

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 A couple of the comments - 

Paul Medlicott25-Jul-14at

Jon that was unbearably moving. I am probably one of perhaps millions looking on impotently and wondering where this may all end. Hamas undoubtedly have a case to answer but Israel seems (to an outsider) to have lost all sense of decency and perspective–there seems no will to find a solution, and their appalling spokespeople seem to be constantly on the edge of aggression should anyone challenge them. Israel and the Jewish nation have for many of us a deep well of goodwill–we all know their history–but that well has run dry and the time for accountability has arrived.

Monique Buckner25-Jul-14at

Paul, it’s not the Jewish people who are doing this, it’s zionists and zionism which in fact has many Christian fundamentalist supporters who believe that a big war in Israel will bring back Jesus. It’s mainly (at least in the beginning in roughly 1897 when Theodor Herzl founded zionism) a secular European colonial movement. I’d like to think of Netanyahu and his fascist cronies as using Jews as human shields in order to commit his crimes against humanity, war crimes, apartheid, etc.There are so many of all faiths and no faiths who really want to see justice for the Palestinian people and full equality for them.

Monique Buckner25-Jul-14at

This is not a story of a misunderstanding between equal sides. There is a historical context in which Palestinians lost their country, Palestine, and their territory has been steadily shrinking ever since due to settlement expansion and land grabs. The Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in a genocide from December 1947 which has been creeping along to this day.

Gaza has been under a 7/8 year brutal blockade by Israel that many international legal experts agree is collective punishment and illegal. I appreciate your wish for peace, but you need to understand the problem more deeply and what is at the root cause of it before you can hope for peace and justice and before you can even claim that an occupied people have leaders with ‘too much power’. The Palestinian people for all intents and purposes are virtually powerless and most certainly lack the financial, military and political support of the world’s only superpower (unlike Israel which enjoys impunity and political cover from the US and the UN).

Some charge that Israel controls the US but it’s essentially the US which uses Israel as a proxy in the Middle East and the Palestinians are the population paying the price for US imperialism in the region, which began as European, specifically British imperialsim, after the Ottoman Empire fell.

As for Gaza, I agree that rockets, if aimed at civilians (whether Israeli or Palestinian) constitutes a war crime. Over 10 years, 29 Israelis have ever died from Gazan rockets compared to hundreds of Palestinian children, men and women in just recent days. I am not exaggerating. I wonder how many people actually know this fact?

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/rocket-deaths-israel.html

Remember: the rockets from Gaza are right now being used by the government of Israel as a justification for genocide.

Gazans, even if they do not think the rockets are very effective, say that this is the only time the world pays their plight any attention. It’s tragic that the only time people look at Gaza is when their children are being blown to bits by the Israeli army, navy and airforce combined.

You can criticise Hamas for ‘not investing in education or jobs’- but they can’t- they’re under a blockade and have no money even for government salaries. After Hamas was elected, for instance, all financial assistance stopped going to Gaza because Israel wanted it so. It’s also up to Israel what is imported into the Gaza Strip and what gets exported (see Israeli organisation ‘Gisha’ for detailed statistics).

At one point, Israel did not allow in books or children’s crayons so for all the money in the world, Gazan children couldn’t have a normal education. Israel keeps bombing their schools, which are already overcrowded from previous bombings that destroyed schools that could not be rebuilt because, yes, Israel did not allow concrete into Gaza. I really could go on about the inhuman conditions this people is subjected to. South Africa during apartheid did the same with subjugating a people while making sure they did not reach similar human development. It’s carefully planned and executed. And it’s called apartheid.

I just want to mention that it is actually quite offensive to say that they ‘may as well be murdering their own people’. Tell that to a Palestinian in Gaza who has lost his whole family to an Israeli bomb or a woman who was carrying her baby while holding a white flag when an Israeli sniper shot her baby in her arms. Could you say the same for Jews in the ghetto who had the courage to fight back? Would you say to their descendants that ‘they may as well have murdered themselves’? Is this how we are conditioned to think of Palestinian lives? That they may as well murder themselves if they have the dignity and immense courage to fight their oppression? No, Robert, ISRAEL is doing a perfectly fine job of genocide without need for western apologies.

Palestinians have a legal right to resistance, even armed. That Israel is slaughtering them should not be blamed on the victims who have a right to resist and defend themselves (funny how this right isn’t invoked for Palestinians).

As others have observed before me, there can be no peace without justice and who of us has the right to be telling Palestinians otherwise? Aren’t we all equal and deserving of our rights? Isn’t this why they are called inalienable? That programme on BBC3 sounds appalling. It was liberal fluff that painted a dangerous picture of a false reality because the Palestinians really do have international law (land, refugee rights, right to freedom of movement, etc) on their side. That this BBC3 programme tried to dilute Israel’s very real moral and legal responsibilities as occupier and aggressor is appalling. But, as so many are now protesting, the BBC is pretty appalling in its ‘coverage’ of the occupation.

'We are no longer here, do you care?'

This video brings to life the fleeting words of headlines, and puts them into context. I had chills, and it brought tears to my eyes.

'Published on 23 Jul 2014

'Dutch Children Protest the Killing of their Palestinian Peers'

Dutch children have taken part of a short movie to protest against the continuing Israeli bombings of Palestinian civilians; children in particular. In a short video by filmmaker Abdelkarim El-Fassi, eight Dutch children tell the story of eight Palestinian children killed by Israel.

War, bombs, terror. The video tells exactly where the children were at the time of their death. Some were on Facebook, while others were greeted with violence that no innocent person should be exposed to, while sleeping or while watching a World Cup match.
From the year 2000, every three days, a Palestinian child has been killed at the hands of Israeli forces, a appalling and confrontational number. In recent days, during the ground offensive on the 'open air prison' GAZA, this average only increased.

"I am no longer here, do you care?" is an awareness campaign to bring injustice taking place in Palestine closer to home This is necessary because the disproportionate actions of Israel, which violates many international and human rights, have not been condemned.

Is the life of a Palestinian child worth less?
The recent Israeli attacks on Gaza have slaughtered more than 160 innocent children, and counting. Such an inhumane policy should cease as soon as possible. Therefore El Fassi start this campaign that brings the innocence of hundreds of now deceased Palestinian children forward.

El Fassi had previously made a video denouncing the injustice in Palestine in 2012; the video on Mahmoud Sarsak went viral. Mahmoud Sarsak is a Palestinian footballer who went on hunger strike for more than 200 days because he was arbitrarily arrested and locked up in an Israeli jail without trial. Because of international pressure, he was finally released. Are we going to get that done now? #doyoucare?'

TTIP and why it's not a good idea - from the Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/17/nhs-taken-over-wall-street-cameron-health-service-privatisation?CMP=twt_gu

The NHS is being taken over by Wall Street. And Cameron won’t stop it

Len McCluskey
The prime minister’s refusal to exempt our health service from a deal that will make it impossible to reverse privatisation really is a matter of life and death

Will David Cameron go down in history as the man who gave away this country’s greatest achievement to Wall Street, the man who enabled big American healthcare access to our hospital wards? The answer will be yes – unless the prime minister makes it clear once and for all that he will protect the NHS from the world’s largest bilateral trade negotiations, happening right now in Brussels.

Make no mistake, we are in the fight of our lives to save the NHS from being sold off lock, stock and barrel. But to make matters even worse a trade deal called TTIP (the transatlantic trade and investment partnership) will mean that reversing the damage done by this government could be impossible unless Cameron acts.

This week faceless bureaucrats from Brussels and Washington are negotiating behind the closed doors of the European commission. You may well ask what trade negotiations in Brussels have got to do with the NHS. But these talks matter to every man, woman and child in the UK. In fact people across the country are campaigning up and down the high streets of our towns to raise awareness of the danger. From Dorset to Dumfriesshire there are growing numbers of people getting angry when they learn about Cameron’s continued refusal to use his veto to protect the NHS from TTIP.

The trade deal would create a single market between the European Union and the United States, and the British government has given the negotiators a free hand to negotiate away our rights to control our health system.

The government’s Health and Social Care Act 2012 opened the floodgates to the NHS sell-off. The act has massively increased the number of private providers in the NHS. Since this act came in to force, 70% of health services put out to tender have gone to the private sector.

Many of these companies are US-based or have Wall Street investors. Serco, for example, is involved in the provision of health services within the NHS and is owned by big Wall Street investment firms such as Invesco, Fidelity and BlackRock. Now Cameron is set on giving these US investors new powers to sue any future UK government if it makes changes to health policy that might stop the dollars rolling in.

The deal will mean that American investors will be able to haul any UK government that tries to reverse privatisation to a tribunal – the “investor state dispute settlement” that would operate outside the law of this land. These tribunals will have the power to award billions in damages and compensation for lost profits and the loss of projected future profits, with no right of appeal. Yes, that is right – no right of appeal.

In short, the British public would face massive costs to bring NHS services back into public hands, making it nigh on impossible.

The prime minister can’t claim he is being forced into it by Brussels. The British government has a seat at the European trade council, which gave the go ahead for, and must sign off on, any TTIP deal. He could easily protect our healthcare and our democratic right to vote for the health policies we want by insisting on an NHS exemption at the council. He has not done this.

If you, like me, believe that the current sell-off of the NHS is destroying one of this country’s greatest assets and putting our future at risk, then you also need to be worried about TTIP.

The prime minister has used his veto before in Europe and he’s threatened to use it on a number of occasions. He has even opposed capping bankers’ bonuses in Europe, but when it comes to going there to fight for the NHS, he falls silent. It’s clear where his priorities lie.

Cameron acts tough but does not deliver. Despite the rhetoric, he’s weak in Europe. It is time for him to stand up and act, use his veto and exempt the NHS from this dangerous trade deal. This is not about blocking Brussels bureaucrats. This is about our NHS, it is about our future, our health, our children. This time, it’s life and death.

Iraq war victim Ali Abbas reflects ten years on (Telegraph)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/9939885/Iraq-war-victim-Ali-Abbas-reflects-ten-years-on.html

marsh arabs

http://www.usip.org/publications/the-marsh-arabs-iraq-husseins-lesser-known-victims

The Marsh Arabs of Iraq: Hussein's Lesser Known Victims

Newsbyte examines the plight of the Ma'dan people of Iraq.

WASHINGTON--Saddam Hussein's persecution of his political enemies, most notably the Kurds of northern Iraq and Shia Muslims in general, is notorious in the West, except in one case: that of the "Marsh Arabs" of southern Iraq. A society of 500,000 people who have lived in and around an enormous freshwater wetland ecosystem for some 5,000 years, the Marsh Arabs have suffered the total destruction of their economy, their culture, their habitat and their way of life. The devastation has not been the result of a direct assault on the people themselves, but on the environment that was the foundation of their existence—the marshlands. Covering about 12,000 square miles as recently as 1985, the three contiguous marshes have been drained, burned and dammed to the point that only remnants of them still exist. Where once lay healthy, ecologically rich wetlands, teeming with aquatic life, buffalo and migratory birds there now is only barren, salt-encrusted land. Researchers who have studied this phenomenon have concluded that the destruction of the marshlands had no economic or developmental purpose, but rather was carried out with the singular purpose of destroying the Marsh Arab people. If so, it was a successful venture. Most of the Marsh Arabs have left the area. Only a few thousand remain. The rest have fled to refugee camps in Iran or have dispersed throughout Iraq.

On November 11, 2002, the U.S. Institute of Peace held a Current Issues Briefing on the plight of the Marsh Arabs. Speakers were the co-editors of, and contributors to, a new book entitled The Iraqi Marshlands: A Human and Environmental Study (Politico's Publishing, London, 2002). Richard Kauzlarich, director of the Institute's Special Initiative on the Muslim World, moderated the briefing. This Newsbyte briefly summarizes the speakers' presentations.

Emma Nicholson, Member of the European Parliament, Vice Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Special Rapporteur on Iraq

The Marsh Arab people, she said, "form a subset of humanity," as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, so those responsible for their extreme misfortune should be prosecuted under that treaty.

The Genocide Convention "declared that the world has not just a possibility, but an absolute obligation of acting when genocide is being committed," she said.

"We lay the blame at the feet of Saddam Hussein and of his regime," the baroness said. "But we do not believe that one man is uniquely responsible and must carry the blame and the guilt for everybody else involved. Others should be tried too, and as close as possible to where the crimes were committed. We are clearly not going to be able to do that in Iraq. So the world needs to act now to set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal."

Peter Clark, Chief Executive Officer, AMAR International Charitable Foundation

Clark said the Marsh Arabs have always engendered a certain amount of distrust and suspicion among urban and northern Iraqis; the marshlands have long been thought of as a refuge for smugglers, political dissidents and other transgressors. Also, there have been plans for various engineering works in the marshes since the early 20th Century. However, the wholesale destruction of the marshlands didn't begin in earnest until after the Marsh Arabs participated in a rebellion against Saddam Hussein immediately after the Persian Gulf War.

"It was only in the '90s under the present regime in Iraq that a drive was made to...really punish the people of the marshlands, and so it has been done in a pretty horrific way," Clark said. "There have been enormous consequences both to the environment and to the people as a result of the engineering works of the area, destruction of an economic base, destruction of a way of life, out-migration, pauperization."

The area's economy and way of life was based on agriculture, livestock production, hunting, fishing, and the servicing of commercial boats that traversed the Tigris River between Basra and Baghdad. All that was made impossible with the draining of the marshes and the resulting desertification of the area. It is important to bear in mind that 80 percent of Iraq's potential oil wealth is in the marsh he added.

After the regime began its assault on the marshlands, there was an exodus of Marsh Arabs to Iran. "These people were largely nobody's friends," Clark said. "Because they were Shiite, there was not a great deal of interest on the part of the rest of the Arab world. And because they were Arab, there was no great interest on the part of Iran." Iran did, however, agree to take in some of the Marsh Arabs, about 40,000 of whom now live in refugee camps there, according to The Iraqi Marshlands. Several hundred thousand others are dispersed throughout Iraq and elsewhere.

James Brasington, Lecturer in Geography, University of Cambridge

The southern Iraq marshes were formed over a 10,000-year period as a result of the annual flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They covered some 12,000 square miles and were home to a rich assortment of wildlife species. The only part of the marshes that remains intact straddles the Iran-Iraq border and is fed entirely by stream flows from Iran, which Iraq cannot control. That segment represents about 10 percent of the original marsh area.

"The removal of a wetland has affects on the regional climate," Brasington said. "The reduction of evaporation is likely to increase summer temperatures, making the area even more inhospitable and also causing a decline in...rainfall."

There are 32 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates upstream from the marshlands. They have the capacity to hold and store the entire capacity of the two rivers.

"The water retentive capacity of these engineering structures is enormous," Brasington said. "The spring flood has disappeared. River regulation has taken [it] away."

Joseph Dellapenna, Villanova University Law School

Hussein is "very likely" guilty of genocide against the Marsh Arabs, Dellapenna said. That the largest of the three marshes holds canals and engineering structures that serve no purpose other than to drain the marsh suggests that they were not built for any legitimate agricultural or developmental purpose.

"What happened in 1991 that may have prompted this?" he asked. "The answer is very obvious. It is that the Marsh Arabs in the south, as well as the Kurds in the north, rose in revolt against Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War. The allied coalition took steps to protect the Kurds. They did not take steps to protect the Marsh Arabs."

"That culture was of course built around water and around life in the marshes and that culture has been destroyed and, I would argue, deliberately and purposefully destroyed, precisely because they were people hard to control and a people who had risen in revolt."

[An October 2002 paper by John Fawcett and Victor Tanner entitled "The Internally Displaced People of Iraq," published by the Brookings Institution and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, reports that Iraqi state-owned media preceded the assault on the Marsh Arabs with a series of articles deriding them as primitive "monkey-faced" people, who were not real Iraqis.]

While there are a few bilateral treaties governing the use of water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, there is no comprehensive regional treaty. If the marshlands can be restored—which in itself is an open question—such a treaty is needed, Dellapenna said. But it certainly will not materialize while Saddam Hussein is in power.

The United States Institute of Peace is mandated by Congress to strengthen the nation's capabilities to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflict.

The views summarized here reflect the discussion at the meeting; they do not represent formal positions taken by the Institute, which does not advocate specific policies.

November 25, 2002

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/24/in-cradle-of-civilization-shrinking-rivers-endanger-unique-marsh-arab-culture/ 

In Cradle of Civilization, Shrinking Rivers Endanger Unique Marsh Arab Culture

Posted by Julia Harte of NG Young Explorers in Explorers Journal on April 24, 2013

This spring, National Geographic Young Explorer Julia Harte is traveling along the Tigris River from Southern Iraq to Southeastern Turkey, documenting ancient sites and modern communities along the river before they are transformed by the Ilısu Dam, an 11 billion-cubic-meter hydroelectric dam that will generate 2 percent of Turkey’s power.  

assim Al-Asadi knows the Central Marsh of Southern Iraq better than most. The director of Nature Iraq’s Chibayish branch was born in these vast wetlands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in a traditional Marsh Arab boat.

His birth came two months early in the summer of 1957, surprising his mother, who had been out gathering reeds when her water broke.

“When I opened my eyes, I opened them to see blue sky, the water, the plants, I heard the birds, and I saw the snakes,” recalls Al-Asadi, smiling at the thought. His mother laid him on the reeds she had been collecting, and took him home.

“In that time, there was no land like there is now in Chibayish,” explains Al-Asadi. “The town was like Venice. It had more than 1,200 islands, and between each island, there was water and natural canals.”

A woman races over the water of Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes in a motor-powered boat. Photo by Julia Harte

At their height, these wetlands sustained up to half a million people: Marsh Arabs who relied on buffalo breeding, fishing, hunting, and a few crops. Their lifestyle resembled that of the Sumerians who first settled the marshes 6,000 years ago.

Jassim was born in a hut entirely constructed of mud and reeds. To this day, the grandest accommodations in Marsh Arab Society are towering, arched reed structures called mudhifs, each one made of about 150,000 reeds — and nothing else. A bundle of 50 reeds costs about 2 USD.

Left: Men tug together the arches of a new mudhif. Right: Men pray and socialize in the mudhif of a sheikh in Chibayish. Photos by Julia Harte.

In Jassim’s childhood, the marshes were an intimate part of everyday life — even in the schoolroom.

When the marshes flooded, he recalls, “we put reeds and plants in the classrooms, and put the desks on it. The water entered the classrooms, the birds entered the classrooms; there were fish with us sometimes, not just pupil and teacher.”

At that time, the quality of the water was much higher, according to Jassim. The steady flow of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers periodically flushed the marshes with fresh water. Jassim and his friends would spend all summer swimming — something he wouldn’t dream of doing now — and drink water directly from the marshes.

Nowadays, all the marsh inhabitants buy water from the town of Chibayish, filling large plastic tanks for about $5 per ton of water, and ferrying them back to their homes on motor-powered boats.

A Marsh Arab family sets off on an errand. Even young children can easily operate taradas. Photo by Julia Harte.

In the middle of the Central Marsh, we disembark on an artificial island that dates back to Sumerian times, according to Jassim, and is now inhabited by a family of two dozen people.

Just thirty years ago, the site was a village with an electricity generator, a school, a health center, and many shops, say the people who live there now.

But all that has vanished in the intervening years. Saddam Hussein perceived a threat in the Marsh Arabs, accusing them of sheltering Shi’ite rebels. He ordered them all to leave, and built roads into the marshes so that his soldiers could find and expel any who remained. In 1993, he dealt the crowning blow, diverting the water of the Tigris River away from the marshes, into a massive canal called the Glory River.

The Central Marsh was completely dehydrated. A few years after the fall of Saddam, the land around the Glory River also dried up.

A town near the Glory River was abandoned after reductions in the Tigris flow shrank the canal and parched the surrounding wetlands. Photo by Julia Harte.

After the dictator’s fall, however, locals began to return. With the help of a bulldozer hired by Nature Iraq for about $350, they broke down the main embankment that Saddam had built, and water returned to the Central Marsh.

It wasn’t quite the same, however. Since pre-Saddam times, the quality of the water had drastically worsened; salinity levels reach 4,000 parts per million (ppm) now, says Jassim, compared to 200 ppm during the 1960s. The current level of salinization makes it difficult to breed buffalo, and stunts the growth of the reeds.

“We need good water from the Tigris, but no water is coming from the Tigris,” says Said Ali Said Hashim, a reed-gatherer who left the marshes after Saddam drained them but returned in 2004. “All the water comes from the Euphrates, which has become very saline and low-quality. I don’t care if the water floods into all our houses, we just need water.”

Marsh Arab women sit near their home and watch their buffalo swim. Photo by Julia Harte.

Now that Saddam and his embankments are no more, the Marsh Arabs see upstream dams as the main threat to their water supply.

Nowadays, the quantity of water in the Euphrates River at Nasiriyah is sometimes as low as 18 cubic meters per second, according to Jassim. No less than 90 cubic meters per second is required to supply adequate water for drinking, irrigation, and marsh replenishment, he adds.

Most of the blame for these lower levels in the rivers can be apportioned to Turkish and Syrian dams. Turkey, in particular, controls approximately 90 percent of the water flow in the Euphrates and 50 percent of the flow in the Tigris. In the last forty years, Turkey’s hydroelectric dams have reportedly reduced water flow into Iraq by approximately 80 percent.

The diminishing level of water in the Shatt al-Arab River, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, allows salty water from the Persian Gulf to creep into the marshes and farmland of Southern Iraq, “which is catastrophic for all kinds of marine life as well as for agriculture,” says Bakhtiar Amin, Human Rights Minister of Iraq from 2004 to 2005.

Each year, says Amin, there are thousands of new “water refugees” in Southern Iraq: people displaced by the changes to their natural environment. “Many villages are depopulated because of that. It has a terrible economic impact upon the population.”

Shatt al-Arab River begins at the former meeting point of the Tigris and Euphrates. Since the Euphrates was diverted into the marshes, the Tigris has filled in this section of the Euphrates riverbed. Photo by Julia Harte.

Turkey’s Ilısu Dam, which with a hydroelectric generating potential of 1,200 MW will meet 2 percent of the country’s power demand when it is finished, will save the government $400 million in energy costs each year, according to project managers.

But to Marsh Arabs, these bucks aren’t being saved — they’re simply getting passed downstream. Sheikh Said Ahmet Said Ali is an agricultural landowner in the Glory River basin. “I think all the effects on the Euphrates and Tigris River are from the Turkish dams. Many times, we haven’t been able to be sure of our water supply because of new dams,” he says.

Jassim highlights the importance of the marshes for its remaining inhabitants. “The locals know very well that the economy depends on the marsh, and they need the marsh,” he says.

For them, environmental ethics and the marshes’ tourism potential are secondary to the larger service the marshlands provide: a resource base for the fishing, buffalo breeding, hunting, and reed gathering that they rely on.

Women sell freshly caught fish by the side of the road near their village on the marshes. Photo by Julia Harte.

If all the dams that Turkey is planning to build are completed, Jassim says, “there won’t be any marsh in Iraq. This marsh is here now because we closed the Euphrates between Nasiriyah and Basra and diverted it into the marsh, but that’s causing salinity issues in the marsh. What will we do if there isn’t any Tigris either?”

All the Marsh Arabs we have spoken to agree that the marshes won’t recover until the river water improves. If it doesn’t, they will be forced to make a final migration to the city, ending a remarkable civilization in the land where civilization began.

Sunrise in the marshes. Photo by Julia Harte.

This project is also made possible by a Dick Goldensohn Fund grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10233538/Iraq-marshes-A-return-to-Eden-after-Saddams-fall.html

Iraq marshes: A return to Eden after Saddam’s fall

Nature has rewarded the man with a vision who brought the Mesopotamian marshes back to life after Saddam, and now they have been designated Iraq's first national park

Marsh of progress: Azzam Alwash set up an environmental group that helps local efforts to reverse Saddam’s draining of the wetlands Photo: Getty Images

By Geoffrey Lean

7:25PM BST 09 Aug 2013

They are thought to be the site of the Garden of Eden, but Saddam Hussein turned them into hell on earth. Yet now, largely through one man’s vision and sacrifice, the Mesopotamian marshes have been sufficiently restored for much of them to have been designated as Iraq’s first national park. Fed by the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshes were once the largest and richest in wildlife in the Middle East, and – at some 7,700 square miles – the third most extensive in the world.

More than five millennia ago, much of the modern human story began around their shores, as writing and the wheel were invented, agriculture was developed and early cities took root. After the great Sumerian civilisation declined and fell, its descendants lived on in a world of water amid the desert, their way of life little changed from that depicted on clay tablets from 3,500 BC. Fifty years back, explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who lived for months in the marshes, wrote of “stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, canoes coming home at evening, peace and continuity and the stillness of a world which never knew an engine”.

He is echoed by Azzam Alwash, who used to visit them as a child. “I remember looking into deep, deep clear waters and seeing large fish darting away,” he told me, “and black clouds of birds in the blue sky. Words cannot describe the beauty of the place.” It wasn’t to last. Shia who had risen against Saddam took refuge in the marshes, making the president determined to destroy a traditional sanctuary for dissidents. Over the next few years he obsessively drained the wetlands, constructing six giant waterways – with names like Saddam River and Loyalty to the Leader Canal – and thousands of miles of embankments.

The marshes were shrunk by 93 per cent – and their people, once hundreds of thousands strong, to some 20,000 – in what the United Nations Environment Programme described as the greatest engineered environmental disaster of the century. In Alwash’s words: “A once-beautiful green Eden became a salt-encrusted desert.” By this time, having fled the regime’s persecution aged 20, he was living “the American dream”, married with two daughters, in an affluent Los Angeles suburb, with “a wonderful job” as an engineer.

But when Saddam fell, he decided to give all that up in order to go back and try to bring the “cradle of civilisation” to life. Expert after expert told him it could not be done but, as Alwash, now aged 55, has said, he doesn’t let himself “be constrained by reality”. He set up an environmental organisation, and set to work coordinating haphazard breaches in the embankments already being made by local people and developing a master plan.

“I hadn’t planned to be a hero,” he now says. “I was foolish enough to think it could be a two-year project.” Instead he has now been at it for a decade, often in danger in a country with little law and order, revisiting his home and family only “twice a year, for two weeks at a time”. Despite his family’s support, he desperately misses watching his children grow up but adds: “The honest truth is that I could not give up.”

And nature has rewarded him. More than half the marshlands have now been restored. All their previously recorded 278 species of birds appear to have survived in small pockets and are now recolonising them: there are thought to be some 43,000 marbled teal, a species that long seemed to have vanished. Otters and other wildlife once thought extinct have returned and the people of the marshes are coming back, able again to make a living. There’s still a long way to go in what Alwash now realises is a “multi-lifetime” effort.

“It now looks the same, and feels the same as in my childhood,” he says, “but my gut knows it is not yet the same.” And threats continue. Turkey is building more than 20 dams across the Tigris and Euphrates upstream, increasingly choking off the spring-time pulse of meltwater from the mountains that has always given life to the marshes.

Alwash – who this year won the Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots activists, which I help to judge – is drawing up plans to recreate it artificially while persuading his countrymen not to waste water. Even so, the revival of the marshes – and the designation of the national park – is changing the fate of the Garden of Eden from one of the world’s worst environmental catastrophes to an example of how other lost wetlands could be restored worldwide. Who, you might ask, would Adam-and-Eve it?