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
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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
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?
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