Water+in+the+Middle+East


 * WATER AND PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST **

A 12th-century sultan ordered it built to carry water from the Nile to Cairo. Napoleon filled in the arches and turned it into a wall. Now, after another year of severe drought in the Middle East, the government has ordered the city’s ancient aqueduct restored to slake the thirst of modern Egyptians.

The project, which will take two years to complete at a cost of U.S. $11 million, dramatizes the importance of one of the major keys to peace in the Middle East: water. Experts say that a lack of agreement on how the region’s scarce resources should be divided not only could wreck any peace deal with Israel, but could actually lead to new outbreaks of war among the Arab states. “People outside of the region tend not to hear about the issue,” says a U.S. State Department official. “It just doesn’t make the news. But there are talks all the time among water specialists. Guaranteeing fair access to water is critical to any peace agreement.” Palestinian official Fadl Ka-wash declared yesterday on the official government radio station that water “is no less important and serious than any other final status issues on the agenda of the Camp David summit” between the Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. RUNNING ON LOW In a region with a population of 12 million and about as much rainfall every year as Phoenix, Arizona, water weighs heavily in the concerns of Palestinians, Jordanians, and Israelis over their joint futures together. Forty percent of Israel’s water supply comes from aquifers beneath the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. About 25 percent comes from the Sea of Galilee, which helps explain why Israelis balked when Syria this spring insisted on giving up control of the shoreline as well as the entire Golan Heights—often called the “water tower of the Middle East”—as the price of peace. Even though it controls most of its water resources now, Israel is running dry. Last spring, in the midst of the worst drought since 1990-91, the cabinet decreed a 40 percent reduction in subsidized water allocations for farmers and promised compensation to farmers for their losses. The leading newspaper Ha’aretz, citing the possibility of more years of reduced rainfall and an “imminent threat to the supply of drinking water,” called on the government to set “special regulations to reduce urban consumption and educational activities to promote water conservation.” GREEN LAWNS, DRY TAPS While water shortages are proving an annoyance to Israeli citizens, they are angering the Palestinians. At one point Palestinian officials in Hebron—hardest-hit of the West Bank cities—limited households to running water only twice per month. Most West Bank water still flows through Israeli pipes, despite the existing agreement yielding control over the territory to the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians claim their average citizen receives less than one-third as much water as the average Israeli, and criticize California-style watered lawns and vat-sized bathtubs in Israel. A study released this spring by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and counterpart groups from Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority confirmed that Israel’s per capita water use in 1994 was nearly quadruple that of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But Israel and its immediate neighbors aren’t the only Middle-Eastern states with water problems. The Egyptian aqueduct project was spurred partly by predictions that the country’s water needs will rise 30 percent by 2017. Water Resources Minister Mahmoud Abu Zaid told a January symposium at Cairo University that Egypt will have to find an extra 20 billion cubic meters of water by then to meet the demands of its rapidly growing population. In Egypt as elsewhere, agriculture is a prime consumer of water, especially since 1977, when the government embarked on an ambitious irrigation program in the northeast to help feed the country’s 68 million people. MOVING IT AROUND Several Arab states are busy moving their dwindling water supplies around to serve the neediest areas. Iran—which has set up a crisis committee to deal with water shortages in Tehran—recently opened a 207-mile (333-kilometer) pipeline to supply water from the Zayandeh River in central Iran to the desert province of Yazd. President Mohammad Khatami visited his native region in March to inaugurate the U.S. $88.6-million pipeline, which the official news agency called the largest water transfer project in the Middle East. The government of Iraq in March began digging a canal to take water from the Tigris River to drought-stricken lands north of Baghdad—part of emergency measures ordered by President Saddam Hussein to cope with water shortages. Saddam also ordered relief measures for the western town of Rawa, where falling levels in Lake Qadissiyah and in the Euphrates River have caused a drinking-water crisis. Water levels in the Tigris—which along with the Euphrates form the major sources of Iraq’s supplies—have been falling sharply because of slack rainfall over the past three years. The government also has bitterly complained that the situation has been worsened by dams built upstream, further reducing the flows. Dams, in fact, have become a source of dangerous friction that could lead to war, in the opinion of some of the ministers from nations attending a World Water Forum held in the Hague in March. “Worldwide, at least 214 rivers flow through two or more countries, but no enforceable law governs the allocation and use of international waters,” said Sandra Postel, a senior researcher for the U.S. based environmental group Worldwatch Institute. WATER WARS? Many believe the biggest flash-point is the Middle East with its desert climate, shrinking aquifers, staggering rates of population growth, and tradition of settling differences by fighting. “Many of the wars of this [20th] century were about oil,” World Bank Vice President Ismail Serageldin once observed, “but the wars of the next century will be about water.” No country is so dependent on a single lifeline as Egypt is on the Nile—the source of which lies several countries to the south. Eighty percent of Iraq’s water originates outside its borders. Turkey controls most of the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the twin rivers upon which both Syria and Iraq depend. Syria and Iraq are gravely concerned about the effects that water-rich Turkey’s massive Southeastern Anatolian Project, with its dam system, will have on their stretches of the Tigris and Euphrates. Former Turkish President Turgut Ozal a decade ago proposed a “peace pipeline” to sell surplus water from the Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers to parched countries on the Arabian Peninsula. Experts estimated that such a project would cost billions of dollars and take a decade to build. But the most daunting challenge to such a project—or any other regional water-sharing arrangement—would be getting nations that often have warred against each other to cooperate. In the end, a pan-Arab deal on water resources that takes into account Israel’s concerns may not only be a price of peace in the region. Peace might be the price of such a deal.

** Protests Grow Over Plan For More Turkish Dams **

When it's finished, perhaps in the next decade, it is expected to bring life-giving water to a region about the size of Austria. Turkey's controversial US $32 billion Southeast Anatolia Project - a massive plan calling for 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric plants strung along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers - is also intended to provide almost one-quarter of that country's electric power.

But issues unrelated to irrigation and electricity are raising anxieties among an odd collection of international political bedfellows drawn together by their various concerns about GAP - as the project is known by its Turkish initials. Opponents include Turkey's downstream neighbors Syria and Iraq - along with local and foreign environmentalists, human rights activists, and even archaeologists and art historians worried about the flooding of ancient cultural sites.

Bowing to growing public pressure, Great Britain recently put a hold on its plans to help finance the next major component of the project, the proposed Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River. Some groups are insisting that Turkey consult with Syria and Iraq - both of which have had hostile relations with Turkey - about the use of the waters.

Last month an alliance of 14 human rights and environmentalist groups appealed to the U.S. Export-Import Bank and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to halt any further discussion of plans to support the Ilisu Dam.

Even some companies that stand to be enriched by the construction work have begun getting cold feet. In August the Swedish firm Skanska announced that it was pulling out of an international consortium of contractors that have been designated for the work in order to protect its environmental reputation.

Turkey's government is giving every indication that it intends to proceed despite these setbacks. The project is expected to give the pro-western country an enormous strategic advantage in a chronically thirsty part of the world. Many experts predict that during the 21st century, whoever controls the water supply in the Near East will dominate to a great extent economic and political events, possibly even the production of oil by water-reliant members of OPEC.

"The next war in the Near East will not be about politics, but over water," former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali once warned an American think tank. "Washington does not take this threat seriously because everything in the U.S. relates to oil."


 * WATER BLACKMAIL?**

The concerns of Syria and Iraq focus primarily on their reliance on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers for water. The rivers, which flow through Turkey, are being systematically dammed up by GAP activities. Turkish officials have said repeatedly that they will not restrict flows once their reservoirs are filled; but the two downstream countries fear they will be subject to blackmail by Turkey whenever their national policies conflict.

Citing international law requiring agreement of downstream countries to dam projects, Iraq has threatened to bring Turkey - which does not recognize this law - before an international tribunal.

Earlier this year a chorus of protest arose when rising water in a new reservoir behind the recently completed Birecik Dam threatened to inundate the site of the 2,000-year-old Roman city of Zeugma, including its collection of long-buried mosaics and other stunning examples of imperial Roman artwork. The filling operation was briefly suspended during a frantic effort to salvage some of the most important known artifacts, and then resumed. The project also has destroyed pistachio fields and other orchards and has affected an estimated 30,000 people - mostly members of Turkey's Kurdish minority - in 44 villages. Some 6,500 residents have been forcibly resettled.

The Birecik Dam is the third dam on the Euphrates, following the Karakaya and Ataturk Dams. The proposed Ilisu Dam would obliterate 52 villages and 15 small towns along the Tigris. Among these is the modern 5,500-person settlement of Hasankeyf - which lies in at the bottom of a limestone cliff below the ruins of its medieval predecessor, a nationally recognized cultural heritage site. Artifacts that consumed by the rising water include a bridge built by a local 12th-century chieftain, a mosque built by a sultan, and a royal tomb.

In human terms, more troubling to many than the loss of cultural and historical areas is the effect that GAP is having on the hard-pressed Kurds, who happen to be the majority in the areas designated for flooding. Kurdish guerrillas in southeastern Turkey have been waging a war for independence since 1984. Some critics see GAP as playing a helpful role in the government's efforts to suppress them.


 * ENVIRONMENTALISTS JOIN CRITICS**

London-based Kurdish human rights lawyer Kerim Yildiz is spearheading an international campaign to block the Ilisu Dam, taking aim at what is possibly its most vulnerable spot: its need for large amounts of money. Appealing to several western governments that along with Japan have been asked to provide export credits or guarantees of about US $850 million, Yildiz argues that "if anyone supports this dam it will contribute to the violation of human rights and international law."

Critics say the Ilisu Dam will require the forced resettlement of as many as 34,000 local people - mostly Kurds - and could negatively effect the lives of 78,000.

Yildiz' allies include several prominent environmental groups, including London-based Friends of the Earth. They maintain that with tons of untreated solid waste and wastewater of major cities already being dumped into the Tigris, the new reservoir would vastly reduce the ability of the river to cleanse itself naturally. They also argue that besides displacing thousands of Kurds, the reservoir would bring malaria and other waterborne diseases to those who remain in the area.

"The Ilisu project will wreak environmental and social havoc and wreck the lives of thousands of Kurds," says Friends of the Earth policy director Tony Juniper. He called British government support for the project a "direct intervention in a war zone."

The Turkish government has answered critics at every step of the way, promising to conduct new environmental impact studies, to install wastewater treatment plants, laboratories, and to launch health education programs in the affected areas.

Government officials say that if international financing is cut off, Turkey will find a way to continue. They cite interest from several unnamed construction companies in participating if the others were to join Sweden's Skanska in backing out.

"Turkey wants to realize the project either with these firms in some way, on credit or on its own," says State Waterworks Authority General Manager Dogan Altinbilek. "We want to complete this project, not waste our efforts."