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Remarks by Andrew S. Natsios,
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International DevelopmentIraq's Marsh Arabs
Brookings Institution
May 07, 2003
We began research on this topic last fall, on the basis of data that's available at United Nations, in Europe and the United States, in the scholarly community, and within AID itself of course, because AID has 40 years of experience around the world in the environmental area, and in the human rights area, and in the internally displaced area. Roberta (Cohen, of Brookings) and I do share some expertise on the plight of internally displaced people around the world, among the most brutalized of them being the Marsh Arabs.
The marshes of southern Iraq were the largest wetlands in the Middle East. As you all know, for 5,000 years the Madan or Marsh Arabs lived in these marshes and developed a unique culture. It was intimately tied in to the environment, to hunting and fishing, and the cultivation of rice and barley.
Since the '50s there have been at least 32 dams built on the Tigris and Euphrates River basin; another 20 or so are either under construction or planned. The destruction of the marshes and the people who lived in them accelerated rapidly after the first Gulf War. Saddam, as you well know, went to great lengths to build canals and drain the waters in order to punish the people of the marshes after the Shi'a uprisings in the early 1990s.
His soldiers reportedly killed tens of thousands -- some estimates are as high as between 50 and 100,000 - and burned their communities to the ground, poisoned the water, destroyed the livestock, and planted unmarked land and water mines throughout the region.
The population numbered more than a quarter of a million 1990 according to some estimates, and may have been reduced to 20,000 to 40,000. Many live as refugees in Iran. Another 250,000 are internally displaced, and as you know, there has been great discrimination beyond just the Ba'ath Party within Iraqi society, tragically, against the marsh people, and so they are among the most oppressed of the social order in the country. The marsh lands that once covered 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometers now extend to less than 2,000. The Central Marsh has been reduced to 3 percent of its original size, and all of the Al Hammar Marsh is down to 6 percent. Only the Al Hawizah Marsh along the border with Iran remains sizeable, and even that has been reduced by two-thirds.
There has been though, to be fair, a relationship between the decline of the marshes and the damming of the water basin, in Syria, Turkey and Iran, and in Iraq itself. And so some of this was an actual function of development and another was a systematic attempt to destroy the marshes by the regime and the Ba'ath Party.
The questions we must deal with first are what can be done about this? First, we have to be realistic. Neither the Tigris nor the Euphrates Rivers carry as much water as they did into Iraq 15 or 20 years ago. We all know that. The question is, of course, what that water-filled body is at this point. Turkey, Syria and Iran have control over the headwaters and control that through the damming system that has been built over time. Iraq's population has continued to grow over the years, too, and the demands of people living upstream affect profoundly the marshes in the downstream. The worst place to be in the case of marshes, as you know, is the downstream, where you don't control the headwaters. Further, there is no international agreement or comprehensive river basin plan for managing the Tigris and Euphrates River system, nor is there a mechanism for balancing Iraq's competing claims on these waters and the land that depends on them.
The marshlands have been closed to outsiders since 1988. I know some people have managed to get in, but we have not had much freedom of movement. My view is that we need to see what conditions are, to measure the hydrology of the system to make some comprehensive assessments that are precise and there's general scientific agreement on. We also know that there are experts within the Iraqi Government who are people of high standards and high technical principles who will be supporters of efforts to deal with this issue. No one knows for sure how the marshes have been affected. We know there's been drainage on a massive scale, there has been enormous damage.
The hydrology and ecology of the wetlands are extraordinarily complex and extraordinarily delicate as well. We know the controversies that have surrounded the attempts and the plan to restore the Everglades, which may never be fully restored to what they were. This issue will not go away. It is there. We are looking at it now, and we certainly need the expertise of the people in this room, the international community and, and within Iraq itself, particularly among the people living there. These marshes after all belong to the Iraqi people; they are their owners, the ones who are left.
Now, the question is what do we need as sort of general operating principles to look at this issue? And I'm going to conclude these remarks because I know time is short. The first is: we should design a process that includes Iraqis at every step, and which can resolve the social, political and institutional issues related to resettlement, property rights, economic opportunities and social safety nets.
Two: we need to establish a reliable database that is commonly accepted among the scientific community within the country and outside the country so that we don't have debates on the technical issues. We're going to have enough debates as time goes on about what to do. The question is dealing with a baseline of data. So we need to do a set of technical surveys as the basis for programming in the future.
We also need to look at funding immediate interventions to manage and respect what marshlands that do remain is important and restoring the destroyed areas through targeted and rehabilitation pilot projects. The next principles are creating partnerships with other donors and with other international institutions, the private sector, and with of course the donor community and non-governmental organizations, and training Iraqi scientists, officials in the new government, the environmentalists and the marsh Arabs themselves in wetland management beyond the skills they already have. They certainly have skills, but AID has learned, for example, a lot about river basin management across national boundaries. We have had extensive experience in this in Latin America, in North Africa, and now in the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers in southern Africa. So our experience is decades long, in terms of negotiating inter-country agreements on the sharing of water, on the collection of data, and other elements of watershed management.
And finally, we need to form a broad-based scientific coalition to work with the others on issues in research. Any plan would have to include the riparian countries of the Tigris and Euphrates River basin, for without their cooperation, we're not going to have much success over the long run. But there are some things we can do to to help deal with this problem. I actually postponed a trip to go to Canada, which I was invited to, but I postponed because I wanted to attend this.
Thank you for inviting me and we're with you on this. We need technical assistance. Where's John? John is right here. He's a career officer with AID. He's got a beard, glasses, a very handsome guy. He is our technical expert here, is in fact doing research on this issue. Thank you very much and thank you for doing this.
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Last Updated on: May 28, 2003
