Media

After Saddam: the welcome flood

The Times
18 January 2008
Author: Martin Fletcher

It is a scene of stunning natural beauty. The young man steers his wooden boat through a maze of narrow waterways flanked by banks of yellow reeds. The water sparkles beneath a wintry sun. The floats of submerged fishing nets bobble on the surface. Herons and waterfowl scatter as the boats approach.

It is difficult to believe that this is Iraq, yet we are only 200 miles (320km) from war-torn Baghdad, on the country’s southern marshes, witnessing one of the happier stories to emerge since the US-led invasion.

Five years ago these marshes - which once covered an area nearly the size of Wales - were barren desert, drained by Saddam Hussein to destroy a sanctuary for his opponents. The UN called it one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters.

Today more than half the marshland has been reflooded. The fish and abundant birdlife have returned. So have roughly two thirds of the 500,000 Marsh Arabs forced from their homes.

But it remains hard to see how this natural paradise and ancient culture, extolled by the British adventurer Wilfred Thesiger in his 1964 classic The Marsh Arabs, can ever recover fully from the catastrophe that befell them.

In the squalid town of Nahiyat al-Fahud on the marshlands’ western fringe, Ajil Shenawa, 60, recalled how he was raised in a reed house in the marshes and, like generations of his ancestors, fished for a living. When the waters dried up he took his family to live in the town of Safwan, on the Kuwait border, until Saddam fell.

Mr Shenawa is thrilled that the water has returned - “I didn’t think it would ever come back” - but has chosen to live in Nahiyat al-Fahud, not the marshes themselves, because it has brick homes, electricity, water and basic services.  “In the marshes we don’t have anything,” he said. Of Mr Shenawa’s ten children, only two are fishing. One has joined the army and the rest are jobless. Thus a way of life that stretches back thousands of years is in danger of extinction.

The marshes of lower Mesopotamia are found where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers dissolve into meandering ribbons and lakes before entering the Persian Gulf. They form one of the largest and oldest wetlands on the planet. They are thought to have inspired the biblical Garden of Eden, and possibly the Flood.

Here, Man developed agriculture. Here, human beings have lived for at least 6,000 years, fishing, raising water buffalo, growing rice and dates, and living - often - in reed houses on floating platforms. They built mudheef: communal meeting houses with great arched roofs made entirely of reeds that serve as the political, social and religious centres of Marsh Arab life. Traditionally, the marshes have also provided refuge - for slaves, for bandits, for opponents of the British in the early 20th century, for deserters during Iraq’s war with Iran during the 1980s and, more recently, for thousands of Shia rebels who rose against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam had long repressed the fiercely independent Marsh Arabs, but after 1991 he set out to destroy them and their habitat for ever. He built canals and earthen levees to stop water flowing into the marshes. He poisoned the marsh water and laced it with mines. He sent in troops and helicopter gunships to destroy the villages, burn the reed beds and slaughter the herds of water buffalo. Many thousands of Marsh Arabs were killed.

“It was genocide,” said Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, who had long been appalled by Saddam’s atrocities and, after 1991, crossed many times into the marshes from Iran dressed as a Marsh Arab woman to see what was happening.

By the time Saddam was overthrown in April 2003, less than 10 per cent of the marshes survived, and in some places Saddam had even sent in bulldozers to remove the rich topsoil. The 85,000 Marsh Arabs who remained had been forcibly resettled far from their hereditary lands. The rest had fled to refugee camps in Iran or the slums of Iraqi cities.

After the US invasion the Marsh Arabs acted quickly. Using dynamite and bare hands, they broke down Saddam’s dams and dykes and let the waters flood back over their dessicated, salt-encrusted land.

Today the marshes look serene and beautiful, but appearances are deceptive.  Saddam’s legacy survives in the form of more than 30 dams built further upstream. They, and Turkey’s giant Ataturk dam, have almost halved the volume of water in the Tigris and Euphrates, meaning there is no longer enough to re flood the rest of the marshes.

There is no longer a spring surge, which was caused by melting snows in Turkey’s mountains and flushed fresh water through the marshes just as the fish were spawning, birds migrating and reed banks emerging from their winter hibernation. Today water flows much more slowly through the re-flooded marshes.  It is dirtier, more saline, and no longer drinkable. The Marsh Arabs would find it hard to resume their traditional lifestyle in large numbers even if they wanted to. Their villages have been destroyed, their water buffalo herds slaughtered, their land degraded. They used to harvest reeds for mats and paper, but the market has collapsed in the post-war chaos of Iraq.

So, it seems, has the Marsh Arabs’ harmony with nature and themselves. Ali Nasir Muthana visits the marshes regularly as manager of Amar (Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees), a charity founded by Baroness Nicholson. He says that from economic necessity some of those living in the marshes now poison or electrocute the waters to catch fish. The tribes are blighted by vicious land disputes caused by Saddam’s forcible relocations. “Inter-tribal conflicts are the major cause of deaths inside the marshes,” he says.

Without action Thesiger’s words - written long before Saddam’s ascendancy - may prove sadly prophetic: “Soon the Marshes will probably be drained: when this happens a way of life that has lasted for thousands of years will disappear.”

LIFE ON THE MUD

* The Marsh Arabs traditionally live in houses built on artificial islands, created by enclosing a stretch of marsh with a 20ft-high reed fence. Reeds and rushes are packed inside the fence, forming the foundation for the house

* A more permanent site - a dibin - is produced when mud from the marsh is used to cover the foundation. If a family leaves a dibin unoccupied for more than a year, anyone may take possession of it

* According to Marsh Arab folklore two deadly monsters live in the heart of the marshes: the anfish, a giant serpent with hairy skin; and the afa, a giant serpent with legs

* When the marshes were being drained, underground pipes were used to disperse waters, as well as canals, dykes and dams, and some marshland was
burnt. Fifty-two fish species, water birds, wild boar and red foxes disappeared from the area

* The Marsh Arabs are Shia Muslims. Saddam’s destruction of the area was, in part, retribution for the Shias’ failed uprising after the first Gulf War

Sources: Agencies, Human Rights Watch, Everyculture.com