A potential flashpoint? Turkey’s GAP dam project.
|
Let
not a simple drop of water that falls on the land go into the sea without serving
the people.
Parakkama-Bahu
I,
King of Sri Lanka
(1153-1186)
|
You cannot increase your water resources by going to war with a neighbour |
Aaron
Wolf*, an American geographer, dispels the scare-mongering of a looming war over
water by sifting through just about every related conflict and treaty in history
Just
about every journalist writing about water will evoke the spectre of past and impending
wars over the resource. You have searched for and analyzed every international water
agreement signed and “incident” reported. When was the last time two states
formally went to war over water?
The only recorded incident of an outright war over water was 4,500 years ago between
two Mesopotamian city-states over the Tigris-Euphrates in the region we now call
southern Iraq. Since then, you find water exacerbating relations at the international
scale. But you also regularly find hostile states—such as India and Pakistan or the
Israelis and Palestinians—resolving water conflicts even while disputes rage over
other issues.
We also analyzed every reported water incident between two states that we could find
anywhere in the world’s 261 international river basins in the past 50 years. Two-thirds
of a total of 1,800 events involved cooperation, like conducting joint scientific
investigations or signing over 150 water treaties.
Turning to the negative events, we found that 80 percent consisted of verbal threats
and posturing by state leaders, which was probably aimed at their own internal constituents.
In 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said: “The only matter that could take Egypt
to war again is water,” in reference to the Nile. King Hussein allegedly said the
same thing for Jordan in 1990.
Yet in the last 50 years, there have only been 37 events in which people actually
shot at each other over water. Of those, 27 were between Israel and Syria over the
Jordan and Yarmouk rivers.
But critics argue that you cannot look to history to predict the future because
of unprecedented stress on increasingly scarce water supplies.
I cannot think of a worse case than the Tigris-Euphrates or the Jordan River. All
of these countries have run out of water. They have the means to divert their neighbour’s
water and the enmity between them couldn’t get much worse. Yet they have all come
up with agreements.
States have gone to war over oil, why not water?
Strategically, water wars don’t make sense. You cannot increase your water resources
by going to war with a neighbour unless you are willing to capture the entire watershed,
depopulate it and not expect a tremendous retaliation.
But water has been used as a weapon and target in war.
That’s a totally different issue, which happens all the time. During the Gulf War,
Iraq destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination plants and the Allied coalition intentionally
targeted Baghdad’s water supply and sanitation system. Serbian engineers reportedly
shut down Pristina’s water system in Kosovo before Nato arrived in 1999.
Yet you must distinguish between water as a source of conflict, as a resource and
as a weapon. We’ve gone to war over oil. Yet you wouldn’t put that event in the same
category as the military use of a flame thrower or even napalm.
So where does this water-war talk come from?
A lot came from the post-Cold War period, when the Western military asked, “what
do we do now?” That is when this whole environmental security movement took off.
By around 1992, a lot of political scientists began writing that resource scarcity
in general was going to lead to warfare. It’s very tempting to see water as a source
of conflict once you begin to understand what it means to society and ecosystems.
But in emphasizing the value of the resource, these analysts overlooked the subtleties
involved.
You argue that water by its very nature induces co-operation between states. Can
you give an example?
The Oslo Accord between Israelis and Palestinians actually came out of backroom talks
among water people from the region who met in Zurich in 1990—I believe. The water
people introduced their political counterparts to one another and actually hatched
out the process, which led to the accord.
This kind of scenario happens regularly because water naturally flows into other
realms. States along the Nile began by talking about water and are now working towards
an agreement that includes roads, electricity and other infrastructure (see
pp. 30-31).
You maintain that the “red flag” for international water is not water scarcity
but one country’s attempt to dominate an international river. Most of these conflicts
usually revolve around plans to build a major dam. But this kind of project generally
requires assistance from organizations like the World Bank, which evaluate proposals
according to environmental and ethical criteria. By pulling the purse strings, can’t
these organizations prevent water conflicts from arising?
What you’re suggesting has been the case. But as more private capital takes over
investment in these projects, the ethical and environmental criteria of the development
banks is no longer an issue. Turkey, for example, is diverting private and public
capital to fund one of the most contentious projects, known as GAP, which envisages
the construction of 22 dams and 19 power plants on the Tigris-Euphrates and its tributaries.
The same is true for the Narmada dam in India and China’s Three Gorges project.
The Tigris-Euphrates is regularly cited as a flashpoint for a possible war. How
can anyone induce Turkey, probably the most powerful state in the region, not to
pursue its own interests to the detriment of its downstream neighbours, Iraq and
Syria?
Everybody keeps talking about the Tigris-Euphrates as a potential flashpoint, but
what’s really interesting is that in 1991, Nato actually asked Turkey to shut the
flow of the Euphrates towards Iraq. But the government refused and basically said,
“You can use our air space and bases to bomb Iraq, but we won’t cut off their water.”
Since the 1970s, Turkey, Syria and Iraq have had an implicit agreement, which Turkey
continued to respect even while building the dams. And despite the rhetoric, Syria
and Iraq both recognize that they benefit from those dams because they even out the
river’s flow and extend their farmers’ growing season. Turkey wants to be seen as
a fair, good neighbour for several reasons, including Nato pressure as an ally, internal
politics and attempts to join the European Union. The difficulty lies in making the
implicit agreements explicit.
Water professionals maintain that you have to manage a river basin as a whole.
But multilateral water treaties must be a nightmare to negotiate. Which are more
effective—multilateral or bilateral agreements?
The more people in the room, the more difficult it is to reach an agreement, especially
when you are dealing with a country’s sovereignty. Take the Jordan River as an example:
Syria and Jordan have an agreement, Jordan and Israel have an agreement, Israel and
Palestinians have an agreement—several sets of bilateral agreements for a multilateral
basin which is managed fairly efficiently, although the Palestinians will eventually
claim and probably get greater water rights.
A new way of solving water conflicts, some economists argue, is to set up an international
water market. But then again, we can look to the recent conflict in which the U.S.
has argued that Canada must sell its water resources under the terms of the North
American Free Trade Agreement—a proposition that Canada rejects. What is the value
of treating water as an economic resource when trying to resolve a conflict?
Economists can highlight and quantify the benefits flowing from water, like hydroelectricity,
and help build what we call a “baskets of benefits.” For example, the U.S. and Canada
have an agreement in which the U.S. has flood control dams within Canadian territory.
The U.S. pays Canada for that benefit. It is generally easier and more equitable
to allocate the benefits than the water itself.
Economists also remind us of the need to recover the cost of water delivery, treatment,
storage and so on. But we’re often pushed to think in terms of water markets—buying
and selling water as a commodity even though this has never happened internationally
in a practical sense. As someone who is committed to water emotionally, aesthetically,
religiously and for ecosystems, I am reluctant to think of water as just another
economic good.
*
Director of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database project (http://terra.geo.orst.edu) and
associate professor at Oregon State University |
