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Vanishing Water Landscapes in the Middle East: Public Perceptions, Political Narratives and Traditional Beliefs Surrounding Water and Scarcity in an Arid Region Francesca de Châtel ISBN/EAN: 978-90-9028232-9 Cover photo: Adel Samara, Syria. The road to the submerged village of Tel Abr that was flooded by the creation of Lake Tishreen on the Euphrates River, 2009. Cover design: Ghazal Lababidi Layout: Ilse Stronks, persoonlijkproefschrift.nl Printing: Ipskamp Drukkers Vanishing Water Landscapes in the Middle East: Public Perceptions, Political Narratives and Traditional Beliefs Surrounding Water and Scarcity in an Arid Region Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. mr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 11 juni 2014 om 12.30 uur precies door Francesca de Châtel geboren op 22 oktober 1973 te Amsterdam Promotoren: Prof. dr. F.W.J. Keulartz Prof. dr. H.A.E. Zwart Manuscriptcommissie: Prof. dr. A.J.M. Smits Dr. T. Oestigaard (Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Zweden) Dr. S.V. Meijerink Vanishing Water Landscapes in the Middle East: Public Perceptions, Political Narratives and Traditional Beliefs Surrounding Water and Scarcity in an Arid Region Doctoral Thesis to obtain the degree of doctor from Radboud University Nijmegen on the authority of the Rector Magnificus prof. dr. S.C.J.J. Kortmann, according to the decision of the Council of Deans to be defended in public on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 at 12.30 hours by Francesca de Châtel Born on October 22, 1973 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands Supervisors: Prof. dr. F.W.J. Keulartz Prof. dr. H.A.E. Zwart Doctoral Thesis Committee: Prof. dr. A.J.M. Smits Dr. T. Oestigaard (Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden) Dr. S.V. Meijerink Table of Contents PART I Introduction 13 Chapter 1 Perceptions of Water in the Middle East: The Role of Religion, 31 Politics and Technology in Concealing the Growing Water Scarcity PART II Chapter 2 Damascus: The Death of the Garden of Eden 47 Chapter 3 The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: 71 Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution Chapter 4 Watching Landscapes Disappear: Local Perspectives on the 93 Impact of Long-term Water Mismanagement in Syria PART III Chapter 5 Bathing in Divine Waters: Water and Purity in Judaism and Islam 123 Chapter 6 Baptism in the Jordan River: Immersing in a Contested 149 Transboundary Watercourse Conclusion 181 Acknowledgements 187 Samenvatting 189 List of Publications De Châtel, F. (2007). ‘Perceptions of Water in the Middle East: The Role of Religion, Politics and Technology in Concealing the Growing Water Scarcity’. In: Shuval, H. and Dweik, H. (eds.) Water Resources in the Middle East. Heidelberg: Springer. De Châtel, F. (2014). ‘Damascus: The Death of the Garden of Eden’. In: Tvedt, T. and Oestigaard, T. (eds.) A History of Water, 3(1). London: I.B. Tauris. De Châtel, F. (2014). ‘The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution’. Middle Eastern Studies, January 2014 (online), DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2013.850076. De Châtel, F. (2014). ‘Leaving the Land: The Impact of Long-term Water Mismanagement in Syria’. In: Holst-Warhaft, G., de Châtel, F., Steenhuis, T. (eds.) Water Scarcity, Security and Democracy: a Mediterranean Mosaic. Cornell University and Global Water Partnership Mediterranean, Ithaca/Athens, forthcoming. De Châtel, F. (2009). ‘Bathing in Divine Waters: Water and Purity in Judaism and Islam’. In: Tvedt, T. and Oestigaard, T. (eds.) A History of Water, 2(4). London: I.B. Tauris. De Châtel, F. (2014). ‘Baptism in the Jordan River: Immersing in a Contested Transboundary Watercourse’. WIRES Water 1(2), DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1013. List of Abbreviations BCM billion cubic metres GDP Gross Domestic Product ha hectares m/yr metres per year m3/s cubic metres per second m asl metres above sea level m bsl metres below sea level MCM million cubic metres MCM/yr million cubic metres per year MENA Middle East and North Africa mg/L milligram per litre mm millimetre mm/yr millimetre per year SYP Syrian Pound US$ United States Dollar List of Acronyms DAWSSA Damascus Water Supply and Sewerage Authority FAO Food and Agriculture Organization FoEME Friends of the Earth Middle East UN United Nations UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund PART I The Nile at Aswan, Egypt, 2007. Source: Terje Oestigaard. INTRODUCTION This PhD dissertation is the result of 14 years of fascination with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region1 and its water resources (Fig. 1). During this period, I travelled widely from Iran to Morocco and from Turkey to Sudan, and lived in the Syrian capital Damascus from 2006 until 2010. I worked as a journalist, writer and editor, but also researched and wrote a non-fiction book about the history, culture and politics of water in the MENA (de Châtel 2007). The chapters in this cumulative PhD dissertation reflect this trajectory, with three chapters dedicated to different aspects of water management in Syria and three chapters covering a broader geographical scope in the MENA. All chapters are based on empirical and qualitative research and fieldwork carried out in the MENA region since 2001. All chapters have been published separately in academic journals and publications between 2007 and 2014. BACKGROUND My first foray into Middle Eastern water issues was in 2001, when I travelled from Granada to Istanbul through North Africa and the Middle East on a nine-month “Water Journey” in search of the meaning of water in the most water-scarce region in the world. I had prepared the trip with extensive reading about water, losing myself in libraries, weaving my way between narrow isles of books, and searching the catalogues for “water”, “water + Middle East” and “water + desert”. I read voraciously, anything I could get my hands on, from travel journals written by intrepid 19th-century desert explorers, to semantic discussions of the symbolic value of water in the Koran and countless theoretical books on the “Middle East water question”. These were written by political scientists, economists, geographers and engineers, for whom water was an economic resource, a commodity to be traded, 1 Various definitions of the MENA region exist. Unless otherwise specified, regional figures quoted in this chapter are based on World Bank (2007), which defines the region to include Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen. My research since 2001 has included fieldwork in Egypt, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey, with a focus on Syria, Palestine, Israel and Jordan. 13 Part I the “blue gold” that would soon replace the black gold, oil, as a strategic resource. It was a political weapon to be wielded against, withheld from, or sold to, neighbouring countries. Water would be the cause of the wars of the 21st century, some authors affirmed with candid authority; others refuted these theories and said that, on the contrary, water scarcity would lead to peace and collaboration between nations. Figure 1. The Middle East and North Africa. Source: Michael Durran. Here I was in the realm facts and figures and clearly delineated problems that were sliced into chapters and handed to the reader in clear analytical order. It was reassuring to read books like this, but as soon as I had left the ordered discipline of the library behind me, the neat hierarchy collapsed, as I had known it would. From a distance it was easy to label and classify, decanting the torrent of ideas, thoughts and images into separate jugs. Once I stepped into reality, and found myself in the valleys of the High Atlas in Morocco, the Western Desert of Sudan, or the dying Ghuta Oasis around the Syrian capital Damascus, seeing the land and the water and speaking to the people who used it, it all became a tangled, rushing stream of meanings, values and perceptions with currents and counter- currents whirling through my mind. Water is an elusive subject, ungraspable and fleeting; its significance, usages and values so layered and manifold that it is impossible to distil a single meaning. It plays a 14 Introduction central role in the region’s three main religions: the Bible and the Koran are filled with metaphors of water as a source of life, fertility and prosperity. Yet as soon as one looks at how this is reflected in everyday practice in this region where religion continues to play a defining socio-cultural and political role, one notices that water is wasted, polluted and undervalued. How can this disconnect be explained? Before setting off, I had expected the beliefs, attitudes and traditions surrounding water to reflect water’s natural scarcity in the Middle East and to be very different from perceptions of water in the wet Dutch climate I had grown up in. I imagined people had more respect for the resource, used it more sparingly and valued its presence more highly than we did. Yet in most places I found water was an unquestioned resource that was taken for granted like the air people breathed. In the eyes of many, water was still an abundant resource. And in places where scarcity was a daily reality, few felt any sense of responsibility to resolve the problem. As I travelled through the region, I became increasingly aware of the gap between individual perceptions of water and the reality of growing scarcity. But I also found that these perceptions and individual realities are just as important as the physical reality of growing scarcity because the facts of hydrology, demography and meteorology are often only known and fully understood by scientists, whereas local realities and perceptions determine the behaviour of water users from the Moroccan Sahara to Tel Aviv.

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