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Rivers, Dams, and Drought: Crisis of Water in the Syrian Civil War

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Rivers, Dams, and Drought: Crisis of Water in the Syrian Civil War 1 Rivers, Dams, and Drought: Crisis of Water in the Syrian Civil War The Evergreen State College A New Middle East? Program Spring Quarter Final Paper Michael Korchonnoff 2 Table of Contents Abstract and Introduction ……………………………………………… 3 State, Culture, Business, and the legacy of Colonialism ………………. 9 Mirages of Conflict …………………………………………………….. 13 Burdens of Responsibility ……………………………………………… 19 Weather, Climate and the Macro-View ………………………………... 25 Shallow Wells in the Deep State ………………………………………. 30 Damming of the Euphrates and the “Kurdish Question” ……………. 38 The Turkish Position …………………………………………………... 44 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………… 50 Post-Conclusion ………………………………………………………… 53 Endnotes ………………………………………………………………… 58 3 Abstract This paper is an exploration of the ecological influences underpinning the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011. Although the paper does not attempt to explain the war in strictly environmental terms and in fact takes an explicit stance against such a position, it is argued within that environmental events, or more specifically the drought experienced by the Fertile Crescent region in the years of 2000-2010, strongly contributed to the social upheaval that preceded the war. Space is given within the paper to address different possible causes of the drought and analysis of studies that assert that each one of these elements, being the influence of bad agricultural practices, climate change, and the ecological consequences of large-scale hydroelectric projects on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, are the primary contributors to the drought. It is the position of this paper that all of these are influential contributors, but that the contribution of the massive Southeastern Anatolia hydroelectric project is an overlooked influence that has a history of contention and conflict within the region long preceding the Syrian Civil War. Introduction A Man of Umma who, over the levee of the boundary territory of Ningirsu or over the levee of the boundary territory of Nanshe in order by violence to take fields might in the future cross, whether he be a man of Umma or a man of a foreign land, may Enlil annihilate him! These words of warning, lifted from cuniform etchings and translated from ancient Sumerian, form part of the concluding verses of an artifact known as the Enmetena Cone, a stele 4 dating from around 2400 BCE which details a conflict between Umma and Lagash, a pair of ancient Mesopotamian city-states who existed close to the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a region commonly known to us in the modern era as Iraq. These wars raged for generations over territorial rights to fertile fields and water canals - one account describes the conflict as originating with a King of Umma ordering the drainage of a canal leading from the Tigris - and the clay tablets chronicling their history as well as the provisions of the treaties between the two cities are considered to be the earliest diplomatic documents yet discovered, perhaps even forming the most ancient of foundations for modern-day International Law, as Professor Malcolm Shaw has suggested in his written work on this legal field.1 It is most significant to note here that water is the salient object of dispute in this ancient conflict. Water, the foundation of life, once the bounty of the Fertile Crescent that cradled the most ancient of agriculture, whose Neolithic peoples gifted the first domesticated grains to the human world. In following the terrible contemporary disaster that has engulfed Mesopotamia's modern incarnation one may see parallels between the ancient and the modern. Although this may seem a bit simplistic of a statement it is undeniable that water, in the vast duality of its simplicity and ecological complexity, is a crucial element of the present-day strife that ensues in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and many other places in the region. It is worth noting as well that the land of this region has become more arid than it was four-thousand years ago and the populations of these lands have increased considerably as well, perhaps making its relevance more dire within the context of these conflicts. The politics of water are inextricably connected to food security, and both of these resources are cornerstones of common welfare and security in society. "Aish, huriya, adala igtimaeya!" was the chant that emanated from Cairo's Tahrir square in January of 2011, a 5 exaltation that challenged Hosni Mubarak's autocratic regime to acknowledge the people of Egypt's need for "bread, freedom and social justice" in a time when the price of staple foods had multiplied to an untenable degree for the vast number of poor in Egyptian society, inheritors of the very land that had once been renowned as the "breadbasket of the world". From Anwar Sadat's Intifah, or "opening" of the Egyptian economy to foreign investment to the culmination of the nepotist business monopolies of Mubarak's era, many of the fertile farmlands of the Nile delta that once provided bounties of wheat and other staples for the people of Egypt had transitioned over into cotton plantations for the textile industry, placing the worlds breadbasket in the bizarre situation of becoming one of the world’s largest importers of wheat for domestic consumption. These neoliberal economic reforms undertaken under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund, coupled with an autocratic corruption that blended the institution of Egypt's military with the handful of major corporations in the nation all contributed to widening the economic class division in Egypt, enriching some in Egyptian society while deepening the squalor of those millions pushed into the fringes of the common wealth. Although the wildfire of popular protest and revolt known as the Arab Spring may have had its iconic spark in the self-immolation of the struggling street-vendor Mohamed Bouazizi whose act of symbolic martyrdom moved the Tunisian people to demand the abdication of Ben Ali, it was what happened in Tahrir Square that may have had the biggest impact in the region concerning the phenomenon of the Arab Spring. Mubarak's fall certainly provided fuel for the burgeoning popular movement that quickly spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa, hastening the removal of nearly every regime with some notable exceptions, these being the rentier-State Monarchies of the region and the government of Bashar al-Assad of the Syrian Arab Republic, heir to a Baathist dictatorship established by his father Hafez al-Assad that has essentially been a 6 family-run organization since its establishment in 1971. And there certain comparisons that can be drawn between the contemporary conditions of Egypt and Syria, both being autocratic regimes, previously of an Arab-Nationalist Socialist persuasion that originally established themselves within a Cold-War context of struggling to maintain geopolitical autonomy while trapped between the hungry maws of the Soviet Union and the United States, only to later eschew their Socialist schema in favor of a form of western-style capitalism, although the Syrian regime conspicuously abstained from playing this game until the appointment of Bashar al-Assad in 2000, and has maintained a reliably obstinate stance with the western powers. It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that what has transpired in Syria has long overshadowed the developments that have happened in pretty much every other Arab Spring nation. Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and even Libya finds themselves footnotes in the media headlines that Syria has come to dominate in the past several years. The original popular protests that took place in cities like Homs and Aleppo seem phantasmal and distant ancestors of a conflict that has taken on a very global character, as participants of every stripe, be they militant volunteers, foreign militaries, financial benefactors or humanitarian aid workers pour their energies and resources into the Syrian crucible to engage themselves with a bloodbath that has taken on a seemingly intractable and pyhrric character for every party involved -- all while millions of Syrian have been forced to flee their destroyed or occupied homes lest they face death, torture, conscription or any other injustice. But at one point during the flowering of the Arab Spring, thousands peacefully took to the streets in Sham emboldened by the momentum shared by the region. And the fundamental demands of these original protests were for political transparency, fair elections and economic reforms, all demands that were driven by conditions that were not too far removed from what had transpired in Egypt in many ways. Of course the 7 ways in which the regional character of Syria differs from that of Egypt are tremendously relevant in consideration of how differently things turned out for the Syrian Arab Spring. But is essential to acknowledge that however distorted the image of the revolution may have become in the present day, issues of political representation in vital connection to those fundamental issues of food, water and shelter formed the foundation of the uprising. And in following the sensationalism and death-obsession of the mainstream Western Media coverage of the Syrian conflict it can be easy to lose track of these root causes. About two years into the horrific morass of the Syrian Civil War certain western news outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR and others ran articles begging the question as to whether or not the conflict may have been precipitated by a drought that had been devastating to Syria's agricultural sector2, thereby driving portions of the rural population into the cities, coupling unemployment and overcrowding with food shortages -- a toxic mixture that provided fuel for the social unrest that was so brutally suppressed by the government of Bashar al-Assad, sparking of a popular revolution that soon mutated into a devastating civil war. A crucial question that has been asked within this light has been that of the role of climate change in this drought, with some speculating even that the advent of global climate change is itself the primary influence and mover of the Syrian Conflict.
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