IUCN Water Programme

SHARE Toolkit: Case Studies

The -Euphrates Joint Technical Committee – deadlocked

By Christina Leb

1. Origin and Background

The Euphrates and Tigris rivers both rise in the highlands of southeastern and after passing through the territory and along the border of Syria they join north of the Iraqi town of Basra to form the Shatt al-Arab water way, which empties into the Persian Gulf. Even though the waters of the two rivers flow most of their long journey to sea in two separate streams they are regarded as forming one system. Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq are the four main riparian countries.1

Most of the waters in the two rivers is drawn from Turkey. The Euphrates River is formed by two rivers, the Kara and Murat Rivers, at their confluence in Kharput, Turkey. Turkey contributes 95% of its waters; the remaining 5% derive from Syrian territory, where two main tributaries the and Balikh join the main river bed. Iraq, which controls 1,060 km of the approximately 2,800 km long main channel of the Euphrates River, does not contribute any measurable quantities of water. The Tigris River also draws a large part of its total discharge (about 58%) from the Turkish highlands. It rises near Diyarbakir and is joined by the Batman River on its 100 km journey through Southeastern Turkey; it forms the border between Syria and Turkey for about 44 km before it enters Iraq, and finally joins the Euphrates River to form the Shatt al-Arab. Its total length is about 1,750 km. Iraq contributes about 30% of the Tigris discharge. Most of Iran’s contributions to the system take place after the two rivers united through discharge from the Kharun River, which adds about 20-25 km3 annually to the Shatt al-Arab. Annual mean flow of the entire system is about 70-80 billion km3.2 Both rivers have high seasonal and multi-annual variances in their flow, yet the danger from flooding is far more pronounced in the Tigris basin; Iraq controls the infamous Tigris floods by diverting water to the Euphrates basin. Large parts of the floodplains and marshes north of the Persian Gulf have become victim to politics; they were drained by the Iraqi regime to permit military access and control the largely Shiite population. Some of the damage could be reversed in the last years, through the destruction of dykes and dams, as result of military activity in the current crisis.

The River system is also referred to as the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization. Historically, infrastructure development occurred downstream. The rivers’ waters were occasionally used as weapon by creating artificial droughts and floods. Today, infrastructure development occurs largely upstream, the corner stone being the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) of Turkey. The water resources of the system are primarily used for agriculture and hydropower development in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Turkey is the only country of the three that is considered self-sufficient in terms of food production.3 Iran has abundant water resources outside the basin, which pose less of a technical challenge to develop and utilize, and therefore has no major water development programs under implementation on its tributaries to the Tigris (Diyalah and Lesser Zab) nor on the Kharun. The Euphrates is navigable only by very light rafts up to the Iraqi city of Hit, further upstream rapids and shoals pose a major challenges to navigation. The Tigris River is navigable by larger vessels to and by light rafts all the way upstream to .

While the water resources have not yet caused armed conflict, part of the river system, the Shatt al-Arab was object of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. The differing claims with respect to the

1 delimitation of the two countries’ territories along the river were one of the reasons for this conflict. When the completion and filling of the reservoirs of two large dams, the Keban dam in Turkey and the al-Thawra dam in Syria, coincided with a particularly dry period, this brought Syria and Iraq to the brink of armed conflict. Iraq blamed Syria for the release of unacceptably low amounts of water, while Syria transferred the blame on Turkey. It was only through third party facilitation by Saudi Arabia that war could be avoided. Other than that, conflicts and tensions in the region had their sources in events and realities unrelated to water; e.g. Arab-Turkish tensions caused by Arab Revolt in the early 20th century which led to the downfall of the ; Syrian-Iraqi tensions because of the split between the Syrian and Iraqi Ba’ath parties in the 1960s; and tensions among all four main riparians due to the presence of the Kurds in their territories and their use/abuse as destabilizing forces by all four riparian countries. Nevertheless, the issues of quantity and control over water resources add to these historic conflicts and further spoil the atmosphere for cooperation in the region. In terms of positions, Iraq claims historical rights to water, Syrian as the mid-stream and smallest riparian favors equal over equitable distribution, while Turkey as the most upstream and most powerful riparian sees little reason to commit itself to legally binding water allocation agreements.4

2. Legal Frameworks for Trans-boundary Management

Due to the above mentioned hindrances, the legal framework for trans-boundary water management in the Euphrates-Tigris system remains weak. There is no multi-lateral or basin- wide agreement, yet a small number of bilateral accords5 have emerged to resolve occasional questions with respect to water discharge. On the occasion of the construction of the Atatürk Dam, the largest dam in Turkey with a reservoir about the size of that behind the Hoover Dam in the United States, Turkey and Syria signed a protocol in 1987 in which Turkey agrees to a monthly minimum release of a bit more than half the Euphrate’s mean volume at the border between the two countries. According to Article 6 of this protocol, Turkey guarantees a minimum release of 500 m3/second to Syria and in cases where monthly flow falls below this level, the difference of flow will be made up in the following month.6 This clause, which allows for a time lag in the release of the agreed minimum amount, has been referred to by Turkey when it claimed that it had fulfilled its obligations under the agreement by making up for the stoppage of the water flow between January 13 and February 12, 1990 during the filling of the reservoir behind the Ataturk dam in subsequent months. Yet due to this arrest of the flow of the Euphrates river, Syria had to temporary halt hydropower production and Iraq lost and estimated 15 percent of agricultural production. There is no a commitment to the Tigris river waters in the 1987 agreement.

In 1990 Syria and Iraq entered into a bilateral agreement according to which the two countries share the waters received from Turkey on a 58% (Iraq) and 42% (Syria) basis.7 Those who closely follow the politics of cooperation in the basin are skeptical as to whether these occasional agreements have been honored by the countries over time.8

3. Institutions for Trans-boundary Management

A Joint Technical Committee (JTC) was set up with the protocol9 from the Joint Economic Committee meeting held between Turkey and Iraq in 1980; Syria joined the JTC in 1983. The Committee was set up as a purely technical committee of experts with the mandate to determine methods that would lead to the definition of the reasonable amount of water each country would need. After sixteen meetings, the work of the JTC deadlocked in 1992. The parties were not able to reach consensus on basic principles and definitions, nor was it possible to produce even produce an outline for a report.10 One of the key reasons for the impasse was the inability of the three countries to reach an agreement as to whether the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had to be considered as one single system, and therefore the entire basin water discharge would have

2 formed the point of reference for any calculation effort, or whether discussions could be limited to the Euphrates basin.11

Some consider tri-lateral cooperation under this Committee as a failure, while others attribute moderate success to this body. Those who criticize the work of the Committee blame the failure of this forum on the countries’ differing views on the purpose of the Committee, which hampered the work of the JTC from the outset. While Turkey considered it as a merely consultative body, Syria and Iraq would have liked to see the work of the Commission focus on the development of a water sharing agreement. They further point to deficiencies of effectiveness that are on the one hand due to the fact that on occasional basis the Committee met as mere bilateral body, because depending on the issues on the agenda and/or the prevailing political situation of the time, one or the other party refused to attend; and on the other hand they claim that the absence of Iran, which as an important contributor to the Euphrates-Tigris water system would add another 30-35 km3 to any allocation equation discussed in this forum, undermined the effectiveness of allocation negotiations. Those who have a more positive outlook on the work of the Joint Technical Committee see it as a forum, which despite its irregular meetings provided at least for some level of consultation and cooperation among the riparian countries.

4. Trans-boundary Management Interventions

The absence of institutions for cooperation and multi-lateral agreements is mirrored in the lack of coordinated water resources planning. There are no basin-wide management plans with respect to water use, water quality, and water discharge. Yet, there are management interventions that have considerable basin-wide impact, most notably the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) of Turkey. For Turkey the project serves a double purpose, an economic and a political one; its economic targets are to secure the country’s energy supply and to transform southeastern Anatolia into the national “bread basket”12; the political objective is to integrate the primarily Kurdish area into economic development programs of the country and to weaken ethnically and historically motivated opposition through the provision of employment opportunities and socio- economic development.13 The GAP is a gigantic integrated water development project, which was planned in the 1960s, a period when environmental policies and concerns were not yet well articulated. Once finished, 22 dams will have been built and 1.7 million additional hectares of land will be under irrigation on the upper reaches of both the Euphrates and the Tigris. Naturally these planned infrastructure measures and new water consumption patterns raise considerable concern about future water availability among the two downstream riparians, Syria and Iraq. Already the filling of the reservoirs behind the Keban and Ataturk dams have led to a political tensions over water discharge.14 The concern over the GAP-created power to control water quantity and flow volume in the basin is coupled with concern over environmental impacts and decrease in water quality due to agricultural runoff. One beneficial aspect of the project for the downstream countries is the regulation of water flow and hence the decrease in flood risk.

Up to today the countries have been relatively water sufficient. Iraq has been able to compensate for seasonal variations and additional Syrian abstractions of the Euphrates River for irrigation through water resources from the Tigris basin. With the rapid population increase 15 in the basin it is doubtful whether the countries, in particular Syria and Iraq, will be able to meet their future water demands if water development continues to be carried with this low level of coordination between the riparian countries. Concise estimates of when the water crisis – excess demand over supply - will hit the region are impossible, because water data on the basin varies considerably even though numerous studies measuring the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers have been carried out. The problem of non-comparable data presents itself because experts used different methods for water quantity assessments and for reasons of the political value of water information as bargaining chip in allocation negotiations.

3 5. Mobilizing Funding for Trans-boundary Water Management

In the absence of regional programs, countries raise funding for their respective water management projects individually. Economic sanctions after the First Gulf War and the current crisis in Iraq has impacted on the country’s ability to carry out major water resources development projects. Some funding for the reparation of environmental damage caused by the first war (e.g. water pollution through oil spills and destruction of sewage plants) was released through the United Nations Compensation Commission, and US American and international donor money have been made available for the restoration of the Southern Iraqi Marshlands and reparation of damage caused by military actions during the Second Gulf War. Syria has access to Arab and Kuwaiti funds for the financing of its major water development infrastructure; for example the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development provided a US$ 125 million loan for the construction of Syria’s third dam on the Euphrates, the Tishreen Dam.16

The GAP project in Turkey experienced considerable delays17 that are partly due to problems of raising funds for infrastructure development. International financial institutions, such as the World Bank, have declined to finance project costs based on their policies with respect to funding of projects located on trans-boundary water systems.18 Turkey turned to the private sector and commercial banks utilizing the “Build-Operate-Transfer”19 scheme to finance infrastructure under the GAP. The financing of the most recent project, the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River, through private investors has caught attention of numerous international NGOs. Hoping to be able to suspend implementation or at least mitigate the social and environmental impact, NGOs lobby the governments and their official export credit agencies, which provide the investment guarantees to the private companies, with the demand that they make the observation of strict environmental and social standards a condition for signature of investment guarantees.

6. Lessons Learned

• Conflict and cooperation in the Euphrates-Tigris basin is a classic example of upstream- downstream (im)balance of power in an international river basin. Turkey is not only the most powerful country in hydrological terms due to its geographic positions as upstream riparian of both rivers; it is also currently the most powerful riparian in terms of economic and political power. This leaves the down-stream riparian countries with little opportunities for cooperative basin-wide management planning, as long as the up-stream country is disinclined to engage.

• In addition to a long history of regional conflicts and mistrust, any attempts by neutral third parties to facilitate cooperation for trans-boundary water management in the basin are complicated by the fact that water data has been politicized to a certain extent; identifying the data set that most accurately represents reality among the series of available water assessments, which have arrived at inconsistent conclusions, poses considerable challenges.

• From the perspective of managing a river basin as one hydrographic unit with a view to locate water infrastructure on those stretches of the river where they can produce highest returns, the GAP project, in particular its hydropower generation components, have a certain merit. The amount of water lost to evaporation relative to surface area is lower in reservoirs that are located at higher altitudes, where lower temperatures prevail. However, in a basin, where water has already been used as a weapon, even though this happened in antiquity, projects of this kind raise serious political problems.

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1 Minimal amounts of water resources in the Euphrates-Tigris basin stem from Armenian and Saudi Arabian territory. Some wadis located on Saudi Arabian territory discharge into the Euphrates basin during storms, and the Tigris receives some waters from Armenia. However the relative contribution of these countries to the system is generally regarded as nil, and they are most often omitted as basin countries. 2 Jack Kalpakian, Identity, Conflict and Cooperation in International River Systems (2004), Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Burlington, Vermont, pp. 98-101 3 Hilal Elver, Historical Uses of International Rivers – The Euphrates and Tigris River Disputes (2002), Transnational Publishers Inc., Ardsley, New York, p. 354 4 Iran, as downstream-tributary riparian, has not engaged in the water quantity discussions between the other three co-riparian countries. 5 In addition to the agreements outlined in this section, Hilal Elver refers to an agreement between Iraq and Syria to end their dispute of 1975. This agreement, which was not made public, grants 60% of the water released by Turkey to Iraq while Syria keeps 40%. See Hilal Elver, Historical Uses of International Rivers The Euphrates and Tigris River Disputes (2002), Transnational Publishers Inc., Ardsley, New York, p. 375 6 Hilal Elver, Historical Uses of International Rivers – The Euphrates and Tigris River Disputes (2002), Transnational Publishers Inc., Ardsley, New York, p. 376 and 421. According to Jack Kalkapian, this protocol was concluded between the two countries in return for terminating Syrian support to the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). See Jack Kalpakian, Identity, Conflict and Cooperation in International River Systems (2004), Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Burlington, Vermont, p. 115 7 Hilal Elver, Historical Uses of International Rivers – The Euphrates and Tigris River Disputes (2002), Transnational Publishers Inc., Ardsley, New York, p. 422 8 According to Jack Kalpakian, these agreements “seem to have been honored only in their repetitive breach on both sides.” Jack Kalpakian, Identity, Conflict and Cooperation in International River Systems (2004), Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Burlington, Vermont, p. 115 9 The idea of setting up of a Joint Technical Committee had been repeatedly mentioned in meetings between the three countries since 1965, but no agreement as to the function, mandate and structure could be reached; the JTC was subsequently established based on a meeting protocol. 10 Aysegül Kibaroglu, Settling the dispute over the water resources in the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin, in Saskia Castelein (ed.), Proceedings: From Conflict to Co-operation in International Water Resources Management: Challenges and Opportunities – International Conference 20-22 November 2002 (2002), UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, Delft, Netherlands, p. 266 11 Ibid. 12 According to plans, the GAP will increase installed capacity by about 7500MW and irrigated land by 1.7 million hectares. 13 Julien Cazala, Le droit international de l’eau et les différends relatifs au Tigre et à l’Euphrate, in Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Salman Salman (eds.), Les ressources en eau et le droit international Water Resources and International Law (2005), Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden/Boston, 2005, p. 551 14 The filling of the reservoir behind the Keban dam coincided with the filling of the al-Thawra dam in Syria and led Syria and Iraq to the brink of armed conflict, which could be avoided through third party facilitation by Saudi Arabia. The filling of the reservoir behind the Ataturk dam led to a temporary stoppage of water flow from January 13 to Februar 12, 1990 and again during one month in 1991 when Iraq found itself in a situation unable to protest; it demonstrated the vulnerability of the two downstream countries. See Julien Cazala, Le droit international de l’eau et les différends relatifs au Tigre et à l’Euphrate, in Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Salman Salman (eds.), Les ressources en eau et le droit international – Water Resources and International Law (2005), Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden/Boston, 2005, p. 558

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15 According to World Bank indicators the population of Turkey, Syria and Iraq grow at the extent of 1.3%, 2.6% and 3% respectively. Hilal Elver quotes a population growth rate for Southeastern Anatolia which is at about 1.9 times of the national average; in Historical Uses of International Rivers – The Euphrates and Tigris River Disputes (2002), Transnational Publishers Inc., Ardsley, New York, p. 391 16 Total project costs amount to estimated US$ 165 million. Jack Kalpakian, Identity, Conflict and Cooperation in International River Systems (2004), Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Burlington, Vermont, p. 107 17 Initially the GAP was planned to be completed in 2010, according to current plans it will be finished in 2047. 18 The World Bank attaches great importance to riparians’ making appropriate agreements or arrangement for projects on international waterways. See the organization’s Operational Policy 7.50 with respect to safeguards for funding of projects on international waterways; http://www.worldbank.org 19 Under the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) project financing schemes, a private entity receives a franchise from the public sector to plan, construct, operate and finance a facility for specified period during which the operator can charge facility users in order to recover investment costs. After the period, ownership is transferred back to the public sector.

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