Post by Bozur on Mar 13, 2005 18:51:35 GMT -5
For Iraq's Great Marshes, a Hesitant Comeback
Max Becherer/Polaris for The New York Times
Hamid Muhamed Hashim revisited the ruins where his family and friends once lived in the marshlands of Iraq. The area, drained years ago for a dike by the government of Saddam Hussein, is now springing back to life.
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: March 8, 2005
Max Becherer/Polaris, for The New York Times
Habib Mossen, a University of Basra student, is part of a team of researchers monitoring the Hammar marsh in Iraq.
ABU SUBAT, Iraq, March 1 - The family of marsh Arabs that had lived in this smashed house was named Tweresh, said Hamid Muhamed Hashim, walking carefully in his cracked leather sandals over the fallen bricks.
He had visited them; his cousin used to live right over there, Mr. Hashim said, pointing to another ruin sitting amid the rubble of its collapsed roof, the doors and window frames torn from the walls either by looters or the fleeing families themselves.
"This was the main guest room," he said quietly, as if the owners were still here.
A dike that Saddam Hussein's government finished nine years ago had drained this marsh, once part of an incomparable ecosystem spread across 7,000 square miles of southern Iraq that Mr. Hussein systematically destroyed.
After sealing this dike, the government gave families 24 hours to leave and never come back, Mr. Hashim said. The ruined houses were left sitting on dusty little hills in a barren and bone-dry desert. He was 15 then.
But when Mr. Hussein's government fell in April 2003, villagers went to the dike and gouged holes in it using shovels, their bare hands and at least one piece of heavy equipment, a floating backhoe. Since then, something miraculous has occurred: reeds and cattails have sprouted up again; fish, snails and shrimp have returned to the waters; egrets and storks perch on the jagged remains of the walls, coolly surveying the territory as if they had never left.
As Mr. Hashim walked down a short muddy embankment to his boat, the air filled with a cacophony of frogs croaking in full-throated appeal to their potential mates. The re-emergence of life from the bleak Iraqi desert, said Ali Messen, another marsh Arab, from the town of Chabaysh, has made him feel "like a person detained in prison who is set free."
In certain places, and with a fraction of their former bounty, the marshes have started to come back from the dead.
Now, financed by an array of American, Canadian, British, Italian and Iraqi agencies, teams of scientists are trying to determine how fast and how fully this region can return to what was. The work includes soil and water sampling, computer modeling of water flows, training of local scientists and restocking some of the marshes with indigenous fish. One program also comes with veterinary and health services for the marsh Arabs.
To do their research, those scientists are delicately negotiating their way around tribal boundaries, a continuing insurgency and the extreme passions and politics that the marshes excite in the south of Iraq.
The clannishness bred by the region's long isolation is a factor not to be overlooked, said Dr. Azzam Alwash, an American civil engineer originally from Iraq who is working in one of the teams.
"I used to call the marshes our Sherwood Forest," said Dr. Alwash, who is project senior director at the Washington research organizations Eden Again and New Eden. "It was a place of refuge for people who didn't want to be under the control of the central government."
Mr. Hussein's obsessive and vindictive drainage program, in fact, was intended to obliterate this prime refuge for deserters from his army and the southern Shiite guerrillas, many of them marsh Arabs who fought his government long before the Americans arrived.
Whatever the complexities of the region, reversing Mr. Hussein's depredations and bringing back one simple resource, water, is at least the first step in changing the course of recent history here, said Dr. Thomas E. Rhodes, the representative in southern Iraq for the United States Agency for International Development, which is financing some of the work.
"The conversation starts because there's water there," Dr. Rhodes said, "and the conversation is guided by how much water is there."
"After that," he said, "it's every man for himself."
Under the protection of local sheiks, village leaders, Iraqi scientists and heavily guarded American officials, this reporter visited a number of reflooded sites in recent weeks, traveling mostly along a stretch of road some 75 miles long, running north from Basra to the town of Qurna - as legend has it, the center of the Garden of Eden and west to Chabaysh, a marsh Arab town on the way to the major city of Nasiriya.
The trip covered places where marsh Arabs, with little or no official supervision, were returning and putting up clusters of their reed huts in the marsh equivalent of boom towns, and other spots where old settlements remained spooky and deserted. Great expanses of desert are still dry; other areas now stretch away in grand vistas of water and reeds, dotted by slim wooden boats.
From the road an observer could see boats that were often piled to within a few inches of sinking with bundles of reeds, which the marsh Arabs harvest and feed to their water buffaloes or sell at market.
But with an ethereally tuned sense of balance in an element that is so plainly their own, the boatmen, who often stood upright and pushed the craft with poles, never came close to overturning. Veiled women dressed in bright colors picked up the bundles of reeds at the shoreline and carried them on their heads along the side of the road.
Obvious everywhere in the pleasant spring sunshine was a passion for the marshes.
"Surely the marshes can be recovered as they were before," said Dr. Malik H. Ali, director general of the marine science center at the University of Basra, where some of the marshland research is being carried out.
When asked how much of the original marshlands could be restored, Dr. Ali replied, "Eighty percent, that will be acceptable." But others have suggested that no more than a third of the marshes can reasonably be restored, and Dr. Ali added, in what many here would regard as a vast understatement, "Certainly, it needs a lot of political involvement."
In truth, a much deeper set of challenges confronts the people here, beyond the technical problem of undoing what Mr. Hussein wrought. Dozens of dams in Turkey, Syria and Iraq have reduced the historical flow of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where they merge and nourish the marshes. Rich oil fields beneath some of the former marshes ensure that no force on earth will push the rigs out and bring water back anytime soon.
Max Becherer/Polaris for The New York Times
Hamid Muhamed Hashim revisited the ruins where his family and friends once lived in the marshlands of Iraq. The area, drained years ago for a dike by the government of Saddam Hussein, is now springing back to life.
By JAMES GLANZ
Published: March 8, 2005
Max Becherer/Polaris, for The New York Times
Habib Mossen, a University of Basra student, is part of a team of researchers monitoring the Hammar marsh in Iraq.
ABU SUBAT, Iraq, March 1 - The family of marsh Arabs that had lived in this smashed house was named Tweresh, said Hamid Muhamed Hashim, walking carefully in his cracked leather sandals over the fallen bricks.
He had visited them; his cousin used to live right over there, Mr. Hashim said, pointing to another ruin sitting amid the rubble of its collapsed roof, the doors and window frames torn from the walls either by looters or the fleeing families themselves.
"This was the main guest room," he said quietly, as if the owners were still here.
A dike that Saddam Hussein's government finished nine years ago had drained this marsh, once part of an incomparable ecosystem spread across 7,000 square miles of southern Iraq that Mr. Hussein systematically destroyed.
After sealing this dike, the government gave families 24 hours to leave and never come back, Mr. Hashim said. The ruined houses were left sitting on dusty little hills in a barren and bone-dry desert. He was 15 then.
But when Mr. Hussein's government fell in April 2003, villagers went to the dike and gouged holes in it using shovels, their bare hands and at least one piece of heavy equipment, a floating backhoe. Since then, something miraculous has occurred: reeds and cattails have sprouted up again; fish, snails and shrimp have returned to the waters; egrets and storks perch on the jagged remains of the walls, coolly surveying the territory as if they had never left.
As Mr. Hashim walked down a short muddy embankment to his boat, the air filled with a cacophony of frogs croaking in full-throated appeal to their potential mates. The re-emergence of life from the bleak Iraqi desert, said Ali Messen, another marsh Arab, from the town of Chabaysh, has made him feel "like a person detained in prison who is set free."
In certain places, and with a fraction of their former bounty, the marshes have started to come back from the dead.
Now, financed by an array of American, Canadian, British, Italian and Iraqi agencies, teams of scientists are trying to determine how fast and how fully this region can return to what was. The work includes soil and water sampling, computer modeling of water flows, training of local scientists and restocking some of the marshes with indigenous fish. One program also comes with veterinary and health services for the marsh Arabs.
To do their research, those scientists are delicately negotiating their way around tribal boundaries, a continuing insurgency and the extreme passions and politics that the marshes excite in the south of Iraq.
The clannishness bred by the region's long isolation is a factor not to be overlooked, said Dr. Azzam Alwash, an American civil engineer originally from Iraq who is working in one of the teams.
"I used to call the marshes our Sherwood Forest," said Dr. Alwash, who is project senior director at the Washington research organizations Eden Again and New Eden. "It was a place of refuge for people who didn't want to be under the control of the central government."
Mr. Hussein's obsessive and vindictive drainage program, in fact, was intended to obliterate this prime refuge for deserters from his army and the southern Shiite guerrillas, many of them marsh Arabs who fought his government long before the Americans arrived.
Whatever the complexities of the region, reversing Mr. Hussein's depredations and bringing back one simple resource, water, is at least the first step in changing the course of recent history here, said Dr. Thomas E. Rhodes, the representative in southern Iraq for the United States Agency for International Development, which is financing some of the work.
"The conversation starts because there's water there," Dr. Rhodes said, "and the conversation is guided by how much water is there."
"After that," he said, "it's every man for himself."
Under the protection of local sheiks, village leaders, Iraqi scientists and heavily guarded American officials, this reporter visited a number of reflooded sites in recent weeks, traveling mostly along a stretch of road some 75 miles long, running north from Basra to the town of Qurna - as legend has it, the center of the Garden of Eden and west to Chabaysh, a marsh Arab town on the way to the major city of Nasiriya.
The trip covered places where marsh Arabs, with little or no official supervision, were returning and putting up clusters of their reed huts in the marsh equivalent of boom towns, and other spots where old settlements remained spooky and deserted. Great expanses of desert are still dry; other areas now stretch away in grand vistas of water and reeds, dotted by slim wooden boats.
From the road an observer could see boats that were often piled to within a few inches of sinking with bundles of reeds, which the marsh Arabs harvest and feed to their water buffaloes or sell at market.
But with an ethereally tuned sense of balance in an element that is so plainly their own, the boatmen, who often stood upright and pushed the craft with poles, never came close to overturning. Veiled women dressed in bright colors picked up the bundles of reeds at the shoreline and carried them on their heads along the side of the road.
Obvious everywhere in the pleasant spring sunshine was a passion for the marshes.
"Surely the marshes can be recovered as they were before," said Dr. Malik H. Ali, director general of the marine science center at the University of Basra, where some of the marshland research is being carried out.
When asked how much of the original marshlands could be restored, Dr. Ali replied, "Eighty percent, that will be acceptable." But others have suggested that no more than a third of the marshes can reasonably be restored, and Dr. Ali added, in what many here would regard as a vast understatement, "Certainly, it needs a lot of political involvement."
In truth, a much deeper set of challenges confronts the people here, beyond the technical problem of undoing what Mr. Hussein wrought. Dozens of dams in Turkey, Syria and Iraq have reduced the historical flow of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where they merge and nourish the marshes. Rich oil fields beneath some of the former marshes ensure that no force on earth will push the rigs out and bring water back anytime soon.