It is said that the thick, endless green reed beds and seasonally mobile mud islands that make up Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian Marshlands once nourished and gave shelter to ancient communities born long before the recording of human history. Some scholars claim the marshlands are the location of the Garden of Eden, the birthplace of Abraham, and the site of the great flood where Noah built his ark. World famous archeological sites scattered along the edges of the marshlands hold remnants of the birth of human civilization. Among them are the ancient Sumerian cities of Ur, Lagash, Larsa, Eridu, and Uruk, one of the world’s first cities to house a dense population and home to a king who went by the name of Gilgamesh and resides in history thanks to one of the more famous works of early literature.
It is in this place, the southernmost tip of the ancient Fertile Crescent—where the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers divides and separates into a drainage basin made up of a multitude of small waterways before emptying into the Persian Gulf—that plans are being implemented to create Iraq’s first National Park in an area ravaged by the vengeful acts of Saddam Hussein, who during the closing decade of the 20th century aimed to destroy a 5,000-year-old culture. The proposed Mesopotamian Marshlands National Park will cover an area just under 350,000 acres and contain a core area of 59,000 acres. Known as the Eden Again Project and led by the Iraqi environmental group Nature Iraq, the project’s partners also include the Italian Ministry of the Environment, Land, and Sea, and Iraq’s Ministries of Environment, Water Resources and Municipalities and Public Works. The broad objectives of the national park aim to protect the environment, foster socio-economic development in the region, preserve its cultural heritage inclusive of restoring and protecting from further deterioration all identified archeological sites, and to guide the establishment of ecologic corridors within the marshes along with the creation of an appropriate marshland monitoring and management system.
Creating a national park is a heady goal for an organization that hires body guards to accompany their scientists as they work in the field doing surveys, collecting flora, fauna, and water-quality samples; and cataloging wildlife. And if creating Iraq’s first National Park during a time of war and occupation weren’t enough, discussions regarding the creation of a second National Park have recently begun in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region, a more secure but equally environmentally devastated area thanks to the purposeful acts of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Although Iraq’s north and south are separated by its heavily populated central region, the lifeblood dispensed from the Tigris and Euphrates links the two regions. Fed by headwaters located in the mountains of Turkey, Iran and northern Iraq’s Kurdistan, the two main arteries flow south providing silt, clay, and all the nutrients necessary for the continual spawning of life.
It is this link that some feel will ultimately unite Iraq, if not from some open desire to become one indivisible nation, than at the very least because of an environmentally driven need—access to water.
“There are two places in Iraq—the high places in the north’s mountains and the southern marshlands—where you are speaking with God,” said Narmeen Othman, a Kurd who spent her youth as a Peshmerga, the Kurdish guerilla organization. As the Minister of Iraq’s newly formed Ministry of Environment, oversight of both projects fall to her. “When I was Peshmerga, alone in the mountains, I took my strength from nature, from the grasses and flowers and trees, from the waterfalls and rivers. The same pieces of water that come from our mountains, they end up in the marshes, and they are a gift given to Iraq.”
In 2002, soon after reviewing the 2001 United Nations’ Environmental Program report that detailed “one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters”—the decimation of Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshlands—Azzam Alwash,
an Iraqi expat born in Nassariya, on the fringes of the marshlands, and his American wife, Suzie Alwash, combined knowledge gleaned from their respective PhDs in civil engineering and geology and conceived the Eden Again Project, the forerunner of Nature Iraq. The UN report was not exactly news to Alwash. Despite living in the US, he had kept his thumb on the pulse of his homeland. Yet both he and his wife were horrified by the extent of the devastation. What had been the third largest wetland in the world just 10 years before—8,000 square miles of thriving, expansive, and self-sustaining marshland—had been reduced to just five percent of its original size, purposely destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1990s in retaliation for the Shiite uprising that followed the fi rst US invasion of Iraq in 1991.
Avid kayakers, the Alwash’s had spent many hours exploring the wetlands of southern California with Alwash telling his wife, “Wait until we go back to Iraq and you see Iraq’s marshlands.” Having spent some time in his younger years accompanying his father, Jawad, to work, Azzam was left filled with memories of the spectacular landscape and its culture. A district irrigation manager and one of the first irrigation engineers to gain access to the marshes, the elder Alwash had a genuine interest in and delight at being accepted into the close-knit albeit reclusive and secluded culture of the Marsh Arabs, and regularly brought his young son along on trips into the marshlands to resolve water disputes. His work and attitude enabled him to establish close relations with people whose culture was remarkably unique.
Although residing in southern California, Alwash spends most of his time traveling between the US, southern and northern Iraq, Italy, and wherever the work of Nature Iraq takes him. One of his greatest challenges in the preliminary stages of creating the planned Marshland National Park has been in opening/creating dialogue among the Marsh Arab tribal community—upon whom a genocide was attempted—and gaining their trust. “One of our goals is to provide legal protection for these marshlands, so that they are protected from ever again deliberately dried,” said Alwash. “Not to be too poetic about it, but the restoration of the marshes is a ‘phoenix from the ashes’ symbol for the restoration of the destruction visited upon it by the Baath regime. To that extent, the creation of the national park in the central marshes will serve as a ‘never again’ monument for the future generation of Iraqis to remind them about what happened in the late 20th century. The same regime that destroyed the southern marshes also destroyed 5,000 villages in Kurdistan. To that extent, the north and south of Iraq are linked, at least emotionally, through the destruction visited upon them by the same regime that governed Iraq for 35 years.”
REVENGING REBELLION SADDAM-STYLE
Until the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, the indigenous inhabitants of the marshlands, the Madan or Marsh Arabs, lived in much the same way as their ancestors did 5,000 years ago. They fi shed, herded water buffalo, and glided their small craft through the lush green reeds they tended, cut, dried and then used to construct their complex, arched homes and meeting places. As noted in a BBC interview with William Thesiger, British explorer, and author of The Marsh Arabs who spent time in the marshlands in the 1950s and 60s, “It [was] a curious sort of life because you had to live in a canoe. There’d be one house here and another 4 or 5 yards away and you couldn’t get to it because there was water between you. And you had to step in a canoe and go over. You traveled everywhere and lived everywhere in a canoe.”
It was in 1991 when Saddam Hussein, freshly defeated by a United States led 34-country unifi ed force, faced immediate internal opposition from rebellious groups that included predominantly Shiite Muslims from Basra and some Marsh Arabs in Iraq’s south, as well Kurdish forces in the north. All had been persecuted by Saddam’s regime during Iraq’s war with Iran during the 1980s. Rebels in the north and south had been inspired by the apparent ease with which coalition forces routed Iraqi troops from Kuwait. They were also encouraged by a radio broadcast by then-President George Bush calling for open rebellion, and an expected intervention by coalition forces on their behalf once they rose up. The intervention never came.
In the south, the rebellion was spontaneous in nature, although supported by the regional political parties. In Northern Iraq’s Kurdistan region, the uprising was more organized and driven by two rival Kurdish militias: the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The rebellions, both north and south, were savagely repressed by Saddam’s military.
The southern rebellion lasted three weeks before Saddam’s regime began to reassert its authority by targeting the marshes. The remote region, lacking roads or points of entry by anything other than boat, acted as an ideal hiding place for those running from Saddam’s military forces. According to January 2003 Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, “In their attempt to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack unarmed civilians as
they fled the cities. Tens of thousands of army deserters, political opponents, and others who had sought shelter in the southern marshlands were systematically and relentlessly pursued by security and military forces following the Iraqi government suppression of the uprising. The government also launched an unprecedented attack on the Shi’a Muslim faith and culture.”
In April 1991, in an attempt to stop Saddam’s military attacks, which included bombing and strafing of civilian populations in both the north and south of Iraq, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 688, which condemned “the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq,” and demanded that Iraq “immediately end this repression” and “allow immediate access by international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance in all parts of Iraq.” Ignored by Saddam, the bombing continued unabated. In the north, as the Iraqi army attacked the rebellious region, fear of a second Anfal massacre [see Chronogram, August 2008] saw millions of Kurds fl ee to the Iranian and Turkish borders. No sooner was the ink dry on Resolution 688 than the US, Britain, and France—claiming they were acting under the resolution’s jurisdiction—
allied under Operation Provide Comfort, which included the provision of humanitarian aid, military protection for the Kurds, and the creation of a no-fly zone enforced by allied aircraft. By October 31, 1991, Saddam withdrew
his troops from the region, leaving it in an autonomous state of independence.
RAGE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT
The south was not so lucky. Although a similar no-fly zone—Operation Southern Watch—was launched by allied US, French, British, and Saudi Arabian forces aimed at monitoring and controlling the airspace over southern Iraq, Saddam’s attacks in the south took a diff erent tack. As direct bombing and strafing attacks on the civilian population abated, Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein better known as “Chemical Ali” and well versed on tactics of annihilation from his time spent directing the Anfal campaign in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan, launched almost a decade of measures that resulted in what is now is now seen as one of the world’s largest purposefully perpetrated ecological suicides or “ecocides” ever recorded. Although they represented a small
portion of rebelling forces, Majid was bent on annihilating the Marsh Arab population. Under his command, the regime set about creating huge hydroengineering schemes in the marshes, building a series of drainage and water diversion structures that saw 90 percent of the massive marshlands—the third largest wetlands in the world at that time, measuring an area approximately the size of the state of Massachusetts—desiccated. In some areas, the waters were poisoned, killing all domestic animals and wildlife, as the endless seas of green
reed beds dried up and were purposely burned.
In its 2001 report “The Mesopotamian Marshlands: The Demise of an Ecosystem,” the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) stated, “At the dawn of a new millennium, the tragic loss of the Mesopotamian marshlands stands out as one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters. Dams and drainage schemes have transformed one of the finest wetlands, the fabled Eden of the Fertile Crescent that has inspired humanity for millennia, into salt-encrusted desert. The ecological life-support system of a distinct indigenous people dwelling in a rare water-world of dense reed beds and teeming wildlife has collapsed.”
According to the UNEP report, “The Marsh Arab society, whose livelihood has been entirely dependent on the wetland ecosystem for millennia, has been dealt a shattering blow. The numerous economic benefi ts provided by the marshlands, from fishing, hunting, rice cultivation, a prodigious reed supply for construction and paper milling as well as tourism, have been lost.” Their supporting ecosystem vanishing, it is estimated that between 40,000 and 100,000 of the approximately half-million Marsh Arabs fled to Iranian refugee camps. The remaining hundreds of thousands became internally displaced within Iraq living “in unknown conditions.”
In addition, the silt and clay brought by the yearly spring rush of water from the northern mountain regions would push out the brackish water left over from the previous year. Along with important nutrients, the rush would bring toxic industrial pollutants from unchecked factories, sewage, and other human wastes. These pollutants, once filtered out by the massive reed beds, were left to gather in deadly amounts and before long pollution was being found six to seven miles out into the Persian Gulf. Cancer clusters began to appear and rocketing cancer rates were linked by some in the Western peace community to the depleted uranium (DU) left over from the First Gulf War. But others worried that focusing only on the DU aftereff ects left Iraq’s southern population at great risk.
“I have a theory that the cancer cluster in the south of Iraq has nothing to do with depleted uranium,” said Alwash. “I think the major cause is the fact that they are drinking the industrial pollution of all of the country down in the south. That’s what they are drinking.” While admitting DU could be part of the problem, he explained that in its campaign to exterminate the southern Shiite and Marsh Arab populations, not only did the Hussein regime not want outsiders coming into Iraq to clean up the DU, but was delighted by the fact that pollution might be aiding its agenda. “The previous Iraqi regime was so paranoid, it wouldn’t let anybody do anything to help. And besides, who is going to be hurt? The Shiite in the south? Let them die. Who the hell cares? [Cancer-causing DU] was good propaganda.”
REBIRTHING THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Horrified by the UNEP report, and in the case of Alwash, fed by memories of accompanying his father to work in the marshlands, the Drs. Alwash, as members of the Iraq Foundation, began working from a spare bedroom in their home and with the help of $120,000 funding from the US State Department, created Eden Again Project in 2002. The duo assembled a group of international experts to evaluate the potential for restoration of the marshes. They eventually determined that the marshes could and should be restored. This same group then began work on a series of documents and plans that could be implemented by Iraqis to reverse the devastation as soon as circumstances allowed.
Not long after the last bomb of Operation Iraqi Freedom’s Shock and Awe Campaign had fallen (rumor says before the last bomb had fallen), local marsh dwellers and the Iraqi Ministry of Waters Resources began to implement the reflooding of the marshes. Today, 65 percent of the marshes have been reflooded, with over half of it being revegetated, thanks to the growing partnership of “The New Eden Team,” consisting of Nature Iraq, various Iraqi Ministries and science communities, Italian experts, and many concerned citizens who live in the southern Iraq region.
While some sections of the rare aquatic landscape captured within the desert remain barren, and others are slow to recover, other large areas have been completely restored due to the rapid regrowth of the marshland vegetation. Assessment of the ecosystem’s recovery is underway and it is hoped that the habitats that once held important populations of wildlife, including endemic species of mammals, birds, and fish that were endangered (and many worry are now extinct), will experience regeneration and thus foster reintroduction of species thought to be lost in the devastation. Once a key wintering and staging site of the intercontinental migration of birds, the devastation of the marshes put at least 40 bird species at risk and greatly reduced their numbers. However, Marshland and Persian Gulf fisheries that saw great reductions in fish populations due to the loss of marsh spawning and nursery grounds are becoming hopeful that the bird and fish populations will thrive and flourish once again. One hopeful sign is the return of the threatened Iraq babbler. Not seen for decades, its babble can now be heard once again, mingling among the approximate 80 other bird species that have returned to the reed bed environ.
The best news, however, is that along with the return of the plant and animal life, the Marsh Arabs are also returning. It is estimated that as many as 80,000 marsh dwellers have returned to their traditional lifestyles in the areas that have been refl ooded. Reed houses on mud islands; herds of water buffalo with only their noses and the tips of their horns peeking above the water as they swim; fi shermen fi shing from their reed canoes; men and women weaving sliced reeds into mats; and the gathering, drying, and cutting into blocks of buffalo droppings to be used later for fuel—all of these remnants of a 5,000-year old culture thought forever lost are returning—have been birthed anew.
A NATIONAL PARK? IN IRAQ?
It is in this regenerating region where Iraq’s first National Park is planned. In May 2004, Nature Iraq under its former Eden Again persona, working alongside Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources, declared the restoration of the marshes a highest priority. With the help and generous financial and other support of their Italian partners, Italy’s Ministry of the Environment and Territory, plans were put in motion to develop a sustainable restoration plan for the marshlands. One of the projects proposed by the Italians was to do marshland National Park feasibility study, the goal of which was to bring sustainable economic development to the area that would restore, protect, and preserve the environment.
While the priority of the National Park will be to conserve the ancient traditions and rich cultural heritage of the region, objectives also focus intensely on marshland restoration acting in concert with socio-economic development of the entire region include restoration of the marshlands ecosystem, and the protection and re-introduction of endangered endemic species. It is hoped that the park will one day become an ecotourism hotspot destination in the Middle East, complete with kayaking and bird watching, sheltered remote locations for the observation of wildlife activities in their natural environment; marked paths and informational education centers. In addition, environmental research facilities on biodiversity, habitats, and ecosystems will operate within doing applied research and creating various pilot projects such as fish hatcheries and buffalo milk farming. It is hoped that international tourists will eventually glide along the reed-strewn waterways and hike into an alien terrain filled with reintroduced species of mammals such as the Mesopotamian fallow deer, cheetahs, otters, the goitered gazelle and the endangered Arabian oryx—a small antelope said to be the creature responsible for the unicorn legend.
Yet a major concern facing creation of the park is the unsettled nature of the structure and functioning of the Iraqi central government, still in its infancy and attempting to work out the kinks with various entities vying for power and control. “The largest challenge for us is the ambiguous nature of the Iraqi constitution,” said Alwash. “The constitution is essentially calling for decentralization and devolution of power to the governorates, which is great. Yet the ministers in Baghdad either do not understand this or they do not recognize it. Thus we always have a tug of war between the governorates and Baghdad. And we are in the middle trying to keep everybody happy and talking to each other because we do not care who controls. We just are focused on the future vision of what the national park area is going to look like in a few years.”
CREATING SUSTAINABLE PEACE ACROSS BOUNDARIES
“It was an Arab culture and their values were the values of the desert,” William Thesiger, once remarked, reflecting on his time spent with the Marsh Arabs. “In the marshes they were very friendly in their loyalties to each other and their attitudes were that of the [Bedouin]. They lived as hard a life as any human could live when I was with them. But their ultimate thing was freedom, ‘we’ve got freedom’ [they would say].” More recently, while interviewing returning Marsh Arabs, Suzie Alwash was told by one of their women that she had returned, “to have a traditional life, with our relatives, and to have our dignity.”
The lure of returning to the homeland is strong for many refugees and the internally displaced worldwide. But it is a pervasive attitude among all Iraqis, so many of whom have had to flee from deadly purposeful annihilation. In Iraq, the violence of the current war is subsiding but has not yet ended. The violence of a regime bent on annihilating its own people has left scars not only on just about every family in the country, but scars on the environmental landscape as well. Yet the Iraqi people are attempting return, not only to their country or their community, but also to some sense of peace in their lives and in their minds. Complete healing of this sort is a long way off , and in many cases will never occur. It is up to the visionaries and the generations of the future to carve out such a peace, the foundation of which must ultimately be forged by addressing the lifeblood of the people—their environment.
“That Iraqis are planning a National Park may seem unusual to some,” said Suzie Alwash, writing from her California home. “This National Park embraces the traditional indigenous uses of the environment and will continue to allow sustainable fi shing, hunting, and reed gathering. The most important species that we are attempting to preserve in the marshes is the human species. Humans are an integral part of the ecosystem—the marshes are the garden that they have tended for thousands of years.”
Her husband, writing from thousands of miles away, echoes her sentiments and takes the vision farther. “The creation of these two parks—north and south—will serve to remind the future generations of Iraqi Kurds and Iraq Arabs that they are linked. Establishing a National Park will bring the areas the protection they not only deserve but also require,” wrote Alwash. And to honor the victims of the former regime, we should build national parks and link them together as a series of peace parks. Maybe we can fi nd like-minded people in Iran who would do similar projects on their side of the long shared border. Wouldn’t it be awesome to organize a hike from the mountains of Kurdistan to the rivers, traverse back and forth into Iran, and then land in the town of Chibaish in the marshlands? Think about it.”
This article appears in September 2008.
