Iraq’s marshes dying, civilization too

young herder, who has no other income. Both the Mesopotamian marshes, and the culture of the Marsh Arabs—or Ma’adan—like Mohammed who live in them, have UNESCO world heritage status. The Ma’adan have hunted and fished there for 5,000 years, building houses from woven reeds on floating reed islands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together before pouring into the Gulf.

Even their beautifully intricate mosques were made of reeds.

But the marshlands have shrunk from 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 square miles) in the early 1990s to 4,000 (1,500 square miles) by latest estimates -- choked by dams on the great rivers upstream in Turkey and Syria and the soaring temperatures of climate change. Only a few thousand of the quarter million Ma’adan who lived in the marshes in the early 1990s remain.

Experts say that Iraq’s management of the waters has not helped.

50 degrees C AFP crisscrossed the central Chibayish marshes at the end of June, where at dawn it was already 35 degrees Centigrade (95 degrees Fahrenheit) before temperatures shot towards 50.

Iraq is one of the five countries most touched by some effects of climate change, according to the United Nations. Rainfall is rarer and rarer, and in the next 25 years the World Bank said the temperature will go up by an average of 2.5 degrees. Water levels in the central marshlands and the Euphrates which feeds it are “dropping by half a centimeter a day”, said engineer Jassim al-Assadi, of Nature Iraq, the country’s leading conservation group. That will get worse “over the next two months as the temperatures rise and more and more water evaporates,” he added.

To draw water for his remaining buffaloes, Mohammed Hamid Nour takes his canoe out into deeper water, where salt levels are lower. He rolled up his sleeves to fill a water tank on the canoe revealing a tattoo of the Zulfikar, the sword of Imam Ali, one of the founding figures of Shi’ite Islam. He got it for “baraka” or blessing, he smiled. He needs all the help he can get.

Saddam’s bid to kill them

The marshes already almost died once when former dictator Saddam Hussein dried them out so he could hunt down the Shi’ite rebels who had taken refuge there after the failed uprising in the wake of the First Gulf War in 1991.

In a few months, Saddam turned 90 percent of the marshes into a “desert”, Assadi recalled. Most of the Ma’adan fled or “moved elsewhere in Iraq or emigrated to Sweden or the United States”.

But when Saddam was toppled by the American-led invasion in 2003 the ditches he dug to drain the marshes were destroyed, and both the marshes and the Ma’adan returned.

Two decades later, the water level is plummeting again.

“The level of the Euphrates in Iraq is around half of what it was in the 1970s,” said Ali alQuraishi, of Baghdad’s University of Technology.

“In the face of these threats, the global community must speak as one. Any use of nuclear weapons is unacceptable,” Guterres said.

Earlier in May the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, and the President of the Japanese Red Cross Society, Atsushi Seike, issued a statement ahead of the three-day G7 summit in Hiroshima.

In their statement, which we endorse as well, they said the world must remember the horror wrought by the two atomic bombings of 1945.

For the sake of the survival of humanity, we must indeed free the world of weapons that threaten catastrophic humanitarian consequences and irreversible harm. This requires immediate and decisive action by the entire international community. The risk of use of nuclear weapons is highest since the worst moments of the Cold War, amid heightened political tensions and new steps to expand arsenals. With almost 13,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear-armed states, many with much more destructive power than the Hiroshima bomb and ready to be launched within minutes, “that dark path would have catastrophic effects on human health, the environment, the climate, food production, and socio-economic development around the globe.” As Mirjana Spoljaric and Atsushi Seike correctly pointed out: “No government or international organization is prepared to deal with such a situation.”

Duterte could not use the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute as a means to avoid the investigation by the International Criminal Court prosecutor regarding charges of committing crimes against humanity in relation to the killings during his harsh war on drugs.

This much should have made President Marcos mindful of when he chose not to cooperate with the ICC probe.

“Withdrawing from the Rome Statute does not discharge a state party from the obligations it has incurred as a member,” the court said in a 101-page decision authored by Associate Justice Marvic Leonen.

It is not a matter of sovereignty but more so a matter of honoring its treaty obligations as party to the Rome Statute.

A treaty is binding on the parties and must be executed in good faith.

In fact, the high court ruled in the same decision that as a state party the Philippines was bound to recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC and cooperate with its processes even after its withdrawal from the treaty that created the international court.

Marcos, as president, is now duty bound to respect the court’s decision after it issues a final judgment.

He is obliged to adhere to it, regardless of any strong disagreements.

While Presidents have historically criticized the Supreme Court, they do not possess the power to invalidate or ignore these judgments.

The issue of non-cooperation with the ICC is more than a question of sovereignty than the quest for justice for the thousands of victims in the murderous drug war prosecuted by the Duterte government.

Government data indicates that slightly over 6,000 individuals lost their lives in over 200,000 anti-drug operations.

This is however being disputed by the ICC prosecutors who say the death toll is significantly higher, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to 30,000.

The UN Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines says about 8,663 of the deaths are a result of the conduct of antiillegal drug operations, with estimates triple that amount.

It is a fight against impunity and to ensure that the victims and their families obtain their well-deserved justice.

Dams upstream in Turkey, where the Tigris and the Euphrates have their sources, and others on their tributaries in Syria and Iran, are the “principle” cause, he said.

“The Turks have built more dams to meet the needs of agriculture there. As the population rises, more water is needed for irrigation and domestic use,” the expert added.

Water has always sparked tensions between Iraq and Turkey. With Iraq asking Ankara to release more, the Turkish ambassador to Baghdad, Ali Riza Guney, sparked outrage last July by accusing the Iraqis of “wasting water”.

There is a grain of truth in the Turkish claim, scientists say. Iraq’s water management is far from ideal.

Since the time of the ancient Sumerians, Iraqi farmers have flooded their land to irrigate it, which is considered hugely wasteful.

But now water for agriculture is short, with the authorities drastically reducing arable farming to make sure there is enough drinking water for the country’s 42 million people.

Iraq’s President Abdul Latif Rashid told the BBC last month that the government “has taken significant steps to improve the water management system in talks with neighboring countries”, without going into detail.

Pollution and heavy metals

Meanwhile in the central marshes, there is so little water even canoes get stuck. AFP

ROMUALDEZ ADDRESSES AIPA.

Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez delivers his message during the plenary session of the 44th (ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) general assembly at the Fairmont Hotel in Jakarta Indonesia Monday.

Romualdez stresses that regional solidarity and cooperation are vital in building a more resilient and sustainable ASEAN community. Inset shows the Speaker in discussions with his counterpart, the President of the National Assembly of Vietnam Vuong Dinh Hue, during their bilateral meeting, with Pangasinan Rep. Rachel Arenas and Zamboanga Del Norte Rep. Glona Labadlabad. Ver Noveno