Her seven children and an assortment of neighbours obediently start singing and clapping, for, at 61, Halima has a glint to her eye that no one turns down. ‘We rowed to our house for a feast of slaughtered sheep and there was entertainment from gypsy singers, a brother and sister who were famous in those days, and the man who danced like a chimpanzee. Then after seven days we were rowed out to bring bunches of reeds back.’
Halima’s exuberance makes it easy to picture the scene, but for one thing. ‘Of course those were the days before Saddam stole our water,’ she says, suddenly turning serious. For the boat in which she is performing is on dry land and there is no sign of water for as far as the eye can see.
Once set on reed islands amid the legendary Mesopotamian marshes, the village of al Turaba in southern Iraq is today a desolate place, a cluster of scruffy mud and reed shacks on salt-encrusted ground which crunches underfoot. In the distance a single donkey moves slowly along a ridge, ridden by a man with a cloth wrapped round his head against the fierce 50°C sun. Instead of the soothing rustle of reeds that Halima grew up with, the only sound is the creaking of a toy car made of thick wire and bottle caps pushed by a small boy.
One of the most persecuted of all minorities under a regime that turned persecution into an art form, the Marsh Arabs were victims of an insidious campaign of building canals and dykes to drain the marshes and thus destroy a unique culture and ecosystem that dates back to Sumerian times.
‘The destruction of Iraq’s marshes involved a genocide,’ says Baroness Emma Nicholson, the Liberal Democrat MEP, as she tours the area, visible from far off in her fluorescent pink headscarf. ‘The best way I could describe it is as an open-air Auschwitz.’
The biggest wetlands in the Middle East, the marshes extended for 20,000 square kilometres (about the size of Wales) from Iraq to Iran. A paradise in green and blue near the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was believed by biblical scholars to have been the Garden of Eden. Its inhabitants, the Madan or Marsh Arabs, lived on small reed islands, fished, grew rice and kept water buffalo in what was regarded by ecologists as a perfectly balanced harmony of man and beast. Millions of birds, including storks, herons and flamingos, lived there or migrated through on their way between Asia and Africa.
In his classic account The Marsh Arabs, Wilfred Thesiger described his impressions from his first visit in 1951: ‘A naked man in a canoe with a trident in his hand, reed houses built upon water, black, dripping buffaloes that looked as if they had calved from the swamp with the first dry land…Before the first palaces were built at Ur, men had stepped out into the dawn from such a house, launched a canoe like this and gone hunting here. Five thousand years of history were here and the pattern was still unchanged.’
Saddam Hussein was no respecter of such history. To him the marshes represented a threat, a refuge for bandits, smugglers and rebels disdainful of external control, their winding canals and ten-foot-high reeds used by Shia resistance groups as cover. Having drained some of the marshes on the Iranian border to build roads during the eight-year war with Iran, his main assault on the Marsh Arabs began after the first Gulf War. His motivation was the Shi’ite uprising which started in Basra on 28 February 1991 when the commander of a tank retreating from Kuwait stopped his vehicle on Sa’ad Square in front of the ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters and fired shells at one of the ubiquitous giant portraits of Saddam.
The uprising was the most serious internal threat ever faced by the regime and for a while control hung in the balance with fourteen of the country’s eighteen provinces in revolt. Thousands of members of the Badr Brigade, a pro-Iranian militia of Iraqi refugees, swarmed through the marshes to Basra where they declared an Islamic Republic.
Once the rebellion had been brutally brought under control with mass executions and bulldozing of bodies, the Marsh Arabs found themselves singled out. The official Ba’ath Party newspaper, al-Thawra, carried six long articles attacking the marsh dwellers as ‘monkey-faced people’ who were not real Iraqis but the descendants of black slaves brought to the south in the Middle Ages; their women were branded sluttish and immodest.
At the same time Saddam launched his ‘Plan of Action for the Marshes’. Crews of workers were hired to dig the 350-mile-long Third River (later to become known as Saddam River), originally started by the British to drain saline water from farmland and carry the waters of the Euphrates directly into the Persian Gulf rather than the marshes. To stop the rivers seeping into the marshes, an elaborate system of dykes and canals was built such as the forty-mile-long Mother of Battles River, which funnelled the waters of the Tigris into the sea.
In case there was any doubt about what Saddam was trying to do, troops were sent in to burn villages and papyrus and set up military bases. What remained of the marshes was allegedly filled with toxic chemicals. Many Marsh Arabs fled across the border to Iran. This is where Emma Nicholson first saw them. ‘There were thousands upon thousands coming across, maybe 80,000, this seething mass of humanity full of anguish, many of them sick,’ she recalls. ‘It was a bitter experience that I will never forget.’
Using her imperious manner to immediately recruit some doctors and commandeer medicines, Nicholson set up the charity Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees (AMAR). For years it was a lonely crusade. Few in the outside world realised what was going on for it was almost impossible for westerners to enter the area. Only now, with Saddam gone, are the Marsh Arabs who stayed in Iraq free to tell their stories.
‘First the troops would come warning us to move, then the helicopters would come in and bomb, then they would set fire to our houses and the soldiers would move in,’ said Mukhtar, one of a group of Marsh Arabs living in shacks near Basra airport. ‘We were moved again and again until they broke us apart. My father had been killed, we had lost all our buffalo and in the end my mother just got tired and we moved to town.’
‘They took three of my sons,’ said Jabbar Minshed. ‘One of them they shot in the marshes and two they took away. Now I can’t see from crying. They didn’t want us to have water. They didn’t want us to live.’
A 2001 study by the United Nations Environment Program using satellite imagery found 93 per cent of the marshland had been bled dry since 1991. Of the three main marsh areas, the Hammar and Qurna had completely dried up, villages left to crumble into the sand like ghost towns. The Huwaiza marsh, which borders Iran, was left largely desiccated. According to a report by Human Rights Watch released earlier this year, the population living in the marshes has fallen from 250,000 to less than 40,000.
The buffalo and fish of the Marsh Arabs once supplied two-thirds of the fish and dairy needs of the entire country. Today those who are left are forced to depend on handouts from the United Nations. The number of buffalo in the central Hammar marsh had fallen from 170,000 in 1985 to just 2,000 sorry-looking specimens. Beached on dry desert, families like Halima’s became wheat farmers, poor ones. The wheat sits in sacks waiting to be collected by a government that no longer exists. In one of the shacks, a mother fans the stained bottom of a baby boy with dysentery. Their children are malnourished and, with no fresh water, diarrhoea and cholera are a constant presence.
As the women work, along the road the men gather in the mudhif, the traditional village meeting house. The only tangible reminder of their ancient culture, the mudhif is exquisite – a long straw-coloured shelter fashioned from latticed reed walls with a cathedral-like ceiling held up by nine arches of dried twisted-together reeds. There are always an odd number apparently, though no one could explain why. Once the mudhif would have been on a reed island surrounded by water; now it sits stranded on the dusty roadside. A plastic clock hangs incongruously on the outside.
Inside, the sheikh or tribal leader, an old bearded man with a worn brown shawl on his shoulders and the carved wise face of Abraham, holds court as the villagers sit cross-legged on rugs woven in geometric designs by Bedouin. The compulsory portrait of Saddam has been torn down and replaced by one
of the white-bearded Shia leader Ayatollah Hakim. A ceiling fan stutters on and off, barely stirring the hot air as the men lean against pillows, sipping endless small glasses of tea, half filled with sugar, poured by a small boy. The Marsh Arabs are stocky people with light skins darkened by years in the sun and many have ammunition belts slung round their waists.
There is an important discussion going on today. The collapse of the regime and consequent breakdown in law and order has led to old feuds resurfacing between the nine main tribes of the marshes. Only the previous week, three of their men were killed in a battle with the Abu Ghaman tribe. Their deaths must now be avenged but the tribesmen are worried that British and US forces will try to disarm them. It was just down the road from here that six British military police were killed last month.
Once that has been discussed, the men do what they always do and reminisce about the olden days, telling me of how in summer they would send people to the desert to collect grass chewed by camels and weave it into the latticed reed walls of the mudhif then sprinkle it with water to cool the air. ‘Now we have no water,’ said a wiry man in his thirties called Khalid Hathiel, taking a shell that looked like a white mussel from his pocket. ‘We call it a Baba’s nose,’ he said. ‘I always carry it. We are like fish, we cannot survive without water.’
As a young man Khalid was conscripted into the army and taken to Baghdad. ‘I couldn’t stand it, I felt like I couldn’t breathe being away from the marshes. So after two months I ran away and hid.’ He ended up in hiding for twelve years, until the fall of Saddam in April, getting food once a week from his family and living with other men in hiding from the regime. ‘During that time my family were moved three times between 1994 and 1996, their village burnt each time.’
He slotted his pistol into his belt and summoned his friend Faisal, the sheikh’s son, who appeared equipped with a Kalashnikov, ‘in case of other tribes’, to accompany us on a tour of the area. ‘Look!’ he said, pointing at the saltpans shimmering in the white afternoon heat. ‘You can almost imagine it is water.’
Khalid and his newly freed friends may soon need to imagine no longer. The Marsh Arabs have suddenly found themselves fashionable and hotels in the southern city of Basra are booked solid with aid workers, European politicians and American ecologists who have come to bring back the marshes. Both the UN and USAID are carrying out surveys.
Some of the Marsh Arabs have already taken things into their own hands quite literally and started tearing down dykes, cheering as the water comes gushing back into their lands. Satellite pictures show that 15,000 hectares have been flooded since the fall of Baghdad. But ecologists warn that such self-help schemes may be risky and could create saline lakes.
Khalid takes me to part of the newly reclaimed marsh on Al Huwaiza where fishermen have already returned, gliding through the water in their long flat-bottomed canoes. One of them, Karim Jasim, paddles over to let me board as Khalid waves me off with a cheerful warning to beware ‘snakes and landmines’.
‘The water came back a month ago,’ said Karim. ‘Before we had to dig ten metres to find water and there were military everywhere; we would have been killed if we came out here.’
Out on the marshes it is another world. White herons pick up their long legs daintily, dragonflies pause on the boat to show off gossamer wings. Karim in the front and a friend in the back paddle through the water to lift out their 200-metre-long net, which is full of tiny silvery fishes. Surviving on a bag of flat Arabic bread, they will stay out for two days and nights until they have filled the icebox with fish then take it to the nearby town of Qalat Saleh to sell it for about 2,000–3,000 dinars, between £1 and £1.50.
‘We used to catch fish so big one man alone could not carry them,’ said Karim, drawing a picture in my notebook of himself in a boat triumphantly holding up a large fish on a trident. ‘Now they are just small, but the big ones will come, Hamdullah [praise God]. And even if they don’t, just to be out here one night and not be scared is worth the world.’
As he speaks he swats with annoyance at the mosquitoes they call ‘little Saddams’ – one of the unintended effects of liberation. Normally the area is sprayed with insecticide before the mosquito season but this year with the collapse of the regime there was no one to order it.
We drift for a while in silence and Karim tells me in his soft voice of the turtles that used to swim in the waters. ‘Now we have water will the animals come back?’ he asks. Most marsh species such as the grey wolf, smooth-coated otter and honey badger have died out. But the crack of a rifle on the way back to the village turns out to be that of a hunter, looking pleased with himself as he waves a marbled duck shot with his old Lee-Enfield, one of many British weapons picked up after the First World War, recently modified with the addition of a looted water pipe tied to the barrel.
Another happy man is Haji Mokhdar Mohammed, once the most famous boat maker in the marshes, now old and shaky, his face a spider’s web of wrinkles. He smiles as he watches his son Mohammed Jasim hammering a lattice of planks together in the village of Al Huwaira. ‘We used to sell one a day but when they took the water from the marshes our business collapsed and we would sell just two or three a month,’ he says. ‘But now business is good again.’
Leaning heavily on his stick, he takes me through the village, followed Pied Piper-like by a line of children. The mosque has a black banner along its wall listing 138 names of the disappeared. ‘Everyone in this village lost someone,’ he says. Eventually we come to the edge of a canal where three men are dipping wooden rolling pins into a steaming vat of bitumen to coat his newly made boats in traditional manner.
Yet even if the marshes can be restored, many of the younger Marsh Arabs say they have no desire to return to the life of fishing and buffaloes but would rather live in cities in houses with all the trappings of the modern world. ‘The old type of life was good,’ said Khalid, taking me to his uncle’s house where his mother shyly feeds us buffalo yoghurt and water followed by delicious fresh buffalo curd from two strangely blue-eyed buffalo lying in a small ditch. ‘But now we want electricity and phones and running water and PlayStations and satellite TV. Not all that marsh stuff.’
Rather like the Amazonian Indians who have been exposed to what passes for civilisation and then do not want to be kept as some kind of museum for the outside world to look upon, some Marsh Arabs are already starting to tire of the foreign aid workers rhapsodising about their ancient lifestyle.
‘Look, I’m delighted Saddam has gone,’ said Lefta Saleh, whose hut sits in front of a small pond of foul-smelling green-rimmed water where some of his seven children splash. ‘The day he fell it rained and rained like it never had. But that doesn’t mean I want to just be sitting in the water with buffaloes and being bitten by mosquitoes. I hate buffalo. If I could, I’d live in Baghdad and have a house and electricity and send my children to school.’
‘As an organic farmer this integration between crops and livestock and man is wonderful,’ said Andrew Friend, a Devon farmer working as a consultant to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation in Basra. ‘The projects are very sexy. Everyone wants to go floating around with the Marsh Arabs but how much of a dream it is for most Marsh Arabs to go back to that life remains to be seen. We found a lot of young people not too keen on going back and milking buffaloes. They’re more into cars and the Iraqi equivalent of the Spice Girls.’
At the end of the day whatever the Marsh Arabs and their powerful new friends in Washington want, their destiny does not lie in their own hands. Oil companies are already eyeing the oil under the marshes while Turkey controls the headwaters of both the Euphrates and the Tigris and is in the middle of its own dam building, the South East Anatolia Project. The line of twenty-two dams, which received British funding, could choke off the two ancient rivers. In 1990 Turkish officials literally shut off the flow of the Euphrates for twenty-nine days.
On my last day in the marshes Khalid gathered some more friends with guns
to risk crossing a couple of tribal boundaries, asking them first, ‘Are you wanted men?’ which seems to be a standard greeting among Marsh Arabs. We drove to Al-Qurnah at the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris. In a small walled garden by a shabby hotel, which like most of post-Saddam Iraq has been looted of everything from beds to window frames, stands an ancient tree. ‘Adam’s tree,’ he said. Believed to be the Tree of Knowledge, like everything in this mythical Garden of Eden it appeared to be dead. ‘Don’t be sad,’ smiles Khalid, beckoning me round the back. From the ground a very tiny green shoot is poking its way through.
An Afghan Asks Why
Diary entry, 28 September 2003
KABUL, FIRST CRISP BITE of the forthcoming winter in the air. Stood on the roof of the Mustafa to make calls with the sat phone and saw the sky was full of kites and the old walls of Kabul picked out in relief on the top of the mountain across the way. Ismael, the baker, has promised me hot naan bread for lunch.
God knows why this crumbling city makes me so happy. Down below, the women are still swishing figures in blue burqas. My mouth is already full of dust and it’s hard to hear on the phone amid all the jangling horns and that discordant Bollywood music. Freedom seems to mean more noise and traffic.
Happy not to be in Iraq any more, though as usual left a mess in London, my taxes going to miss the deadline (again), still got to find a school for Lourenço, need to find a house, sort out a mortgage, buy a hard drive in case my laptop blows up again…
Happy to be alive maybe: the Ariana flight from Dubai landed with the usual bump and a round of applause (which might have been louder if we’d all known about the previous day’s flight losing its front wheel, circling round and round to offload fuel, then making an emergency landing on its belly).
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