Here's something interesting ...
Syria's Water Policy Targets Assyrian Christians
by AINA - Assyrian International News Agency
Posted: Monday, August 21, 2000 10:33 am CST
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Little or no water reaches the Assyrian villages and agriculture correspondingly suffers. The availability of fish, an important source of protein in the Khabur diet, has also been seriously impacted. While the Jazirah region suffers through yet another year of drought and government inaction, recent reports disclosed that Syria announced an agreement to provide neighboring Jordan with water.
Not surprisingly, though, there is sufficient water to reach several Arab villages north of the Assyrian villages as well as the state owned Manajer Farm, which was previously confiscated and nationalized from an Assyrian Christian landowner. Some Arab farmers enjoying close ties to corrupt government officials are allowed to dig wells despite the law, but are in turn charged as much as half of their harvest. While turning a blind eye to wells dug by Arab farmers, the government never the less strictly enforces the ban on wells in the Assyrian villages.
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Just north of Sapeh, a dam diverts water to a reservoir that serves Hassaka, the main city of northeastern Syria. In the area beginning at the Manajer Farm and extending north to Sapeh and the surrounding Arab villages, there is sufficient water flow for irrigation and drinking. Also, the Arab villages to the north continue to enjoy ample water for irrigation on account of the illegal wells. With the dammed and diverted water stored for use in a reservoir farther to the south, water again becomes available just south of the Assyrian villages. No access from the reservoir is granted to the Assyrian villages.
This recent Syrian policy leaves the Assyrian villages alone within an arid belt bereft of water while water is redistributed to the north and south either directly from the Khabur river, through government condoned illegal wells, or through the reservoir. The conspicuously abrupt water demarcation lines in the area of the Assyrian villages is a consequence of both the severity of the current drought and, more importantly, a result of primitive and corrupt Syrian governmental environmental policy as well as the government's inherent hostility towards the politically disenfranchised Assyrian community.
In the past, the Syrian government has been unfairly hostile to local Assyrian efforts to improve the dire water situation. On June 24, 1997, the Syrian government arrested four members of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO), including a former member of parliament, in Hassaka who had initiated a project to bring potable water via tankers to the parched Assyrian Khabur villages (AINA July 21, 1997). The four men were eventually released, three of whom only after several months of incarceration and standard Syrian mistreatment. Despite lacking any legitimate legal merit, the trials of the three were never dismissed, but rather continued indefinitely in order to allow the government the pretext to reconvene the trial at their whim any time in the future.
Other than asking farmers to not plant their summer crops, the Syrian government has not initiated any action to solve the ongoing environmental disaster opting instead to condone corrupt and discriminatory water mismanagement targeting the Assyrian community.
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Water scarcity has increasingly become a source of tension between rival neighboring states in the Middle East. Now the Syrian government is using water scarcity as an internal political tool to refashion the demography of the Jazirah by encouraging the exodus of Assyrians from an historically Assyrian region.
atour.com
Sounds like the Syrians are trying to make the Assyrian homeland uninhabitable. But wait, there seem to be no Jews involved so there's no injustice going on, right? |
