Wow....Excellent observation. I was thinking about this last week after I read the following NY Times article... I am not promoting any political views here, but even if you do not read the whole article just read the last sentence. This is the stuff that lead to wars.
> Water at Heart of Turkey's Policies on Kurds and Mideast Neighbors
>
> By STEPHEN KINZER
>
> ISTANBUL, Turkey -- The recent capture of Kurdish guerrilla
>leader Abdullah Ocalan has focused new attention on the war he
>has waged against the Turkish army for 14 years. In
>recruiting fighters and supporters, Ocalan has fed on the
>resentment many Kurds feel for what they consider the government's
>unjust discrimination against them. But he could never
>have built such a potent force without great amounts of help from
>other countries.
>
> There are many reasons why Ocalan found foreign supporters for
>his bloody rebellion against Turkish rule, and why Turkey has resisted
>his rebellion so fiercely. Some are to be found in
>history, others in psychology, and still others in geopolitics.
>
> Lurking behind them all, however, is water.
>
> For more than a decade until last October, Ocalan lived
>semi-clandestinely in Syria, and the Syrian government gave
>him money, arms and political cover. Iraq also helped him, allowing
>him to build bases along the Iraqi-Turkish border. Neither Syria
>nor Iraq were embracing his cause out of any love for Kurds;
>on the contrary, governments in both countries have fiercely
>repressed their own Kurdish populations.
>
> But Syria and Iraq want water from rivers that spring from
>Turkish soil. Turkey has given them what it considers ample
>amounts of water, but rejects what it calls their "unacceptable
>claims." They have supported Ocalan's fighters as a way of
>applying pressure on Turkey to give them more water.
>
> The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers created the "Fertile Crescent"
>where some of the first civilizations emerged. Today they are
>immensely important resources, politically as well as
>geographically. Through a system of dams in its southeastern
>provinces, Turkey controls their flow and is determined not to
>give up its control. That is one important reason that Turkish
>leaders have so resolutely refused to grant any autonomy to the
>Kurdish region, which straddles both rivers.
>
> Few if any countries understand the growing importance of water
>as fully as Turkey does. In one of the world's largest public works
>undertakings, Turkey is spending $32 billion for the
>huge Southeast Anatolia Project, a complex of 22 dams and 19
>hydroelectric plants. Its centerpiece, the Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates
>River, is already completed. In the reservoir
>that has built up behind the dam, sailing and swimming
>competitions are being held on a spot
>where for centuries there was little more than desert.
>
> When the project is completed, perhaps in the next decade, it is
>expected to increase the
> amount of irrigated land in Turkey by 40 percent and provide
>one-fourth of the country's electric power needs. Planners hope this
>can improve the standard of living of 6 million of
>Turkey's poorest people, most of them Kurds, and thus undercut
>the appeal of revolutionary separatism. It will also deprive Syria
>and Iraq of resources those countries believe they
>need -- resources that Turkey fears might ultimately be used in
>anti-Turkish causes.
> >>
> The region of Turkey where Kurds predominate is more or less the
>same region covered by the Southeast Anatolia Project,
>encompassing an area about the size of Austria. Giving that
>region autonomy by placing it under Kurdish self-rule could
>weaken the central government's
>control over the water resource that it recognizes as a keystone
>of its future power.
>
> In other ways also, Turkish leaders are using their water as a
>tool of foreign as well as domestic policy. Among their most
>ambitious new projects is one to build a 50-mile undersea
>pipeline to carry water from Turkey to the parched Turkish
>enclave on northern Cyprus. The pipeline will carry more water
>than northern Cyprus can use, and foreign mediators like
>Richard Holbrooke, deeply frustrated by their inability to break
>the political deadlock on Cyprus, are hoping that the excess
>water can be sold to the ethnic Greek republic on the
>southern part of the island as a way of promoting peace.
>
> It is no accident that Turkish President Suleyman Demirel is a
>water engineer by profession and entered public life as director
>of the State Waterworks Administration. His background
>and that of his classmate in engineering school, the late
>President Turgut Ozal, have done much to make Turkey so water
>conscious. Both men vigorously supported the Southeast Anatolia
>Project in the 1980s even though Western countries, including the
>United States, refused to provide loans or credits for it because
>they did not want to alienate Arab countries.
>
> One of the most important developments in the Middle East in the
>last 20 years has been the emergence of a strong partnership between
>Turkey and Israel. Both countries have much to gain
>from it; for Israel water is among the greatest potential
>benefits. Israel is thirsting for water, and Turkey is overflowing with it.
>
>Intensive studies are now under way to see whether
>tankers, pipelines or other means can be used to send Turkey's
>water to its new Israeli friends.
>
> Not coincidentally, the basis for the Turkey-Israel partnership
>was laid when Demirel headed the Turkish government and
>another water engineer, Yitzhak Rabin,
>was in power in Israel. "If we solve every other problem in the
>Middle East but do not satisfactorily resolve the water
>problem, our region will explode," Rabin once said.
>
> Other Middle Eastern leaders have agreed. The late
>King Hussein of Jordan asserted that conflicts over water
>"could drive nations of the region to war."
>
> Turkey may be the world's most water-conscious country, and the
>Middle East the region where water issues are most urgent.
>But competition for water, and for the power that control of
>water represents, is intensifying from Africa and Central Asia to
>Los Angeles and the Everglades.
>
> "The world's population of 5.9 billion will double in the next 40
>to 90 years," former Sen.Paul Simon, D-Ill., has written in a new book
>titled "Tapped Out" that examines global water
>problems. "Our water supply, however, is constant," he wrote, as
>"per capita water consumption is rising twice as fast as the world's
>population. You do not have to be an Einstein to understand that
>we are headed toward a potential calamity."
>
> Countries that control water are likely to be the big winners of
>the future. Turkey is among them. Its policies have for years been
>shaped by a desire to use water to achieve political aims, and the
>policies are beginning to pay off.
>
> "Water has been used as a means of pressure, for example the
>Syrians sponsoring Kurdish separatism because they want more water,"
>said Ishak Alaton, a visionary Turkish businessman whose company has
>won the contract to build the water pipeline to Cyprus and is conducting a
>feasibility study for a pipeline to Israel. "It can also be used
>for peace, as we are hoping in Cyprus. You can't overstate its importance.
>I firmly believe that just as the 20th century was the century
>of oil, the 21st century will be the century of water."
> |
