ABOSHOLAN, 24 May 2003 — Sabi Abad’s tiny island is one of the last remnants of a dying world that Saddam Hussein spent a decade trying to crush.
Abad is one of Iraq’s Marsh Arabs who have inhabited the lush swamplands at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers since the dawn of civilization, their lifestyle virtually unchanged for 5,000 years — until they incurred Saddam’s wrath and he launched a campaign to eradicate them.
Beginning in 1991, after a Shiite uprising in southern Iraq, Saddam’s government constructed a series of dams, dykes and earth barriers to stop river water flowing into the marshes, turning them into a parched wasteland.
Saddam is gone, but it may be too late to save the Marsh Arabs. “Saddam hated us because he thought we were guerrillas and rebels. He was afraid of the marsh people,” Abad said. “So he took away our water. He knew we could not survive without it.”
Abad’s family of 21 live in a mud-brick house thatched with straw in the village of Abosholan. His compound lies on an island accessible only by the thin wooden boats that he and his family punt through the streams with long bamboo poles.
The village was abandoned in the 1990s at the height of Saddam’s campaign to destroy the Marsh Arabs, but villagers returned two years ago after setting up a pump which made Abosholan one of the few marsh villages to have enough water.
Scattered around the settlement are the overgrown ruins of the houses of the old village, bulldozed by the government.
According to a report released this year by Human Rights Watch, there were around 250,000 Marsh Arabs in the region as recently as 1991. Fewer than 40,000 remain.
“Enforced ‘disappearances’, torture, and the execution of political opponents have been accompanied by ecologically catastrophic drainage of the marshlands and the large-scale and systematic forcible transfer of part of the local population,” it said. The region’s ecosystem has been destroyed.
A 2001 study by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) found that 90 percent of the marshlands had been destroyed. “Analysis of satellite imagery has shown that the marshland ecosystem had collapsed by 2001,” UNEP said.
The region was home to prehistoric man and known as the cradle of civilization which gave rise to the ancient Mespotamian city of Ur.
The British explorer Wilfred Thesiger lived with the Marsh Arabs in the 1950s and documented how their houses seemed to float on the water among the stillness of the reed beds.
“As I came out into the dawn, I saw, far away, across a great sheet of water, the silhouette of a distant land, black against the sunrise ... a slim, black, high-powered craft lay beached at my feet — the sheik’s war canoe, waiting to take me into the marshes,” he wrote.
“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.”
Thesiger described the Marsh Arabs as arrogant, individualistic and intensely proud. “They never willingly accepted any man as their master and would rather die than be shamed,” he said.
Saddam made them pay a high price for their pride.
“Our people became beggars and laborers, scattered around the country,” said Abdul Qader Mowanes, an elderly Marsh Arab with thick glasses and four blackened teeth. “When we came back, everything was destroyed. We had to start again.”
US officials and environmental experts say they are studying whether it is possible to revive the marshes.
Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, told Reuters in Washington earlier this month that perhaps 25 percent of the marshlands could be restored using existing water flows.
But officials say flood controls and dams in Iran, Syria and Turkey have reduced the flow of the rivers, meaning the marshes could never be restored to their past vitality. Most of the area has become a vast expanse of mud, dotted with stunted shrubs and ruined houses. And the self-sufficient existence of the Marsh Arabs may now be unsustainable.
Their life was structured to fit their environment, based around fishing, cultivation, buffalo breeding and reed gathering. Now the fish population has been destroyed, the ecosystem has collapsed and most Marsh Arabs have dispersed. “We hope that, God willing, things will get better now that Saddam has gone,” Mowanes said. “But we have nothing left. We are desperate.”
