Ariel I. Ahram - Lessons from the destruction of Iraq’s marshes
The immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War saw the
unfolding of one of the worst ecological and human catastrophes of the modern
era with the destruction of the marshes of southern Iraq. Most accounts,
including Iraq’s
own 2005 constitution, attribute this double
ecocide-genocide to Saddam Hussein’s drive for sectarian domination
and vengeance against the Shiites, especially after squelching the 1991 March
uprising.
In a paper in the International
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, I offer a different assessment of what
transpired in the marshes. Using the Baath party’s own internal archives, I
show that much of the decision-making leading to the final destruction of the
marshes was driven more by the desperation of war than sectarian animus. The
counterinsurgency imperative, as so often is the case, led inexorably to
natural disaster. Why, as Bernard Nietzschemann caustically put it, do efforts
to court hearts and minds so often end with battlefields
of ashes and mud?
The marshes, the largest in southwest Asia, dominated the
confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the Iran-Iraq border, and were
home to the Marsh Arabs (ma’dan), a unique subculture based on fishing,
rearing buffalo and cultivating reeds. Western Orientalists often romanticized
the marshes as the location of the biblical
Eden and the ma’dan as primitive “first men.”Beginning in the spring of
1991, Saddam Hussein’s regime launched a concerted campaign to drain the marsh
waters and destroy the ma’dan villages. By 1994, nearly 3,000 square
kilometers of wetlands, almost two-thirds of the previous area, were
dried-out and an estimated 200,000 people had lost their home.
The marshes were the front line of the Iran-Iraq War from
1980 to 1988 and posed an especially difficult and desolate landscape for
combat. At first, Iraq used hydrological manipulation to block Iranian
infiltration. By the end of the war, Iraqi forces had learned to use portable
dams and sluices to dry-out the marshes, allowing advances by Iraqi mechanized
forces. The government knew, though, that support from the marsh residents was
critical for operational success and strove to hold on to their hearts and
minds. While the Baath suspected Iraqi Shiites in general of harboring Iranian
leanings, the ma’dan were identified as primitive but “pure” Arabs who could be
incentivized to ally with the state. Party functionaries and government
officials debated ways to win over the marsh residents with roads, schools,
clinics and electrification. But officials were constantly disappointed by the
ingratitude of the ma’dan for the gift of state-initiated modernization.
Towards the end of the war, more lethal methods took over.
Ali Hasan al-Majid, Hussein’s cousin and later the
author of Iraq’s genocidal Anfal campaign in Kurdistan, oversaw the
establishment of a cordon sanitaire around the marshes, destroying marsh
villages and deporting residents. Buffalo herds were decimated, fishing
prohibited. The marsh ecology itself was identified as an enemy to be overcome.
This was the context when the marshes again became the last
holdout of the rebellion following the crushing of the March 1991 uprising
against Hussein. Internal documents reveal that on March 29, while Najaf and
other southern cities still smoldered, Hussein issued a directive calling
for plans to drain the wetlands. In public speeches and secretly-taped
monologues, Hussein exhibited the self-justification typical of an
autocrat confronted by popular antipathy. On one hand, he attributed the unrest
to Iranian instigators. Since the population was assumed to welcome the chance
to become modern and productive, disorder must be attributed to outsiders. On
the other hand, the Shiites were always suspected of harboring ill-will toward
the regime, thereby warranting the harshest repression.
Breaking a
long-standing taboo against public discussion of sectarianism, government
newspapers began pillorying Shiites in general and the ma’dan in particular as
debased and un-Iraqi. Ali Hasan al-Majid was again dispatched, now conducting a
two-year campaign that desiccated, burned, poisoned and ultimately destroyed
the marshes.
What is striking about this campaign against nature is that
the actual conduct of counterinsurgency remained anchored in developmental
discourse. Iraqi officials justified the construction of new diversionary
canals as necessary for agricultural expansion. Hussein himself oversaw the
ceremonies inaugurating what was known as the “Saddam River,” celebrating it as
a triumph of Iraq’s technical prowess. The removal of the ma’dan was similarly
couched as a modernization initiative. Internal documents concluded that only
way to eliminate the sabotage was draining the area and transforming it into
arable lands. The ma’dan were stubborn and uncivilized; their culture was
defined by their physical environment. By changing that environment,
authorities could introduce the ma’dan to “a new pattern of life.”
Upon passing
a bill to relocate the ma’dan to state-built housing on desert tracks in April
1992, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament claimed the move was an effort to
provide modern amenities like electricity and running water to the ma’dan, whom
he described as bumpkins, afflicted with bilharzias and living in close
quarters with their animals. Ominously likening the situation of ma’dan to the
Kurdish relocation, he said that the marsh-dwellers “will not be given a choice
to move or stay.” Ultimately, the maʿdan were forced to adopt a new—and to the
state, superior—way of life; the marsh waters were rechanneled to more
productive purposes.
While it is easy to dismiss the story of the Iraqi marshes
as the consequence of the irrational sectarian hatreds of a delusional
dictator, a closer inspection highlights instead a disquieting continuity in
the marriage of development and counterinsurgency. The destruction of the
marshes did not begin in 1991, or even in 1980, but a century earlier. For
millennia, the marshes had stood out as a stateless zone, comparable to what
James Scott describes of upland
southeast Asia. Hydrologically incorrigible and physically impenetrable,
the area
was a natural haven for escaped slaves, dissenters and brigands. At the
turn of the 20th century though, the Ottomans and British began using advanced
cartographic technologies and steamship navigation to assert mastery over the
marshes and encourage the
transition from peripatetic tribalism into modern citizenship based on settled
agriculture.
“Reclaiming” the marshes for agriculture was a cornerstone of
development policies in Iraq. By the middle of 20th century, a host
of dams, barrages and canals in Iraq, Syria and Turkey effectively
throttled the flow of water to the marshes, causing a creeping environmental
disaster. Between 1968 and 1984 the marshes shrank
by one-third. Agricultural run-off and other pollutants fouled
the water, and native flora and fauna showed signs of severe
ecological strain.
On the human side, efforts to transform the ma’dan into
yeoman farmers were often coupled with brutal pacification campaigns to
suppress tribal uprisings and persistent criminality. By the late 1950s, many
marsh-dwellers were reduced
to sharecropping or had fled to the teeming slums like
Baghdad’s Medinat ath-Thawra, today’s Sadr City. Hussein took already
destructive and coercive programs for social and ecological transformation and
pursued them to their logical and calamitous conclusion.
What happened in the marshes was not just an act of war,
then, but a strategy of development and social improvement, what Samuel
Huntington called “force-draft
modernization.” The state interceded directly in the human ecology, using
advanced technologies to forcibly change the way population interacted with the
natural world. Similar stories could be told about British
and German uses of concentrations camps and “hunger wars” in southern Africa, Soviet eradication of the herds of
Kazakh nomads, American
defoliation of Vietnamese rice paddies and Portuguese attempts to defeat
insurgency by building a dam in Mozambique.
Third World states have since
adopted similar tactics, as in Guatemala’s genocidal 1982 “beans
and bullets” campaign in the central highlands. The logic of
ecological intervention continues to influence counterinsurgency today. David
Kilcullen, a doyen of contemporary American counterinsurgency theory, describes
his tasks as essentially “armed
social work; an attempt to redress basic social and political problems while
being shot at.” Offering roads, electricity, irrigation, schools, medicine
and other trappings of modernity seems a beneficent and peaceful way to win
civilian away from the insurgency. Development and counterinsurgency are thus
often linked, both tactically and doctrinally.
But even the best development project entails a measure of
ecological disruption and human
displacement. In the context of counterinsurgency, where policy-makers and
soldiers alike become steadily inured to violence, the
ends of security and development justify ever more radical and ruinous means.
There often appears little choice, as Christian
Gerlach points out, but to eradicate obstreperous plants and animals, even
if they are critical foodstuffs or relocate populations to concentrated areas,
even if it requires transfer to patently unlivable habitats. These are the
inevitable costs in the campaign to change wilderness into well-ordered,
well-governed and productive space.
Once these policies are in place, notions
of ethno-sectarian supremacy are but the last steps toward the outright
elimination of environmental and human obstacles to mission. Their redemption
comes through their extinction.
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