Focus on Marsh Arabs

The 50 or so men packed into the meeting room all seem intent on speaking at the same time, but when their leader raises his hand they obligingly fall silent. "Life has been difficult for us, but now there is a new Iraq and we must make choices," said Hashim Shanawah, swatting at the flies buzzing around him. "Let us make sure it is the right choice.". Shanawah is a tribal chief of about 1,000 dispossessed and demoralised Marsh Arabs - an Iraqi tribe, who, until Saddam Hussein intervened, lived simple lives cut off from the outside world. But now, with Saddam gone and calls both locally and internationally for the recovery of the marshlands, Shanawah's village - and dozens more like it - is struggling to choose between the lives they now lead and the lives they were forced to abandon. For close to a decade, thousands of Marsh Arabs- or Ma'dan - have lived in dusty roadside villages, earning a living from land instead of water, from wheat instead of fish, and despite the hardships it entails, there is much that they like about their new way of life. For it is only since they were forced out of the marshes that they have come into contact with the outside world and its progress. "Life in the marshes was good and we were happy to live there, but when we were in the marshes we knew nothing about schools and hospitals. Now we want to be civilised," said Shanawah. Many of the Ma'dan are too young to remember much of the life they once had. Most Marsh Arabs first felt the sting of Saddam in 1991 when the people of southern Iraq dared to rebel against him following his defeat in the first Gulf War. As members of Iraq's long-oppressed Shi'ah majority, many of the Ma'dan were already committed opponents of the former Iraqi government, and when army deserters and rebels sought shelter in the marshes, Saddam began a dual policy of forced expulsion and the systematic draining of the marshes using a network of diversionary dams and canals. In 1993, the government had completed canals to divert much of the water in both the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers and to prevent it from seeping into the marshlands. At the time, the government argued that the drainage project was to create more agricultural land. Of the estimated 250,000 people who were living in the marshes in 1991, as few as 40,000 remain. Tens of thousands fled to neighbouring Iran or moved to safer areas within Iraq. Human rights groups estimate that 100,000 Marsh Arabs are displaced within Iraq. It is believed that some of the Ma’dan may have been sent north to Kurdish areas as part of the regime’s Arabisation campaign. Eighty percent of the marshlands has been converted into open farmland or remains fallow. Much of the ecosystem has been badly damaged and landmines still pose a constant danger to the few who still live there. Moreover, when the Iraqi army collapsed and fled their camps in the aftermath of Saddam's final defeat, they left yet more munitions on the marshes’ borders.

uxo's at the gate to the marshes

The village of Al-Turabah, where some 200 families now live, is just such a place. An oily film spreads across the water's surface and, according to 36-year-old Faysal Na'im, the fish in it rarely grow bigger than a finger where before they used to grow to "the length of my arm". Faisal remembers marsh life well - the fishing trips with his father, the water buffalo cavorting in the water, the neatly built Mudheef, or meeting halls, where men would gather to discuss the business of the day. But much has changed since they were forcibly evacuated from the marshes and Faisal speaks for many Ma'dan when he says that he would rather continue living outside of the marshes with the benefits that come with exposure to the outside world than return to the isolated marsh lives they lived before. Indeed, Faisal is not sure what to make of the growing number of fields that have been re-flooded since the regime's collapse. Both by design and lack of maintenance water is seeping through damns and sluice gates and returning to the fields that until recently grew wheat and barley. "We do not want the marshes to come back," said Faisal. "Where will we grow our crops if there is only water? Now we are farmers not fishermen." But across the border in Iran where the British NGO AMAR (Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees) has been assisting the 60,000 odd refugees for more than a decade, the Marsh Arabs there, says AMAR, are desperate for the marshes to be re-flooded. Like their displaced counterparts in Iraq they too have been exposed to the services and benefits of a modern way of life, but unlike their brothers in Iraq they have not been denied them. "What the Marsh Arabs in Iran are telling us they want is to return to the marshes but to take these benefits and services with them," said Dr. Peter Clark, AMARs Chief Executive Officer. But for their brothers in Iraq, the trauma they had experienced at the hands of Saddam Hussein and many of the adjustments that they have been forced to make means that they have lost their way culturally. As one middle aged Ma'dan put it, "we used to live like fishes but now we have forgotten how to swim."