INDEPTH: IRAQ
The Marsh Arabs
CBC News Online | April 15, 2004
Reporter: Margaret Evans
Producer: Edith Champagne
From The National | April 14, 2004
They're an ancient Iraqi people who have lived off the country's wetlands for centuries. But under Saddam Hussein, the marsh Arabs and their livelihood were all but wiped out. The marshlands cover 20,000 square kilometres of southeastern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet.
The UN says that over 15 years, the government drained 90% of them, resulting in one of the world's worst environmental disasters. It was also a humanitarian disaster. In 1991, a quarter of a million marsh Arabs lived in the region. The number today? Just 20,000. But with the fall of Saddam Hussein, the floodgates have reopened literally, and, with the return of the marshes, a last gasp at an ancient way of life.
The waters are returning to Iraq's once parched southern lands. And with them, the old gondoliers of the marshes.
Sheikh Naim is in his 70s, the leader of his tribe and the keeper of its memories. "That's where my house was," he says. "In 1984, the army came and told us to leave. They burnt the reed houses. I remember."
After decades of brutal repression by Saddam Hussein, the marsh Arabs are slowly recovering. Mohammed is a young member of the sheikh's tribe. He was a child when his brother was killed fleeing the Iraqi army. "We were trying to cross the border to Iran," he says. "They were shooting at us. We couldn't fight them."
Saddam bled the marshes dry in the 1980s and '90s, a bid to flush out Shi'a rebels hiding in the tall reed beds. 200,000 people were forced from their homes. It was the decimation of a way of life, leaving behind a barren moonscape.
Today, the waters are returning much faster than expected. Forty per cent of the wetlands have been reflooded.
"We came back when the water came back," says Amhail Fayad, partriarch of a tribe that survived by fishing and raising water buffalo. "It was desert before. Fishing isn't as good as it used to be because the waters still aren't high enough."
But not all of the marsh Arabs are happy about the return of the water. The villagers in one area still practice the old ways when it comes to building their homes, bundling reeds to make pillars and weaving mats to form the walls. It doesn't mean they want to be rooted in the past. "We lived that life and it's gone now," says Abdul. "We have a new life. We're used to working as farmers now, and we can't leave it."
Some tribes began tearing down the dams that had held the waters back immediately after U.S. Forces entered Iraq last year, desperate for the waters to return. Land was flooded indiscriminately.
The people of al Solbiaytya built a dike to keep the returning waters out. Many of the crops they had planted have already been flooded.
It's just one example of the tension here between those who want to return to the old way of life and those who have already adapted to the new.
Sabria Jamal and her family lost their entire crop.
Now she weaves mats in the hopes of earning money for her family. "We lost everything," she says. "You can see."
There is still a Western romanticism when it comes to the marsh Arabs, a desire to keep alive the idea of an ancient culture untouched by the modern world. But the marsh Arabs still live in abject poverty. No schools, no hospitals. Not even clean drinking water.
Even Sheikh Naim realizes his people can't remain trapped in the past. "We feel as if we've been reborn," he says of the returning waters, "but we'll ask for help to rebuild our houses. We want to get rid of the old reed houses. Bricks are much safer."
Mohammed is content to stay here on the marsh like his father and his grandfather, but he doesn't think those who have been exposed to a different kind of life will want to return. "Those who have left for the cities will not come back," he says. "They have schools, everything. You can't leave a city like that. But the people who stayed close to the marshes will stay here I think."
He heads out to fish alongside other members of the tribe, skimming the water's surface in their low-slung boats. They're not using the old fishing spears of their ancestors. Instead, they've attached electrical wires to their nets, electrocuting the fish as they troll along. The marsh Arabs may well be returning to reclaim some of their former lands, but the glimpses one sees of an old way of life stretching back thousands of centuries are no more than that.
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