Archives

by Richard Ingham

PARIS (AFP) - Iraq's environment may be the big hidden casualty of a second Gulf War, suffering damage that could take years to repair and cost billions of dollars to clean up.

So say environmental experts, who tremble at an apocalyptic vision: of skies turned black by blazing oil wells, of fields polluted by hydrocarbons, of fouled waterways and of deforestation caused by waves of refugees.

"War inflicts direct injury to human beings and the destruction of infrastructure. But the environmental consequences play out over a longer time scale," said Jonathan Lash, president of a US thinktank, the World Resources Institute.

The first Gulf War in 1991 was one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Iraq set fire to 600 Kuwaiti wells and breached Kuwait's oil storage reserves as part of a scorched-earth tactic, unleashing the planet's biggest oil spill and the worst single case of airborne oil pollution.

A thick, greasy, black plume, filled with toxic hydrocarbon particles, sulphur dioxide and other contaminants, hung over much of the northern Gulf for the next eight months until the fires were quenched.

Ten million barrels of crude spewed into the sea, destroying many of Kuwait's coral reefs and fisheries.

Lakes of unburnt oil accumulated in the desert, wrecking the fragile, marginal vegetation.

Kuwait has already filed a claim for 17 billion dollars for environmental damage and in October gave notice that the bill could be even bigger.

Hydrocarbons from the sabotaged wells and salt from seawater used to douse the fires are "steadily and irreversibly infiltrating into the aquifers, making the water completely unsuitable for human consumption unless it is treated," it said.

In addition, the burning oil released 130 million tonnes of the global-warming gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, making a sickening contribution to future climate change. That amount was the equivalent of the entire annual CO2 emissions of Britain.

Saddam Hussein has said he will not set fire to Iraqi oilfields, "but who knows?" said Lash.

"The Iraqi fields are bigger than the Kuwaiti fields, so the potential (for pollution) is greater. The wells also have larger yields of naturally-occurred hydrogen sulphide. "If the wells are blown up and that gas escapes, it's highly toxic, so there's a potential impact. If that gas contaminates the waters of the Tigris river, that would have an immediate effect on human beings, and Iraq is more densely populated than Kuwait." Another aftermath of the 1991 war was the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshlands in southern Iraq, a precious wetland created by the Tigris and Euphrates.

The marshes, home to the richest biodiversity in the Middle East, had already been badly hit by dam projects upriver, notably in Turkey, and by the building of causeways to transport Iraqi troops to the front in its 1980s war with Iran.

But their death knell was sounded after the Gulf War.

Saddam's purported reason was to divert water for agricultural use - but the real reason, according to experts, was to punish the 500,000 Marsh Arabs, who are Shiite Muslims and had risen against him after the war.

"The accelerated scale and speed of marshland disappearance... was mainly driven by massive drainage works undertaken in the wake of civil unrest," says a report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)."Analysis of satellite imagery has shown that the marshland ecosystem had collapsed by 2000."

Added to these massive acts of environmental vandalism is destruction that is a byproduct of war. These can range to breakdowns of sewage systems, the effects of munitions, and the impact from refugee flows.

The forested hills of northern Iraqi Kurdistan, for instance, were stripped of their trees in 1991 as hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled their homes from Iraqi troops and sought shelter in neighbouring Turkey.

As for the depleted-uranium shells fired by US tanks and warplanes in the 1991 conflict, no evidence has emerged so far that their radioactive dust has been a long-term hazard, but "what you haven't seen doesn't mean that it isn't there," observed Lash.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager