'Save our marshland'
The Marsh Arabs cannot live without water, and a way of life is being lost.
Jill Kamil looks into their centuries-old heritage now on the verge of extinction
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Bringing home a load of dry reeds; the first stage of building a raba; one of the Al-Bu Daraj; Feraigat girls
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The Ma'dan, the Arabs who live in the swampy area at the convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq -- a delta region where the "twin rivers" split into meandering tributaries -- watched helplessly as their traditional way of life was destroyed under Saddam Hussein. Many fled in the uprisings following the 1991 Gulf War. The rest are now threatened by a campaign to clear what remains of their traditional territory for irrigation.
Studies carried out in the 1950s estimated that the 400,000 Ma'dan would come under threat if drainage projects were implemented and much of their wetland turned into wasteland. The warnings were not heeded.
The United Nations Environmental Programme describes the drainage of the marshes as "one of the world's greatest environmental disasters". With an estimated 90 per cent of their land already gone, the marsh people's way of life will be lost for ever unless something is done to reverse the situation.
The marshes lie in the delta region known as Mesopotamia ("between the rivers" in Greek). This may have been the first place in the world where humans gained mastery over major rivers. They fished with spears, built islands using the gigantic reeds that grew in the delta, and constructed intricate stilt houses. Their lives were water-dominated and their children learnt to paddle reed canoes before they could walk. This is said to have been the Garden of Eden of Genesis (Chap. 2:14).
When, about 4,00 BC, socially and culturally advanced tribes moved down from the Iranian plateau and settled at the apex of the delta, they learnt how to control water with dykes and distribute it through irrigation. However, this new technology barely affected the marsh Arabs. Not even when the newcomers farmed with the hoe and plough, reaped abundant harvests and raised sheep and goats, were they led to change their traditional way of life. They were suited to their environment and had a culture that suited them. They were comfortable and their diet was good. The spacious houses they built from the huge reeds could be pulled down in time of flood and easily re-erected on dry land.
Some 1500 years after the Iranian tribes, a people moved into the area from Anatolia. These newcomers, the Sumerians, brought with them the domestic buffalo, a knowledge of metalwork and the art of writing. They displaced or absorbed the earlier farming community; but still the lives of the marsh Arabs went on much as before.
Assyrian horse-breeders swept on the "twin rivers" from the north-east and from 750 to 612 BC the powerful Sennacherib ruled the western Asiatic world with an iron hand. He built massive, lofty walls for his city, lived in a lavish palace and collected tribute from all his subject people. But whether or not, and to what extent, the people of the marshland were affected we know little.
Then came the Chaldeans, the new people whose great emperor Nebuchadnezzar reigned in strength over the whole of the Fertile Crescent. The Chaldeans absorbed the civilisation of Babylonia, copying and surpassing their Assyrians predecessors. But after the death of Nebuchadnezzar in 561 BC, the old civilised lands of the Fertile Crescent lost most of their former power. The ancient world was neglected, fell to ruin, and was pillaged. But the marshland people endured. They stood outside politics because they had learnt to adjust to the vagaries of nature and had developed a lifestyle that suited them. Time means little when it is measured by seasons, and change comes gradually.
But it does come. Within a 100 years of the death of the Prophet Mohamed in AD 632, Islam stretched from the Pyrenees to the border of China, but religious differences between the Prophet's descendants resulted in a conflict for power. The Shi'ites advanced the claims of Ali and his descendants to the Caliphate, while the Sunnis believed in a succession of imams who followed the prophet. The Shi'ites built the holy city of Najaf over the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and constructed a great mosque over the tomb in which the martyred Ali was buried, and the marsh Arabs became Shi'ite Muslims.
They made pilgrimage to the holy city of Najaf, but in the marshland life remained much the same. This is nowhere better portrayed than in the late Wilfred Thesiger's The Marsh Arabs, first published in 1964. The explorer and award-winning travel writer, author of Arabian Sands in which he described his journeys across the Arabian "Empty Quarter", lived with the Ma'dan for several years. He gradually made friends with some of tribesmen and presented an account of a way of life that had remained little changed for 5000 years.
Thesiger described houses with interiors which were sometimes five metres long and two wide, and rising to a height at the centre of seven metres. These chambers were divided into sections: one for women who did the cooking, and one for men where guests were entertained. Cooking was done with the aid of dried cakes of buffalo dung, and Thesiger described the buffaloes swimming across the open water to the villages. A great sport was the hunting of pigs, and the weaving of mats was an industry.
No other accounts of the marsh Arabs were so detailed. Apart from a single description of them at the end of World War I, in Haji Rikkan's Marsh Arab published by S E Hedgecock, references to them were, for the most part, disparaging. Despised for their dubious descent, they were shunned by townspeople travelling down the Tigris and Euphrates, and feared by the British who accused them of murder, looting and every other evil.
Thesiger's book, written with great sensitivity, provides a remarkable account of a way of life so sustainable that it had evolved little for millennia. He conveys the spirit and atmosphere, the piety and social life of tribal Arabs who live as comfortably in the marsh as other Arabs do in the desert. He described how they fished with spears, ate rice bread and water-buffalo milk, and wrapped blankets round their thoroughbred horses to protect them from flies. He painted a portrait of an intensely proud community.
The first major scheme for the "Control of the Rivers of Iraq" was drafted in 1951 by British engineers working for the Iraqi government. At least four dams were built on the Euphrates and three on the Tigris, and this had a serious effect on the free-flow of water in the marshes. The report made at the time described the construction of "sluices, embankments and canals on the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates that would be needed to 'reclaim' the marshes". It made no mention of the plight of the Ma'dan; indeed Frank Haigh, the project's senior engineer, regarded the land as wasted. It was necessary, he said, "to recapture the marsh water for irrigation".
Excavation of a large canal, the so-called Third River, began in 1953 and progressed through to the 1960s. Its construction and subsequent draining of the marshes built up momentum at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, ostensibly in the name of progress but also because Saddam Hussein viewed the reeds as perfect hiding ground for political activists, especially Shi'ites. With the loss of the water so vital to them, the Marsh Arabs' way of life came under threat. Various international organisations, among them the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the International Wildfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau, monitored the situation and declared the threat twofold. First, they cited damage to the environment and its unique fish wealth and habitat for waterfowl and migratory birds -- as the marshland dried, the salinated earth was drying out and cracking. Second, they deplored the undermining of the water-based economy of the people of the marshlands, the Ma'dan -- descendants of the Sumerians and Babylonians, whose numbers had been augmented by immigration and intermarriage with Persians from the east and Bedouins from the west.
The threat of extinction is very real. Baroness Emma Nicholson, chair of the Amar Foundation that provides aid to Marsh Arab refugees, believes they are the victims of genocide. Targeting the Ma'dan "has destroyed the livelihoods and many of the lives of nearly half a million people", Nicholson told BBC News in March 2003.
Today there may be as few as 20,000 Ma'dan still living in the area. Whatever the reasons for their falling numbers, unless attention is drawn to their plight and some effort made to preserve what little remains of the marshes, our generation will be responsible for the extinction of one of the oldest cultures in the world.
For further reference:
Gleick, Peter H et al. Water, War, and Peace in the Middle East: Conflict over Water Rights. Environment 36.3 (April 1944)
Pearce, Fred. Draining Life from Iraq's Marshes. New Scientist 138/1869 (17 April 1993)
