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The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project


Auteur :
Éditeur : Southern Illinois University Date & Lieu : 1991-01-01, Carbondale - USA
Préface : Pages : 326
Traduction : ISBN : 0-8093-1572-6
Langue : AnglaisFormat : 150x230 mm
Code FIKP : Liv. Ang. 4720Thème : Politique

Présentation
Table des Matières Introduction Identité PDF
The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project

The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project

John F. Kolars
William A. Mitchell

Southern Illinois University

Concerning conditions in the Middle East…

"Populations are growing fast, and cities swell with thirsty people. From North Africa to the Persian Gulf, farms demand water from lands known more for pale deserts and skies that begrudge all but meager rains.

"The reasons for the coming crisis are complex but one factor is common. From the Nile to the Euphrates, rivers slice through already charged frontiers, and governments of conflicting visions seek to mold events in their neighbors' lands and to grasp for whatever water they can control. Many of the nations concerned about their water lie downstream from a hostile or unsettled neighbor."

Alan Cowell, The New York Times

"Water is a resouce vital to life. As any archaeologist looking for prehistoric habitation can testify, a reliable water source is the one absolute prerequisite for human settlement. It is the ultimate survival issue, a 'superordinate goal' that overrides all other concerns. With populations expanding and aspirations for economic development increasing, the demand of Middle Eastern peoples on their limited water resouces is already approaching the 'water barrier' beyond which the need for water becomes a dominant concern."

Thomas Naff, from the Preface



John F. Kolars, professor of geography and Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, received a B.Sc. in geology from the University of Washington. After working for the United States Geological Survey he later earned a Ph.D. in geography (with special work in anthropology and Near Eastern studies) from the University of Chicago. His initial research focused upon village development and agricultural change in Turkey. For the last decade he has specialized in the natural characteristics and human use of international rivers in the Middle East. He is a regular lecturer at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State, as well as a consultant for USAID and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

William A. Mitchell, Colonel, United States Army Air Force, has served as professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the United States Air Force Academy. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois for his research "Post Earthquake Turkish Villages: An Analysis of Disaster Related Modernization." In addition to his military duties at the Air War College and in the Middle East, he has been a member of the Disaster Response Center at Boulder, Colorado, and the Associates for Middle Eastern Research (AMER). His continuing research and field work has focused upon human response to earthquakes in Turkey and Iran as well as investigations of agricultural land use patterns in the Middle East and the regional geography of the Euphrates and Tigris river basin.

 

 



EDITOR'S PREFACE

This volume, which concentrates on the Euphrates River basin in Turkey and Syria, is the first in a series on water issues in the Middle East. In it, Professors John Kolars and William Mitchell have sketched out the impressive water developments now under way in the upper reaches of the Euphrates River in Turkey. They then go on to apply sophisticated methods of analysis in order to estimate what impact these developments will have on the downstream riparians Syria and Iraq, who also, both historically and currently, have been engaged in hydraulic developments.

The complete water project, of which this present work forms a part, consists of comprehensive assessments of several of the most important hydrological basins in the Middle East: the Euphrates, Tigris, Jordan, Litani, Orontes, and Nile. Work has been conducted under the auspices of Associates for Middle East Research, Inc. (AMER), a non-profit research group in Philadelphia, and has been directed by Professor Thomas Naff of the University of Pennsylvania. The project began in 1983 with a broad-based pilot survey which was published the following year under the title Water in the Middle East: Conflict or Cooperation? (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1984). This earliest phase of the research identified the major issues and demonstrated the need for far more detailed analysis than was possible in one slim volume collated from the available literature.

The purview of the present study, and, indeed, of the overall project, is both physical and political, including socioeconomic factors. Thus, each geographic segment is looked at twice; first, as part of its hydrologic basin to determine the physical dimensions of its water problems, then as part of the country or countries within which it falls to show the contribution of water problems to the political economy and strategic concerns of its region. The end product is an illustration of the inter-relationship between natural resources and international security.

The present volume is the first installment of a larger effort to address those Middle East water issues that the world and the peoples of the region itself can no longer afford to ignore.

The project from which the book has grown has brought together a team of specialists from the Middle East, Europe, the United States, and Australia, drawn from such disciplines as hydrology, geography, geology, engineering, history, politics, economics, sociology, demography, international relations, international law, and resources management. The work is based on extensive field data as well as information from published sources.

The results of this interdisciplinary research will be published over the next three to five years as a series of books. The present volume, on the hydrology of the upper Euphrates in Turkey and Syria, will be followed by hydrological analyses of the lower Euphrates and of the Tigris basin as they interconnect in Iraq. Future volumes will discuss the hydrology of the Jordan and Litani basins and their relationships, and the current hydrological situation in the Nile basin.

Companion volumes will examine the political economy and apparatus for water policy decision making in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan. These studies will give special focus to the strategic and security implications of water problems for each of the countries and for the region as a whole. The legal status of water regulation in the area will be investigated in a separate volume, which will present a compendium and commentary on the relevant treaties, legal codes, and regulatory systems that govern water management and water sharing in the Middle East. Another volume that reviews current and known future technologies will examine the extent to which technology can play a mitigating role in water problems.

Water is a resource vital to life. As any archaeologist looking for prehistoric habitation can testify, a reliable water source is the one absolute prerequisite for human settlement. It is the ultimate survival issue, a "superordinate goal" that overrides all other concerns. With populations expanding and aspirations for economic development increasing, the demand of Middle Eastern peoples on their limited water resources is already approaching the "water barrier" beyond which the need for water becomes a dominant concern. Moreover, overdrafts on existing water resources can degrade remaining supplies, reducing quality below usable levels, and actually decrease the annual amount of water available for future human consumption. In the seven years since this project began, it has increasingly been realized that the most important Middle East resource issue of the twenty-first century will be, not oil, but water.

Restricted supply of water in the Middle East has been a truism since ancient times. Scarcity, that is, the point at which water demand and its related quality of life are constrained by the inadequacy of the available supply, is already a fact in some sectors. Several countries are running a significant deficit on their water budgets which, at best, constitutes a lien against future generations and may, in the worst case scenario, destroy the existing resources for future use. The need to conserve on use of water and somehow augment supplies is very clear.

The threat to posterity and even survival that water scarcity represents is an automatic security issue for all parties. It is rooted in real human needs. When a limited water resource is shared by two nations, competition for it can be a cause of tension; when these nations are already hostile, the competition could lead to open conflict. On the other hand, the "superordinate goal" of mutual survival may compel even hostile neighbors to cooperate. Therein lies hope for agreement, but the opportunity for avoiding a regional crisis is evaporating rapidly.

There are relatively few treaties or agreed-upon international legal or political structures for settling disputes over shared resources. In this unregulated environment, conflicts of interests tend to become confrontations to be dealt with in terms of regional and global power balances. It is our belief that a holistic understanding of resource problems, including their security implications, will empower countries with options for managing their environments without recourse to conflict. This in turn will enhance the capacity of the international system to create legal and other mechanisms for the resolution of problems through accommodation.

The study of water, like other resource issues, is complex, requiring a wide range of expertise from a variety of disciplines from the hard sciences and engineering through the whole gamut of social and managerial sciences. The result of this complexity has, in the case of water, been fragmentary treatment at best, and often outright neglect.
The magnitude of the water problems and the interconnections of the water systems dictate that, for the Levantine, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian areas we are studying, only truly regional solutions will work. The essential first step in that direction is basin wide agreements. This series of publications constitutes our contribution to making such regional cooperation possible.

As with all weather-related phenomena these days, a significant unknown in the calculus that may throw all prognostications off is the so-called Greenhouse Effect, which will surely make Middle East water problems worse. It behooves planners to address the issues now, while solutions are still at least theoretically within reach.

A project of this complexity and magnitude could not have been successfully completed without the cooperation, support, and assistance of many persons, institutions, funding agencies, and governments. The Director and all of his colleagues express their gratitude to all those individuals, too numerous to list here, whose assistance was pivotal in bringing our efforts to fruition. We also wish to extend our sincerest thanks to the government of Turkey and various of its agencies who gave us enlightened access to essential data, and to the following sponsors whose contribution to our project made it all possible: The Phoebe W. Haas Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mobil Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation, Bechtel Corporation, Conoco Oil Company, Dow Chemical, Dresser Industries, E. I. Du Pont de Nemours and Company, Exxon Corporation, and Fluor Corporation.

Thomas Naff
Philadelphia



The Euphrates River and the Southeast Anatolia Development Project

Turkey, the Euphrates-Tigris River Basin, and the Southeast Anatolia Project

History has been said to begin at Sumer, and history today continues to be made in the combined basins of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Increasing water shortages in southwest Asia, in combination with the 'ambitious development plans of every nation found there, focus attention upon those two rivers. Constituting the region's major sources of water, their proper management in the years ahead will help determine the welfare and political stability of much of the Middle East.

Turkey occupies the position farthest upstream on both rivers. Almost all the waters of the Euphrates and a major portion of the waters of the Tigris come from within Turkey's borders. Unlike many Middle Eastern countries, Turkey is petroleum poor but water rich. The nation receives about 509 billion m3 of precipitation annually, of which 38 percent (185 billion m3) ends up as surface runoff. Much of this flows into the USSR, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the surrounding seas. Because the Turks estimate that only a little over half of this surface runoff (95 out of 185 billion m3) can be used for domestic, irrigation, and industrial purposes within Turkey, the international implications of the situation are obvious (DSI 1984b, Tables 4 and 4.1, 20).

Turkey is under enormous pressure to develop its hydro-resources (Kolars 1986a). Total energy use in Turkey from 1975 to …



The major challenge facing the Middle East today is competition for water. Water, not oil, is the Middle East's most vital natural resource. Its scarcity and poor distribution could draw the entire region into turmoil.

In the first volume of a series entitled Water: The Middle East Imperative, John F. Kolars and William A. Mitchell explore water use and supply in the Euphrates basin and examine recent develop-ment projects on the Euphrates River.

By far the largest undertaking on the Euphrates is Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, most commonly known as GAP. GAP will irrigate over 1.7 million hectares of new land, doubling Turkey's energy production and providing huge agricultural surpluses that Turkey hopes to sell to its Arab neighbors.

However, when this project is in full operation, the flow of the Euphrates will be greatly reduced and the quality of the water seriously affected. Similar, if smaller, developments in Syria further complicate use of the river.

In this revealing and sometimes startling account, Kolars and Mitchell describe in detail not only GAP but also other major hydraulic projects in Syria. Using a variety of analytical techniques, they attempt to predict how the projects and the results they bring about will introduce irrevocable changes in the region.

The authors also pay close attention to the domestic and international political developments paralleling the implementation of GAP. This is a crucial book for all concerned with the Mideast and its future.



Note on Transliteration

In rendering proper names from Middle Eastern languages into English, two standards have been used.

For Turkish, the names have been given as they are spelled in modern Turkish, with European characters but minus the diacritics. This is an aid to the reader who may find these names on modern Turkish maps.

For Arabic and other languages that utilize non-European characters, the nomenclature adheres as closely as possible to current usage as found in reputable nonspecialist journals in the English language, again without diacritics or special symbols. Our reason for this is simple: The expert doesn't need these aids; the nonexpert cannot use them.




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