Speaker
Description
The basin of these two rivers, tributary to the Persian Gulf through the Shatt el-Arab, is one of the three large fluvial systems along the « arid diagonal » of the Ancient World, between those of Nile and Indus. They all allowed massive transfer of water towards arid plains and thus, together with China, the development of the oldest states. After a quite long and eventful history, this hydographic basin has been divided between four states by the treaty of Lausanne (1922) : Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, soon after the discovery of oil-fields.
As Turkey and Iran control all the upstream mountainous part of the basin, they could seem to have a dominant position, but the renewal of hydraulic structures has begun downstream, firstly by regulation dams in Lower Iraq (Hindiya on Euphrates 1918, Kut on Tigris in 1939). Then every country has developed its own multipurpose regional planiification, such as the Dez Irrigation Project promoted by the Shâh of Iran inspired by the example of Tennessee Valley Authority, or the Tabqa dam built on Mid-Euphrates course by Hafez el-Assad with the help of USSR. The latter included a geopolitical objective : the government tried to transfer the inhabitants of flooded villages towards new settlements along the north-east frontier in order to create an « Arabian belt » between Kurdish populations on both sides of it, with a limited result.
The most ambitious project was then set by Turkey on the upstream course of both rivers since 1977, the South-East Anatoly Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi = GAP) : a program of 22 dams would allow the irrigation of 1 800 000 ha, the electrification of settlements and industries, the development of major regional cities and a better integration of Kurdish population, just at the time when the revolt of the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) began. This program included also many preventive archaeoligical excavations.
The four governments have thus led almost independently their own hydraulic and regional planification programs, in spite of a few attempts to coordination, such as the 1980 Turkey-Irak protocol of cooperation, extended to Syria in 1983. The latter used different means of pression to obtain in 1987 a minimum flow of 500 m3/s. during the filling of the Atatürk reservoir dam. Another protocol shared the water received from Turkey : 42 % for Syria a nd 58 % for Iraq.
A last episode brought a severe alteration to perspectives of cooperation : the proclamation of an « Islamic State in Iraq and Levanr », alias Daesh, in april 2013 and the autoproclamation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdpâdi as Caliph in june 2014 in Mossul, creating thus a « Caliphate fo the two Rivers » between its metropolis Mossul on Tigris and its capital in Raqqa on Euphrates. It was gradually recovered until 2019, but the fall of Bashar el-Assad in december 2024 has left a situation of instability threatening all the planification processes in this region.
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
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