Wetlands of Mesopotamia

Of all the many people persecuted during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, one group, the so-called Marsh Arabs in the south of the country suffered particularly acutely. Their civilisation, with elaborate houses built of reeds, dates back five thousand years.

Their misfortune was to oppose Saddam Hussein. He responded by draining the marshes which were their homeland. In the last thirty years over ninety percent of the original area has disappeared.

Now that Reporters can get into Iraq, we asked David Loyn to discover how they're surviving.

DAVID LYON:
Look closely. We may never see again the men and women who understood the ways of the wetlands of Mesopotamia.

Life for the Marsh Arabs was unchanged for thousands of years and their ancient customs were certainly intact in the 1950s when Wilfred Thesiger wrote his classic travel book about them, after living in the reed houses and boats which were their life.

Those who were not gunned down like rabbits by Saddam Hussein were scattered, many into refugee camps as here in Iran, when the marshes were drained. They are lost and rootless. There is no work and nothing to do for boat people in the mountains. When he sees a BBC camera, one man tries to lead a protest against the Americans and British. Because he thinks it will please his Iranian hosts. But it's all rather half-hearted and soulless.

This camp was set up by a charity headed by the Euro MP Baroness Nicholson. Now on her way from Iran to Iraq. To see what's left of the marshes.

BARONESS EMMA NICHOLSON MEP:
Getting these people back to Iraq will be the most difficult thing. I thought the last decade was tough and harsh, keeping these people alive, fed and hopeful. But the next step is going to be almost impossible.

DAVID LYON:
What are the problems?

BARONESS EMMA NICHOLSON MEP:
We have to recover the marshlands. These are the famous Marsh Arabs of Wilfred Thesiger fame. They can't survive in the marshes as they are today, dry, desiccated, salt-ridden wastelands.

DAVID LYON:
It is only from the air that the sheer scale of it can be taken in. The water was channelled away, leaving land which is harrowed as far as the eye can see by bulldozers. The high ground where people used to live is mostly levelled. Any commercial thoughts Saddam may have had are valueless as the land turns into desert. Even where the marshes remain, the water is shallower and animal and plant life much reduced. Less than a tenth of the original marsh area has survived.

Saddam Hussein always believed that dissidents and bandits hid in the marshes, so he took on the Marsh Arabs. What you don't see from the air - and have not been able to see at all until now - are the telltale signs which remain of the death of 100,000 people.

UN-NAMED MAN:
In 1991, the Arab Ba'ath Party came here with four cars and on the cars maybe 100 to 150 men, some of them soldiers and civilian men, and put them in a big ditch and killed them one after one.

DAVID LYON:
Locals still remember how at least 100 men were bound and shot here in a shallow pit. Some were still alive when diggers pushed earth over their heads. Their remains have been dug up over the years by animals, leaving only their clothes.

UN-NAMED MAN:
There is something else, not good. The taste, the smell here and here. I'm sure there is a body here.

DAVID LYON:
Life on the ground for those Marsh Arabs who remain is hard. What water they can find is often stagnant and dirty. Like this pool which has leaked out from underneath one of Saddam Hussein's earthworks. The earth banks push across the landscape on an inhuman scale, drawing the water and the life away.

They cling on to what they know. Every village and clan still has a central meeting hall for visitors, mudith in the local tongue. It's a place to gather and remember. Although they were never rich, they used to be comfortable enough selling dates and palm olive oil and buffalo milk. Then, Saddam's soldiers came.

YASSA MUHAYSIN FURIGI:
TRANSLATION:
They entered our house by force and killed two people. They took the women, they stole our livelihood and arrested my uncle.

DAVID LYON:
The story is the same everywhere. This family moved on twice before settling here. They couldn't afford to run to Iran, they were too poor to be refugees.

ABAR KHATEM OBEID SHOILI:
TRANSLATION:
I couldn't run away because I didn't have any transport. I didn't have a car or an aeroplane to leave. Even though we live in this harsh place we don't want to go away now. We are farmers. We lost our old houses and our farms, our animals died because of loss of water. And we suffered from continuing military attacks. But we can't leave because we want to remain as Marsh Arabs.

DAVID LYON:
One of the most striking things about spending a lot of time in Iraq is the sheer scale that Saddam Hussein did things. I mean those presidential palaces, huge useless military bases, the Stalinist ego cult. And then there's the way he destroyed the Marsh Arabs. He did that on a huge, gargantuan scale too.

Those that remained have tried to cling on to their lifestyle, living in houses like this. Those who return may want electricity, jobs in the city, concrete houses. The future of the Marsh Arabs illustrates one of those development dilemmas. Should indigenous people really be paid to live in traditional lifestyles or encouraged to move into the 21st century? What's happening here is far more complicated than just restoring the water to the marshes.

The total area where the Marsh Arabs used to live is almost the size of Wales. Driving around what we could with a British Army escort, we didn't meet anybody who lived where their ancestors had - the disruption is total.

The draining began in the 1980s during Saddam's mad war with Iran and continued with a vengeance after the failed uprising in 1991. An intricate series of dykes, locks and polders in a landscape not unlike Holland, draws water away from the marshlands.

The destruction of the landscape went on until Saddam fell, according to evidence from a British Army map made for this war.

MAJOR NEIL SEXTON,
Army Air Corps:
The road we are on isn't on the map. This canal isn't on the map. There are two roads that are marked, one over there, 100 metres and one that way, but this is new, and this has been formed since this map was made certainly.

DAVID LYON:
According to your map, this should be just marshland?

MAJOR NEIL SEXTON:
This should be wet. Yes, there should be nothing here.

DAVID LYON:
Baroness Nicholson wants the British Army to do more than just patrol the villages and keep law and order. She wants them to take down the dams. She is trying to put together a war crimes case against the Iraqi regime, defining the treatment of the Marsh Arabs as genocide.

BARONESS EMMA NICHOLSON MEP:
The thing is a catastrophe. The simple, harmless-looking dam is just one piece of a malevolent puzzle which was genocide against the marsh people. It's nearly succeeded. We've watched. We haven't done anything. Now we can put it right. We can reverse the drainage, we can open the locks of the dams. It's a slow process, but if it doesn't start the marsh people will be a footnote in history and we will be the guilty parties.

DAVID LYON:
Restoration of the marshes is graphically possible but there are people involved as well. At a meeting of the surviving heads of Marsh Arab clans, Baroness Nicholson is in luck. One of them has returned from Iran to pave the way for his family and he used to work as a volunteer for her charity there so he knows her. It gives her and her refugee doctors an introduction. The Marsh Arabs say that restoring their old way of life will be hard.

HUSSEIN JASEM al-ZAER:
TRANSLATION:
We would like the water restored because the marshes contained a fortune of fish and birds and other agriculture. All the land was owned by the different tribes each tribe had it's own raised land. After the water was drained these raised lands were all levelled, so if the water comes back there will be nowhere for us to live. We do want the marshes to be refilled, but we want to know where people will live.

DAVID LYON:
And there's another factor. Not all of the reclaimed land is turning to desert. Farmers taking in this year's harvest will want compensation if their land goes under water. It's the kind of dilemma which causes a sucking of teeth among development professionals and could provide an excuse for inaction.

The Marsh Arabs, always downtrodden here, will hardly be a high priority for any post-Saddam regime in Baghdad. Britain's top general in the reconstruction of Iraq says the future of the Marsh Arabs will have to wait.

GENERAL TIM CROSS,
Deputy Head, Office of Reconstruction & Humanitarian Affairs for Iraq:
The longer term restoration of the marshlands and the Marsh Arabs is clearly an important issue. It's an issue for the future Iraqi Government and the people in this region to decide how they want to set about doing that.

DAVID LYON:
Do you think it's desirable that the marshes should be reflooded quickly?

GENERAL TIM CROSS:
My personal instinct is to say yes. But I suspect we would find - like if you put two lawyers in a room you get three opinions on this - people will say if you just open the dykes and flood the place, you are going to cause more damage. I suspect that sort of argument will be debated. Whilst my personal instinct is to support what the Baroness is saying and being a military man one tends to want to be decisive and get on with things, nonetheless, a bit of caution and patience and a debate amongst people who understand the issues is going to be very important.

DAVID LYON:
Much of the water which should be in the marshlands now lies in a giant reservoir, like an inland sea, obscenely named the Mother of Battles Canal. The chaos of war led to far more water coming down than usual, as controls on the rivers were eased. But that didn't help the Marsh Arabs - it's all in the wrong place for them.

Those now living in a strip of villages along the banks of the canal are the most vulnerable of all to the ills of any indigenous community which comes into contact with the modern world. Like Australian Aborigines or native Americans used to be, they're blamed for all the crime in the nearby city. One symbol of their relationship with the modern world is the way they take power from cables slung on to the National Grid. They've been appealing to British soldiers to restore the power so they can steal it again. It's obviously not a long-term solution or lifestyle. But how else can they accommodate themselves with changing times?

The only crop they can harvest across their ruined land is salt. It's a desperate industry. The appearance of salt like this is the last gasp of fertile land before it turns into useless desert for ever.

Wilfred Thesiger wrote of a legend of the Marsh Arabs.

"The marshes were once so big, that somewhere lost in the middle among the reeds there lay an island which would drive you mad if you were to gaze upon it."

Now the marshes have gone the madness that remains is Saddam Hussein's giant earth banks driving straight roads like wounds through the spoiled landscape. Can the war really be said to have been won if the marshes are not restored? Securing the oilfields was the easy bit compared to these subtleties of nation building. If regime change does not involve some effort to reverse the effects of Saddam's tyranny, then this might begin to look as if it was a war for oil after all.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.