Water: Conflict or Resolution in China, Tibet and Darfur?

By J. Carl Ganter, Huffington Post. Posted May 20, 2008.

Dr. Geoff D. Dabelko is director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Dabelko discusses water, conflict and peacemaking in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

J. Carl Ganter - Circle of Blue: What role does water play in water peacemaking or environmental conflict?

Geoff Dabelko: We typically think of water and conflict, and in many ways it makes sense. Environmental management is in many respects is conflict management, it's just that it often doesn't become violent.

In the case of water, we obviously have lots of tension around water, but don't see the evidence for all the water wars that so many politicians and so many newspaper headlines scream about. What we often see is that while it is and perhaps it is such a critical resource between societies, between groups, between communities, between countries, that we find ways to at least cooperate and not make that the focus of conflict.

For example, between the Jordanians and the Israelis, the bureaucrats that had to manage this resource came together literally at a picnic table at the border for what became known as the picnic table talks, to jointly manage [water] when their two countries were formally at war. Similarly, in India and Pakistan on the Indus rivers, these are dialigoues that continue to go on. Where if its not formal and active and proactive cooperation, there's at least a willingness to keep this issue off from the table and formally fighting over the conflict.

JCG: Can you put Darfur in context with water conflict?

Geoff Dabelko: I think it is important for us to remember in all conflicts there are many causes. Some are underlying and foundational, and some are the proximate and most obvious. And in many times, you have conflict entrepreneurs exploiting some of these underlying causes for their own purposes.

So in the case of Darfur, you absolutely must start with the conflict entrepreneurs in Khartoum who are pitting one group that makes its living as pastoralists and one that makes it in agriculture. So it happened to coincide with ethnic groups and different backgrounds. And they're using that for their own purposes in terms of generating conflict between those two groups.

There have always be conflicts between pastoralists and agriculturalists in what is now Sudan and across Sub-Saharan Africa. What is now severly testing the conlfict resolution mechanisms are, on the one hand, those folks who are using this and exploiting these differences and really perpetrating a genocide in the region.

The other is that they are facing literally decades of intense drought periods, a combination of growth of people, but also cattle -- tremendous growth in the last fifty years in the number of cattle that this arid area. And more arid in fact, including even losing land area in desertification is expect to sustain. One should start the story of Darfur about Janjaweed and the regime in Khartoum is perpetrating this genocide. One can't tell the story without understanding these larger underlying environmental conditions that are integrally related to water availability.

JCG: Talk about the geopolitical positioning of the Tibetan plateau ...

Geoff Dabelko: There are well over a billion if not close to two billion people who are dependent on this water originating in the Tibetan Plateau. And by definition that makes it high politics and critically important in a political strategic sense, but also the every day livelihoods of literally billions of people who ... are living at the margins.

So this is a critical input into their daily lives. One that has challenges in terms of quantity and timing, in terms of flooding particularly being a terrible problem there. And issues of upland deforestation having very negative effects across borders for populations downstream.

Also of course, quality ... however you count it, two to five million people dying from dirty water and associated diseases each year. This is high politics for those who are having to depend on those water sources. So it's both high politics at the individual level and its high politics between the countries because of the inner dependencies around the water, so much of which originates in the Tibetan plateau.

JCG: How does China's history of water engineers and hydrologists being in high political positions play into their future water management plans?

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