Friday

29th Mar 2024

EU targets water as foreign policy tool

  • Clean drinking water: can be a source of conflict or conflict resolution (Photo: EUobserver)

Water management is climbing the agenda in EU foreign policy and internal security plans, making up a significant part of Europe's new thrust to engage with Central Asia states, soothe tensions in the Middle East and cement conflict resolution in the Western Balkans.

The EU's recent blueprint for a new Central Asia policy lists "environment" and "water management" as a top priority in the effort to bring "security and good governance" to the region creating "a ring of well-governed countries to the east of the European Union."

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EU diplomats working on the dossier tend to see Central Asia in hard-nosed terms of new gas pipelines, unstable dictatorships, counter-terrorism and Russian influence but threats to clean drinking water or farm irrigation are also understood as potential risk factors for EU goals.

"The imbalance between the interest of upstream countries' electricity generating industry and downstream irrigation as well as uneven pattern of water consumption are aggravating [political] tensions," the EU paper states, citing Afghanistan's claim to the Amu Darya river's downstream water as one concrete political example.

With up to 40 percent of people in some areas having "no access" to clean water, high rates of dirty water-related infant mortality and major resources such as Lake Balkhash and the Irtysh river under threat from pollution and excessive draw-off, water also "increases social tensions" in vulnerable states.

A major conference between Kazakhstan and China in early March ended in stalemate when China refused to accept Kazakh food aid in return for letting river water flow unimpeded into Lake Balkhash, The New York Times reports. "The Chinese were cautious and wary, but they also were listening," a Kazakh-based EU diplomat said, amid Kazkah plans to build a nuclear power plant on the lake in future.

The EU plans to spend a large chunk of its €719 million Central Asia budget on funding new water infrastructure and environmental education in 2007 to 2013, as well as pushing international banks to help foot the bill. But the importance of water management for conflict resolution is also apparent closer to home.

Bad smell in Gaza

When Israeli jets fired six missiles at the Gaza strip's only electricity plant on the morning of 28 June 2006, loss of water pump capacity left 1.4 million Palestinians able to draw water for just three hours a day and all-but-disabled the sewage system in the world's most densely populated piece of land, aggravating political tension.

"We understand [Israeli] outrage but diplomacy offers the best chance to address the immediate priority [of a kidnapped Israeli soldier] not the destruction of essential infrastructure," external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said one week later, with EU aid immediately diverted to help restart pumps.

The commission "attaches great importance to the issue of water in the occupied Palestinian territories in the framework of the resolution of the conflict" one EU official told EUobserver, with Brussels helping support water-access talks between Israel, Jordan and Palestine through the so-called EXACT regional forum since 1995.

The EU contributed $30 million to the building of a new World Bank waste-water plant in Beit Lahia, Gaza, to help get rid of open, foetid lakes that act as breeding grounds for parasites and spread disease among local children. Construction is to begin this year and last until 2009 due to "extremely difficult circumstances" that have already seen several major US-funded waste management projects in the West Bank put on hold.

At the same time, Turkey's ongoing construction of the Ilisu dam on the Tigris river - using European construction firms and part-financed by private European banks - could degrade water supply in downstream Syria and has already angered Kurds in southeast Turkey over plans to flood the ancient Kurdish town of Hasankyef.

In south Lebanon, water is still scarce after the war between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006. And the water situation in the region is set to get worse, with a major World Bank report published in Cairo on 11 March predicting that per capita water availability in the Middle East and North Africa will go down by 50 percent by 2050 due to bad water management - not climate change.

"Sometimes, before I go to sleep, I think, what shall I do in the morning in order to have water," a 29-year old Palestinian woman and mother of three told AP in March. "What shall I do? Where do I have to go? These are big questions in my mind."

Balkan water piracy

In the Western Balkans, the EU is also working on humble water projects in parallel to high-level UN diplomacy and EU enlargement mechanisms to find ways for ethnic Serbs and Albanians to live together after the bloody wars of the 1990s, with Kosovo seeing a series of bombings, shootings and violent protests even in recent months.

In the next 12 months €1.4 million of EU money will build new drinking water and sewage pipes for the villages of Kqiq, Firaja, Dushkaja and Skenderbeu in Kosovo. Last December €100,000 built new offices for the Regional Water Company in Mitrovica, with €60 million of EU aid spent on water and environment projects in Kosovo since 2000.

The sensitivity of water in the Western Balkans is clear from the history books: in 1990 Serb forces cut off water supplies in the siege of Sarajevo in Bosnia; in 1999 Serb forces cut off water to Pristina and threw Albanian corpses into wells to spread disease. The same year NATO jets hit Belgrade water supplies.

Critical water inside EU

Water has also been used as an instrument of terror inside the EU itself in recent years, with EU water facilities falling under the scope of the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection (EPCIP) launched last December in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The scheme aims at creating emergency plans and risk monitoring groups to prevent attacks such as the plot in 2002 by four Moroccan citizens to pour cyanide-type chemicals into Rome's water supply or a 2000 incident that saw French factory workers pour 5,000 litres of sulphuric acid into the Meuse river as part of a strike.

A tender for €3 million worth of EPCIP pilot programmes for 2007 will close at the end of March, with EU states set to draw up formal lists of "critical" facilities in 2009 or 2010. "The commission and the member states agree on the importance of the water sector and relevant work is already being undertaken," an EU official working on EPCIP said.

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