February 21, 2003	Friday	Zul Hijjah 19, 1423

LONDON: The three most recent conflicts that include the US and Europe involve environmental disasters on a grand scale. The effects of the last Gulf war in Kuwait, the Kosovo conflict, and Afghanistan are still being felt. In each case the problems left behind are different.

1. Kuwait: The most spectacular images of post-conflict damage were the oil well fires, ignited on the orders of President Saddam Hussein. The fires followed an earlier decision to open the pipelines to the oil terminals in the Gulf, releasing millions of litres of crude into the sea to frustrate a seaborne invasion of Kuwait city. Hussein’s troops destroyed the desalination plants that fed water to greenhouses, also wrecked.

In time, brave and skilled oil workers put out the fires and a remarkable recovery has occurred — the microbes that live in the warm sea literally ate the oil, returning the water to a good state within a year.

Inland, however, there have been no miracles. The land still contains hundreds of thousands of land mines and unexploded bombs. Great oil lakes remain. In Kuwait depleted uranium was used as a weapon for the first time. The uranium dust still blows across the desert, a semi-permanent hazard in such a dry climate.

2. Kosovo: The most spectacular damage inflicted during the Kosovo crisis was the destruction of the bridges over the Danube in Novi Sad, a city on the Yugoslav-Hungarian border remote from the conflict. This disrupted the barge and ship traffic along Europe’s longest river, putting thousands out of work and transferring vast quantities of freight to the roads. Chemical factories, and oil refineries were bombed — polluting the river, groundwater and soils. Alarm also surfaced about the quality of drinking water in countries downstream.

Despite the row that followed the use of depleted uranium in Kuwait, and the fears that it may have been responsible for cancers in the civilian population, it was again used during the Kosovo conflict, although only by the Americans. An extensive search, again by UNEP, discovered traces of depleted uranium, but the only long-term danger would have come from it leaking into the water supply. As in Kuwait, the detritus of war included many unexploded mines, cluster bombs and other ordnance, much of which remains undetected today.

3. Afghanistan: Twenty years of war, combined with a devastating four-year drought, had wrecked large parts of Afghanistan before the allies took on the Taliban. Unlike Kuwait and Kosovo, large parts of the Afghan population are rural farmers who are reliant on crops and animals. There are four million refugees, who have fled their homes at various stages of the conflict.

Water is key to the health and well-being of Afghanistan’s people, and essential to maintain agricultural productivity. Both surface and groundwater resources have been severely affected by the drought, as well as by uncoordinated and unmanaged extraction as people, desperate to survive, drilled deep wells without considering the long-term impact. Contamination from waste dumps, chemicals and open sewers, which have been ignored as armies swept across the country, need to be tackled in a bid to restore a safe water supply.

Wind-blown sediments are filling irrigation canals and reservoirs, as well as covering roads, fields and villages, with an overall effect of increasing local vulnerability to drought.

There are no proper landfills in the towns and cities, and none of the dumpsites are taking measures to prevent groundwater contamination or toxic air pollution from burning wastes.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.