June 07, 2007	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 21, 1428

ISLAMABAD: “It’s not going to be easy, but cleaning up the Siachen glacier is not an impossible task. But, for a start, both (Indian and Pakistani) militaries have to make up their minds to do so,” says Aisha Khan, a mountain trekker and environmentalist.

Despite her vast experience of organising mountain clean up expeditions since 2000, through her Mountain and Glacier Protection Organisation (MGPO), Khan considers Siachen a gargantuan task.

The glaciers have been “marauded and pillaged now for so long and God knows how much military and human waste lie buried under the ice”, Khan said. “Very little matter can biodegrade at such a high altitude.” But what truly gives her sleepless nights is possible contamination from “indiscriminate dumping of tonnes of used batteries.”

“The area is high and not easy to traverse so it will have to be done with the help of local population, trained mountaineers and the military itself with technical input from those who are experienced in clearing up mountain waste,” she said.

At 21,000 feet, the Siachen glacier, 77kms long and three kilometres wide, has temperatures that dip below 60 degrees Celsius, though this has not deterred the militaries of the two countries from maintaining a stand off on what is the ‘world’s highest battlefield’.

For almost half a century now, both India and Pakistan have been engaged in what is also a costly war, in terms of men and material, to hold on to either side of the Saltoro Ridge on the Siachen glacier. Both countries lay claim to this long tongue of ice on the strategic tri-junction between India, China and Pakistan.

Arshad H. Abbasi, hydrologist and adviser to the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), a policy-oriented, research institute based in Islamabad, feels that the only war that is worth fighting is one to protect the Himalayas and preserving its delicate ecology rather exchanging shells and bullets across a patch of snow and ice that may melt away in the not too distant future.

Glaciers cover about 17 per cent of the Himalayan region and are the source of water for the innumerable rivers that flow across the Indo-Gangetic plains. About 15,000 Himalayan glaciers support such perennial rivers such as the Indus, Ganges and the Brahmaputra (Tsang Po in Tibetan).

“The world’s highest battlefield has suffered irreparable damage and havoc has been played with the region’s biodiversity, ecology and hydrology,” contends Abbasi. In the last 20 years, he says, “Siachen has been reduced to 35 per cent, and is retreating at the rate of 110-metre per year,” says Abbasi.

The recession, insists Abbasi, is very likely due to military presence on the glacier, especially when he compares it with other neighbouring glaciers like Baltoro and Rimo-I and Rimo-II that have been observed to be growing.

“The reason for the growth of these glaciers is very little human intervention — these are not even disturbed by mountaineering or tourism,” says Abbasi, who is currently preparing a glacier inventory for the Pakistan Metrological Department with the help of the Swiss World Glacier Monitoring Service.

The human intervention accelerating the melting of the Siachen include “presence of army troops, construction of bunkers, laying and installation of a 120 km-long oil pipeline,” says Abbasi.

“The troops on Siachen have to be fed, the guns have to be maintained and the missiles have to be fired. All this costs energy, quite a bit of energy. Most of this energy ends up in the form of heat. This heat has no place to go but into the snow. And there it melts the snow,” explains Prof. Khalid Rashid of the Global Climate Change Impact Studies Centre in Islamabad.

Khan admits that 20 years may not be a long cycle in the lifespan of earth, and with no systematic studies conducted it is hard to prove the damage caused to the fragile ecosystem. “But the damage caused by PoPs (persistent organic pollutants), may well have started.”

PoPs are chemical substances that persist in the environment, bio-accumulate through the food chain and pose a threat to human health and the environment. “In the last ten years that I’ve been visiting the area, I’ve witnessed a visible change in Baltoro (about 30 km from the foot of Siachen). The pockets of glacial lakes have increased, and that may make them prone to flooding,” said Khan.

The region, rich in biodiversity, is home to snow leopards, brown bears and ibex. The web of life, ecologists rue, will be damaged by the military presence. Troop movement around strategic locations and firing practice as well as the garbage generated from the presence of troops disturbs wildlife, affects their nesting patterns, breeding and can lead to spread of diseases, environmentalists say.

“Owing to the harsh climate the short growing season supports low vegetation cover (under 20 per cent), yet it is known to harbour a unique assemblage of flora and fauna which have not been systematically inventoried and documented,” says Abbasi.

However, those restricted to the valleys below have been studied and include, among varieties of barley and buckwheat, 414 species of vascular plants which have precious curative value and widely used by the indigenous population may forever be lost. Four years since the fifth World Parks Congress held in September 2003 in Durban, South Africa, where mountaineers and environmentalists from the two South Asian countries urged their respective governments to designate the glacier a peace park, to protect the landscape and the endangered animals, little headway has been made.

At a UN Security Council meeting held last month the impact of climate change on international peace and security figured high. “This debate is of special relevance to Pakistan as millions live along and depend for their livelihood on the mighty Indus and its tributaries. The water of the Indus, in turn, depends on mountain glaciers,” says Prof. Rashid.

The melting of Siachen and other glaciers at such an accelerated rate may well result in the rise in ocean levels, thereby stirring up hurricanes across the globe, warns Abbasi.

Not satisfied with a peace park marked on a map, ecologists and environmentalists from both New Delhi and Islamabad have repeatedly demanded detoxification of the glacier.

Peace advocates believe this will not only conserve biodiversity but also foster trust building and allow the armies of both countries to withdraw without losing face.

Yet another idea being floated is to use the glacier as a natural freezer. Siachen could, proponents say, serve as a gene bank to store seeds of diverse varieties of food and cash crops. This may, in times to come, help mitigate the threat to food security arising from climate change. —Dawn/The IPS News Service