More on water and Darfur

A couple of days ago I posted on the possible discovery of a fiant underground lake in the Darfur region of Sudan. Acording to scientist Alain Gachet, however, the lake may have actually dried up millennia ago

In his view the area received too little rain and had the wrong rock types for water storage. On Wednesday, Boston University's Farouk El-Baz said he had received the backing of Sudan's government to begin drilling for water in the newly-discovered lake, in North Darfur. He said radar studies had revealed a depression the size of Lake Erie in North America. But Mr Gachet, who has worked on mineral and water exploration in Africa for 20 years, said the depression identified by the Boston researchers was probably full of water 5,000 to 25,000 years ago.

"This lake was at the bottom of a broad watershed feeding the Nile above Khartoum," Gachet said "This watershed is completely dry today on the southern border of Egypt, Libya and north-western border of Sudan - one of the worst areas in the world." However he said that there was a substantial source of water further south in Darfur where he was he was helping a UN-backed project to drill for water. "There is enough water within these aquifers to bring peace in Darfur... and even more - enough to reconstruct the economy of Darfur."

An increasingly obsolete degree in Physiology and Biochemistry did not give O'Donnell a knowledge of geology so I have no idea who is right here. But if either Gachet or El-Baz is right then there is a faint possibility of eliminating one of the main sources of conflict in Darfur. Sadly the cynic does not hold its breath.

Water means peace for Darfur?

The discovery of a huge underground lake in Darfur may help bring ease one of the causes of conflict in the desert region of southern Sudan according to scientists. Researchers hope to drill at least 1,000 wells in the Darfur region and pump the long-hidden water. Hopefully it will hasten the end of an brutal and largely ignored conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced.

"Much of the unrest in Darfur and the misery is due to water shortages," said geologist Farouk El-Baz, director of the Boston University Centre for Remote Sensing, told the Associated Press. By studying satellite and radar images, Mr Baz and other Boston University researchers identified possible streams running from a 5,000-year-old lake that is now obscured by the sands of northern Darfur. The lake occupied an area of nearly 12,000.

Scientists plan to identify the best location for drilling the first wells. Egypt has pledged to drill the first 20, and the UN mission in Sudan also plans to drill several more for use by its peacekeeping forces, the university said. In a recent article for the Washington Post, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-Moon, cited the lack of water as one of the reasons behind the conflict. Camel herders replenished themselves at the farmers' wells and grazed on their lands. The farmers responded by erecting fences amid fears that their land would be ruined by passing herds.

Darfur activists warned, however, that the discovery of water would not relieve victims of "the politics of a genocidal regime".Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe: "What you see is not simply a competition for the scarce resources of Darfur. If we want to look at the violence in Darfur, we don't look underground, we look at the political realities that exist today."

Given the rate of climate change across the world, access to water will become a source of conflict, especially in more unstable regions. It is not inconceivable that Israel’s next war with Syria and Jordan could be over access to the River Jordan. I don’t hold out too much hope that peace will come to Darfur anytime soon but it is worth a try.

Darfur – a conflict caused by global warming?

An 18 month study of Sudan by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has concluded that the conflict in Darfur has been driven by climate change and environmental degradation, factors which threaten to trigger other wars across Africa unless more is done to contain the damage. "Darfur ... holds grim lessons for other countries at risk," the study concludes.

With rainfall down by up to 30% over 40 years and the Sahara advancing by over a mile every year, tensions between farmers and herders over disappearing pasture and evaporating water holes threaten to reignite the war between north and south Sudan. The southern Nuba tribe, for example, have warned they could "restart the war" because Arab nomads - pushed southwards into their territory by drought - are cutting down trees to feed their camels.

The UNEP investigation into links between climate and conflict in Sudan predicts that the impact of climate change is likely to go far beyond its borders. It found there could be a drop of up to 70% in crop yields in the most vulnerable areas of the Sahel. "It doesn't take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards there is a physical limit to what [ecological] systems can sustain, and so you get one group displacing another." said Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director

The immediate cause of the Darfur conflict was a regional rebellion, to which Khartoum responded by recruiting Arab militias to wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing against African civilians. The UNEP study suggests the true genesis of the conflict pre-dates 2003 and is to be found in failing rains and creeping desertification. It found that: The desert in northern Sudan has advanced southwards by 60 miles over the past 40 years; Rainfall has dropped by 16%-30%;; Yields in the local staple, sorghum, could drop by 70%.

UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, argued: "Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in convenient military and political shorthand - an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

In turn, the Darfur conflict has exacerbated Sudan's environmental degradation, forcing more than two million people into refugee camps. Deforestation has been accelerated while underground aquifers are being drained. The UNEP report warns that no peace will last in the area without sustained investment in containing environmental damage and adapting to climate change. Mr Steiner said: "Simply to return people to the situation there were in before is a high-risk strategy."

Tom Stoppard on Darfur

Last week the Independent carried a letter signed by ten leading European writers (including Nobel laureates Dario Fo, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter) urging the European Union to take action on Darfur. Today it carries this piece by playwright Tom Stoppard entitled “We must speak up for the dead and dispossessed in an epidemic of rage”

If not now, when? If not we, who? News of murder, rape, arson and dispossession in Darfur has been coming in for something like four years, stopping and starting and stuttering, scaling up into horrifying film footage that blanks out the political story, and also down into declarations, resolutions and soundbites that veil the horror of what's really happening in a war so remote and so obscured that the numbers of dead arrive rounded to the nearest hundred thousand.

Is it 200,000 or 300,000? Both figures keep popping up in the Darfur story in reproachable documentation and all you can think is that the sub-text "enough is enough" of Tony Blair's reported message to Angela Merkel the other day had an even darker meaning than the phrase was intended to carry.

But, yes, enough is indeed enough. And one of the things you'd think the UN would have had enough of is being treated with casual disdain by the Sudanese regime, whose latest gesture was to use troops to deny the UN's humanitarian delegation access to a refugee camp in the Darfur region.

A peacekeeping mission would be more to the point, and here again the UN is as helpless against its own vetoes as against President Omar al-Bashir's soldiers. If the United Nations could die of shame it would have been dead years ago.

How can the EU do better? Can it be effective at all? Yesterday, the British Prime Minister and the German Chancellor were making the right noises. Stringent sanctions. No-fly zones. But the unpalatable truth is that sanctions require a degree of collective determination, of which the UN appears constitutionally incapable. A no-fly zone over that vast remote area represents an enormous challenge. And would freezing Sudanese assets abroad, one of the suggestions in the "writers' letter", in itself turn the situation around?

Bob Geldof, who orchestrated the letter, said yesterday: "It's code to get the UN behind us." Well, maybe. But the point about Geldof is that he is a populist. What is needed is to make rage and shame contagious, an epidemic. The situation will be turned by numbers, vast numbers of the living outraged, to speak up for the 200,000, or was it 300,000, dead.