- It's not much of a river. It's low enough to walk across,
warm from a stone bed that attracts the autumn heat, full of tadpoles and
small fish, frothing merrily in a creek below the scruffy village of Ghajar.
But take a closer look and you'll see an Israeli soldier standing above
the creek, on the opposite side of a maze of barbed wire, watching this
little river through his binoculars. For say the word Wazzani right now,
and you're talking water war. Even Colin Powell, the American Secretary
of State, has become involved.
-
- There's no war yet, just a mass of piping that the Lebanese
are laying along the Lebanese side of the Israeli frontier wire to carry
the warm waters of the river to another bunch of dirt-poor Shia Muslim
villages. The trouble is that the Wazzani flows right out of Lebanon and
into Israel, where it feeds the fish-farm lakes of four Jewish kibbutzes.
-
- Lebanon's action is "a violation of every agreement
we have signed in the past", says Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Israel's Defence
Minister. "Israel cannot tolerate the diversion of the waters of the
Wazzani." Israel could solve the problem, said Dan Zazlavsky, the
former head of Israel's water commission, with "a few tank shells".
-
- Up in Beirut, Emile Lahoud, the Lebanese President, has
responded in kind. The project will continue, he says, and the government
has ordered the contractors to speed their work. Bashar Assad, the Syrian
President, has phoned his support to President Lahoud. The Hizbollah militia
- the group that drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon - claims it
will "cut off Israel's hands" if military force is used to close
the pipelines. So no wonder the Israeli soldier watches me through his
binoculars as I dip my hands in these tepid waters.
-
- The Americans have turned up to inspect the pipeline
system the Lebanese are installing and Mr Powell has discussed the project
at the United Nations with Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister,
who warned of a dark plot by Syria to destroy the peace of southern Lebanon.
-
- Israel says the river carries 10 per cent of its water,
which, given its meagre current, seems a gross exaggeration. What Jim Franckiewicz,
the American water expert who turned up on the river here this month made
of it, no one knows.
-
- In a part of the world where water means politics and
possible conflict, the Lebanese have oddly failed to present the UN peace-keeping
force on the border with a project assessment. Word has it that under international
law, the Lebanese may pump 35 million cubic metres of water a year, and
that they intend to pump only 12 million. Other statistics suggest that
the Lebanese already pump 7 million cubic metres further north and intend
only to raise this figure to 9 million.
-
- The Israelis ask why the Lebanese don't pump from the
Litani river, a much larger watercourse, much of whose contents flows uselessly
into the Mediterranean north of the frontier. The answer: the Litani is
poisoned by the outflows of factories further inland.
-
- The Wazzani itself is a weird little stream. It starts
off as the Hasbani river and flows under an elegant Roman bridge below
Mount Hermon and the occupied Golan Heights. Then it changes its name to
the Wazzani and meanders below Ghajar, a village split between Lebanon
and Israeli-occupied Syria, trickles across the frontier into Israel itself,
fills up the Kibbutzim fish lakes and ends up in the Jordan river, on another
international frontier and then feeds Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee)
which is Israel's prime source of drinking water.
-
- Back in 1964, the Syrians tried to divert the waters
of the Banias river and the Israelis attacked the pipeline. They could
easily do the same again although (Lebanon enjoys its little complexities)
they will have to avoid hitting two water pumps here, which have been pressuring
water out of the Wazzani and into Ghajar, including the Israeli-occupied
half of the town, since 1976.
-
- Along the frontier beside the Lebanese village of Addaisey,
unarmed Hizbollah fighters guard the pipeline construction workers. If
the Israelis should open fire at the workers, they know the Hizbollah will
fire Katyusha rockets back across the border in retaliation. Last week,
some of the workers were being abused with obscenities by two Israeli soldiers
in a Jeep, a not uncommon experience these days. When I visited another
section of the frontier this month, an Israeli soldier in a concrete fortification
- who had earlier been singing loudly as if drunk - shouted abuse to a
colleague.
-
- But now Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, has
become involved in the whole affair, discussing with army officers the
fate of the water project. One Israeli minister scoffed at the use of the
army. "Are we going to go to war for four kibbutzes?" he asked.
The answer, of course, is that wars have been started in the Middle East
over smaller things that the Wazzani. Which is why the waters of this wandering
little river could grow a lot hotter in the coming weeks.
-
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=336667
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