From the biblical site of the Garden of Eden, one can see a river in trouble.  The Shatt al Arab, that part of the river after the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge, is full of garbage and the government of Iraq is powerless to clean it up, reports Steven Lee Meyers of the New York Times.

Being the dumping place for dictatorial mismanagement and the brunt of the decades of neglect and war, this river is a river in name only.  Coming through a very arid part of the continent, there are increasing pressures to take all of the water out of the river leaving not a lot going into the Persian Gulf. 

The decreasing quantity of water flowing down the river also compounds the quality issue.  The Karun River which meets the Shatt south of Basra has only begun to run again as Iran shut it down for 10 months.  What is also happening is that the ocean is moving further back up the river, impacting the fresh water fisheries, livestock and agriculture in the area.  This area famous for date palm groves has forced thousands of farmers to question their ability to recover from the continued onslaught of war.

Photo: Fetid, garbage-filled water in Basra. Holly Pickett for The New York Times

Most Canadians have come to understand the crisis by following western media coverage. For the most part, this coverage has presented a political crisis stripped of its politics. Instead, we’ve been given a broad-brush, easy-to-explain narrative of ‘rich versus poor.’ As a result, many of my progressive friends assume the recent protests fit under the same tent as Tiananmen Square, Burma’s democratic resistance, or Thailand’s pro-democracy movement of the early 1990s. The reality is far different.