Toward Freedom welcomed Jacqueline Luqman onto the board of directors on March 17. Jacqueline brings a background in activism and in journalism, and describes herself as a “Pan-Africanist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionary.”Jacqueline co-hosts the weekday radio show, “By Any Means Necessary,” on Radio Sputnik as well as the weekly Black Power Media show, “Luqman Nation.” She also is the organizer of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Black Alliance for Peace and is an organizer with Pan-African Community Action. Besides all that, Jacqueline is the moderator and member of the Board of Social Action of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.
Here’s what Jacqueline told Toward Freedom’s editor, Julie Varughese.
What got you interested in joining Toward Freedom’s board of directors?
I enjoyed the content of the publication and particularly like how Toward Freedom incorporates entertainment critique with political commentary.
Your background is in activism and in journalism. How do you reconcile what are normally seen as mutually exclusive endeavors?
Activism is the response to issues being reported in the news that are the result of politics and policies. Activism is the response to the injustice of those politics and policies on communities that have little to no say in how those policies are made. So reporting on the impact of those policies and politics on the people in the streets is a necessary aspect of activism, as it connects people who are doing the work with many who may not know what is even going on.
Tell us about Bruskie.
He is my 10-year-old furbaby. He thinks he is a person. He may be channeling my late husband, Abdus. But he is a complete 100-pound clown and big baby. He also is a very good Protest Dog, except when other people’s dogs are around, and then he forgets that he’s supposed to be Comrade To All Man and Dogkind. He’s working on that.
What is the next big story Toward Freedom should try to pursue?
The impact the war in Ukraine has had on de-prioritizing the U.S. dollar in developing countries in Africa; multi-polar solidarity among Global South and African nations, and in and between working-class movements in those countries; as well as the role of China as the new leader of the multi-polar world and what that means to the international working class.
Editor’s Note: This article was produced by Globetrotter.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other members of the Biden Cabinet are fond of proclaiming the “rules-based international order” (RBIO) or “rules-based order” every chance they get: in press conferences, on interviews, in articles, at international fora, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and cocktails. Along with the terms “human rights” and “democracy,” the RBIO is routinely used to claim a moral high ground against countries that they accuse of not following this RBIO, and wielded as a cudgel to attack, criticize, accuse, and delegitimate countries in their crosshairs as rogue outliers to an international order.
This cudgel is now used most commonly against China and Russia. Oddly enough, whenever the United States asserts this “rules-based order” that China (and other “revisionist powers”/enemy states) are violating, the United States never seems to clarify which “rules” are being violated, but simply releases a miasma of generic accusation, leaving the stench of racism and xenophobia to do the rest.
This is because there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the RBIO.
The RBIO isn’t “rules-based,” it isn’t “international,” and it confounds any sense of “order,” let alone justice. It is, at bottom, the naked exercise of U.S. imperial power and supremacy, dressed up in the invisible finery of an embroidered fiction. The RBIO is a fraudulent impersonation of international law and justice.
There are many layers to this misnomer, to be deconstructed piece by piece.
‘RBIO’ in Contrast With ‘International Law’
First, the RBIO is not “international” in any sense of the word.
There actually is a consensual rules-based international order, a compendium of agreed-upon rules and treaties that the international community has negotiated, agreed to, and signed up for. It’s called simply “international law.” This refers to the body of decisions, precedents, agreements, and multilateral treaties held together under the umbrella of the Charter of the United Nations and the multiple institutions, policies, and protocols attached to it. Although imperfect, incomplete, evolving, it still constitutes the legal foundation of the body of international order and the orderly laws that underpin it: this is what constitutes international law. The basic foundation of the UN Charter is national sovereignty—that states have a right to exist, and are equal in relations. This is not what the United States is referring to.
When the United States uses the term RBIO, rather than the existing term “international law,” it does so because it wants to impersonate international law while diverting to a unilateral, invented, fictitious order that it alone creates and decides—often with the complicity of other imperial, Western, and transatlantic states. It also does this because, quite simply, the United States does not want to be constrained by international law and actually is an international scofflaw in many cases.
The United States as International Outlaw
For example, the United States refuses to sign or to ratify foundational international laws and treaties that the vast majority of countries in the world have signed, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), ICESCR (the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), CRC (the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ICRMW (the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families), UNCLOS (the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), PAROS (the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space), the Ottawa Treaty (the Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention), and the majority of labor conventions of the ILO (International Labor Organization). In fact, the United States harbors sweatshops, legalizes child labor (for example, in migrant farm labor), and engages in slave labor (in prisons and immigration detention centers). Even the U.S. State Department’s own 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report acknowledges severe problems in the U.S. of trafficking and forced labor in agriculture, food service, manufacture, domestic service, sex work, and hospitality, with U.S. government officials and military involved in the trafficking of persons domestically and abroad. Ironically, the United States tries to hold other countries accountable to laws that it itself refuses to ratify. For example, the United States tries to assert UNCLOS in the South China Sea while refusing—for decades—to ratify it and ignoring its rules, precedents, and conclusions in its own territorial waters.
There are also a slew of international treaties the United States has signed, but simply violates anyway: examples include the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, UN treaties prohibiting torture, rendition, and kidnapping, and of course, war of aggression, considered “the supreme international crime”—a crime that the United States engages in routinely at least once a decade, not to mention routine drone attacks, which are in violation of international law. Most recently, the AUKUS agreement signed between the United States and Australia violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by exploiting a blind spot of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
There are also a multitude of treaties that the United States has signed but then arbitrarily withdrawn from anyway. These include the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, the Agreed Framework and the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, the Geneva Conventions, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and many others.
There are also approximately 368 treaties signed between the Indigenous nations and the U.S. government; every single one of them has been violated or ignored.
There are also unilateral fictions that the United States has created, such as “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOPs): this is gunboat diplomacy, a military show of force, masquerading as an easement claim. FONOPs are a concept with no basis in international law—“innocent passage” is the accepted law under UNCLOS—and it is the United States and its allies who are violating international laws when they exercise these FONOPs. Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZs) are likewise notions that have no recognition in international law—the accepted concept is “sovereign airspace”—but the United States routinely claims that China is violating Taiwan’s ADIZ or airspace—which covers three provinces of mainland China. These are some examples of the absurd fictions that the United States invents to assert that enemy states like China are violating the RBIO. This is weaponized fiction.
The United States also takes great pains to undermine international structures and institutions; for example, not liking the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), it has disabled the WTO’s Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism; it has undermined—and threatened—the ICC (by passing the American Servicemembers Protection Act [ASPA], also known as the Hague Invasion Act), and more recently, sanctioned the ICC prosecutor and her family members; it thumbs its nose at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and its decisions, and generally is opposed to any international institution that restricts its unbridled, unilateral exercise of power. Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, in blunt candor, asserted that there is “no such thing as the United Nations,” but this unhinged ideology is quietly manifested in the day-to-day actions of the United States throughout successive U.S. administrations.
Whose Rules? The United States Applies Its Laws Internationally
On the flip side of this disdain for agreed-upon international law and institutions is the United States’ belief that its own laws should have universal jurisdiction.
The United States considers laws passed by its corrupt, plutocratic legislature—hardly international or democratic by any stretch of the imagination—to apply to the rest of the world. These include unilateral sanctions against numerous countries (approximately one-third of the world’s population is impacted by U.S. sanctions), using the instruments of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the U.S. legislature and courts, as well as currency and exchange systems (SWIFT). These unilateral sanctions are a violation of international law and humanitarian law, as well as perversions of common sense and decency—millions have perished under these illegal sanctions. To add insult to injury, the United States routinely bullies other countries to comply with these unilateral sanctions, threatening secondary sanctions against countries and corporations that do not follow these U.S.-imposed illegal sanctions. This is part of the general pattern of the exercise of U.S. long-arm jurisdiction; examples abound: the depraved arrest, imprisonment, and torture of journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange—an Australian national—for violating U.S. espionage laws; the absurd kidnapping of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou (a Chinese national) on Canadian soil, for violating illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran (which Canada does not itself uphold); and many other examples, too many to enumerate.
This long-arm bullying is often exercised through a network of kangaroo courts within the United States, which arrogate to themselves unitary, plenipotentiary international powers to police the citizens of other countries. Not surprisingly, the United States also applies its own laws in a similarly corrupt way within its own borders, with its own gulag system fed through these kangaroo courts. The most dramatic examples of the corruption of these courts can be noted in the routine exoneration of police-inflicted murders of civilians, except under the most extreme protest and activism; and absurd judgments, such as the prosecution of Steven Donziger by a Chevron-linked corporate law firm; or the exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse by a judge allowing the accused to run the juror lottery. Note, however, the system itself is set up for conviction: over 99 percent of federal cases that go to court result in conviction; most do not even go to trial: 90 percent of U.S. federal indictments are settled by defendants pleading “guilty” or “no contest” to charges filed against them. The idea that there is any impartial notion of justice is belied by the fact that fair and adequate legal representation is unaffordable for most defendants; that appointed public defenders are so overstretched that they often spend literally minutes on each case, simply counseling defendants to plead guilty—which most do—and individuals, in the rare cases where they do win, are often bankrupted and psychically destroyed by a system that has unlimited resources and finances to beat down its victims. This corrupt system of oppression, despite its obvious injustices and iniquities, is exacerbated within vast gray areas of the justice system where even counsel, appeal, scrutiny, or oversight does not apply, and where a single individual may be judge, jury, and executioner. These include, for example, certain parole and probation systems, review boards within prisons, debt collection systems, immigration proceedings, asset forfeiture systems, and many other quasi-judicial systems of oppression.
Generally, these violations and injustices are excused or erased by the international and national media, which are complicit in maintaining an illusion of impartial, high-standards justice in the United States. This is an illusion without substance: the U.S. legal system, like the U.S. health care system or the U.S. educational system, is essentially a failed system that is designed to work only for the rich and powerful. It delivers substandard, so-called care, if not outright abuse, harm, violence, and death, to the vast majority of people who have the misfortune to enter its sausage-making chambers.
Routine Exemptions, Deadly Disorder
Nevertheless, from time to time, dramatic incidents of the United States flaunting the international “rules-based order”—i.e., international law by the United States—occasionally make headlines (before being rapidly silenced).
One type of recurring violation is the abuse of diplomatic immunity. This type of case is mundane and repetitious: a U.S. (or Western-allied) government employee kills or harms native citizens; the United States immediately claims diplomatic immunity. Sometimes the perpetrator is drunk, out of control, or paranoid; often they are spies or contractors. For example, according to recent reports, Anne Sacoolas seems to have been a drunk U.S. spy who killed a British teenager in 2019. She was spirited away immediately as a diplomat.
Raymond Allen Davis was a U.S. contractor, possibly acting CIA station chief, who shot dead two people in the street in Pakistan. Another person was killed by a vehicle picking up Davis to take him away from the crime scene. Davis was spirited out of the country, no explanations were given, and the murders were erased from media consciousness.
This mindset of exceptionalism and impunity is not anecdotal, but manifests on a general, structural scale in the numerous one-sided U.S. status of forces agreements (SOFAs) in the countries where the United States has troops stationed. These give a blanket immunity similar to diplomatic immunity: the violating U.S. soldier or contractor cannot be arrested and rendered to domestic courts unless the United States chooses to waive immunity; U.S. extraterritorial exemption/immunity can be applied despite cases of murder, mayhem, violence, torture, rape, theft, sexual trafficking, and a host of other sins.
This type of exceptionalism also applies to national health policies and international health regulations. For example, multiple COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced to U.S. violations of domestic public health measures—screening, testing, contract tracing, and isolation—in many territories or countries (especially island regions) where the United States has military bases. For example, several major COVID outbreaks in Okinawa have been traced to U.S. troops entering the island without following local health protocols.
The United States takes the cake for hypocrisy, however, when, in several COVID lawsuits, it accused China—without evidence—of violating UN/World Health Organization (WHO) International Health Regulations by failing to notify the United States and the rest of the world in a timely manner about the outbreak of COVID-19. This is entirely refuted by the facts and the well-established timelines: no other country has worked as assiduously and as rapidly in investigating, ascertaining, and then notifying the world of the initial outbreak, as well as sharing necessary information to control it. The United States, however, has carved out a pandemic-sized exemption from reporting any infectious diseases to the WHO if it deems it necessary for its national security interests. Ironically, this exemption is carved out for the single institution most likely to propagate it—the U.S. military: “any notification that would undermine the ability of the U.S. Armed Forces to operate effectively in pursuit of U.S. national security interests would not be considered practical.”
When the United States disingenuously uses the term RBIO, or rules-based international order, it may be playing at international law, but once its applications are unpacked and defused, it becomes clear that it is a weaponized fiction that the United States uses to attack its enemies and competitors.
If “hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” the RBIO is the vicious first tribute that the United States sends to its law-abiding opponents to undermine international order, no less dangerous for its falsehood.
K.J. Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region.
Latif Karim Ismael, 75, in his once-vibrant agricultural field in Chaqlawa in Iraqi Kurdistan / credit: Alessandra Bajec
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan—Standing outside his home in Chaqlawa village, a half-hour drive from the city of Sulaymaniyah, Latif Karim Ismael, wearing black baggy trousers and a light-blue shirt, greeted us and hinted we sit in his backyard.
Accustomed to working a thriving land, the 75-year-old farm worker has to face up to a completely different reality today, with his production having dramatically dropped because of a drought.
“Ten years ago, our land produced 12 tons of wheat—now it’s six,” Karim Ismael began recounting to Toward Freedom. “Barley is half or less than what we used to harvest. Until five years ago, I was growing plenty of vegetables, like chickpeas, beans, lentils. Now, it’s just wheat and barley.”
Karim Ismael added that, besides low rainfall, the poor state of water has caused heavy losses to his yield. Untreated wastewater originating from Sulaymaniyah, the capital of the province of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region (KRI), has contaminated water and soil around Tanjaro River since the early 2000s.
“Back in time, I used to sell my own produce and make an income from that,” the 75-year-old sighed. “Today, the little we grow barely covers our needs.”
Living with three family members, none of whom work, he has relied on his small pension from working for 16 years as a handyman in a public school to provide for the household.
The main source of water supply for his family is groundwater from a well, collected for both agriculture and domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking and cleaning). Having witnessed harsh water shortages in the past few years, he said he would turn to the water well for irrigating his crops.
Map of the Sulaymaniyah Governorate highlighted in red. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is highlighted in red and beige / credit: TUBS / Wikipedia
The agricultural season in KRI usually starts in early November with the first rainfall. The harvest begins in mid-May and lasts until June, extending into July in some areas.
Most Kurdish farmers have normally relied on winter rains to fill reservoirs that sustain their fields through the dry season. However, rainfall across the region has drastically dropped over the last two years.
In April, the director of Dukan dam predicted a drought in the region this year as only 300 millimeters—half of the needed precipitation—had fallen.
Fifty percent of Iraq’s farmland faces desertification. The main rivers—the Euphrates and Tigris—are expected to dry up by 2040, according to the Iraqi federal government. Meanwhile, the World Bank has predicted a 20-percent drop in drinking water by 2050. NGOs say long-standing dams in neighboring countries exacerbate the conditions. Meanwhile, the regional government recently approved four dams in Iraqi Kurdistan to combat the lack of water. All this comes as Iraq is among the five countries most vulnerable to water and food insecurity due to climate change.
Since the start of the 2000s, local farmers have not received compensation or other types of support from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for losses suffered.
“We haven’t seen any assistance, whether financial aid, equipment or fertilizers,” Karim Ismael said. He added the KRG said its priority was first the fight against ISIS, then the budget dispute with the Iraqi federal government, and later the COVID pandemic.
The old peasant lives on his invalidity pension, having carried a war injury disability since the time he fought during the 1960s for autonomy within Iraq. Like everyone in the village, he depends on groundwater for his family’s consumption and to water the little he can produce. They have their own well and share it with four households.
Chaqlawa, which counts 50 houses and some 330 residents, is not connected to the main water pipeline from Sulaymaniyah, as is usually the case in rural areas. People help one another by sharing water wells. They strive to ensure wells do not dry up, or at least that the groundwater is sustained until the next rainy season.
Adding pressure on water resource management, villagers have not adapted to the water crisis.
“People don’t use water properly,” Shad Azad Rahim, an environmental activist from Sulaymaniyah told Toward Freedom. “There’s still no awareness of water conservation, and many farmers have not converted to modern, efficient irrigation systems.” Only two farmers use the drip irrigation method.
Rahim, who coordinates projects at Humat Dijlah and Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan, two local organizations striving to protect water sources, denounced that shopkeepers and others use drinking water for routine cleaning. “Such conduct goes completely unpunished.”
The project coordinator also pointed to the lack of wastewater treatment plants in Iraq, implying sewage and industrial garbage are commonly dumped into fresh water courses. That has polluted the KRI’s two main sources for drinking water, the Dukan and Darbandikhan lakes.
“People have been demanding treatment facilities for years and years,” he said. “Yet, no action has been seen from the government’s side.”
A map highlighting Iraq’s Kurdistan region and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers / credit: researchgate.net
‘Tar Oil Killed My Crops’
A few hundred meters away from Karim Ismael’s house, three villagers who had gathered on a rural road made their way into a patio while inviting this reporter to follow them.
“Years back, I was planting a large amount of crops. Until the day I found them all black and dead!” Mohamed Mahmoud Ismael uttered to Toward Freedom. Donning a black-and-white turban scarf on his head, the 75-year-old pointed to an oil factory in the vicinity of farmlands. “Tar oil poured straight into Tanjaro River at night reached my arable land and killed the crops.”
Seventy percent of Iraq’s industrial waste is dumped into rivers or the sea, based on data provided by the UN and academics. The Tanjaro River, located south of Sulaymaniyah city, has been polluted by untreated wastewater for decades. It joins the Sirwan River to form the Diyala River, which is a tributary of the Tigris, the great river of Mesopotamia that together with the Euphrates gives life to all of Iraq. The direct impact on residents is twofold because they use water for drinking and farming. In partnership with Humat Dijlah, and in coordination with the Sulaymaniyah governorate’s Department of Environment, Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan has organized the “Tanjaro River Threat Assessment and Outreach Project” to raise awareness about environmental threats surrounding this small river. The advocacy NGO organizes regular cleaning campaigns at lakes and rivers in the Kurdistan region.
Meanwhile, Neighboring Turkey and Iran’s dam projects have reduced water flow into Iraq. While Iraq and Syria have signed up to the UN Watercourses Convention of 1997—under which nations are obligated to equitably share their neighbors’ water resources—Turkey and Iran have not.
The spokesperson for Iraq’s water ministry said that since last year, water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had dropped by more than half.
Water activists have reported severe water scarcity in areas from Diyala governorate all the way south to Basra, complaining dams reduce the proportion of water quotas, especially in southern Iraq.
“Up until 1998, we were two big families here cultivating a large output of vegetables and living entirely on our food products. We would always have extra yield to give to other families,” Bakr Sdeeq Hussein, 54, recounted, speaking to Toward Freedom in Chaqlawa. “As water pollution and scarcity gradually hit most of my agricultural production, I decided to cultivate only wheat and few fruits (pomegranates, peaches, apples). I had planted 30 small trees last year. Sadly, all of them died.”
The villager’s subsistence today depends on his taxi business.
Save the Tigris, a civil society advocacy campaign that promotes water justice in the Mesopotamian basin, recently issued a report raising the alarm on the rising volumes of water lost due to evaporation from Iraq’s dam reservoirs.
Rahim argued food production in the Kurdish region is facing a crisis as a result of low precipitation and declining river levels from upstream countries. “Desertification is threatening 70 percent of the country’s agricultural lands,” he said, citing an Iraqi health and environment ministry report. Rahim added that would soon make it “impossible to grow anything.”
Taha Ali Karim on his plot of land in Chaqlawa in Iraqi Kurdistan / credit: Alessandra Bajec
‘Never Sure When We Have Water’
Back in the day, 65-year-old Taha Ali Karim used to grow and market several products, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and aubergines. From the beginning of 2000, he saw his yield decreasing until it stopped bearing its fruit. “Before then, we were mainly relying on rainwater, and especially on Tanjaro River which once had clean water to irrigate the land,” said the 65-year-old, dressed in a white shirt and light-gray baggy pants. “We also had two or three springs.” Now, the river is polluted and the springs have dried up.
Today, he shares his well with two more families, carefully monitoring water volumes and making sure there’s enough for all of them.
“We can’t sell what we produce any more,” he said. “We’ve lost our passion to do farming since we’re not seeing an outcome.”
Karim, who also acts as a village representative, reported contamination of Tanjaro River, water scarcity and economic backlash against reduced food production are some of the residents’ major concerns. His formal written complaints have been met with little to no cooperation. Karim warned 80 percent of water wells in Chaqlawa will run dry in the future. The only solution he sees is for one large reservoir, around 200 meters deep. He requested several times that governorate authorities look into it, but hasn’t received any answer.
“We feel abandoned in many ways, starting with the fact that we can’t access clean water,” he reiterated, estimating the daily water supply at two-and-a-half hours for each well. “Because we depend on our water wells, we can never be sure when we have water and when we don’t.”
At about 15 minutes away from the hamlet, in Naw Grdan—a village made up of 370 houses totaling some 1,800 inhabitants—Mohamed Tofiq, 54, in an all-black outfit with a waist band wrapped around the top of his pants, waved a hand from afar welcoming this reporter to enter his home.
“It’s been really damaging,” the cattle breeder told Toward Freedom. “There’s very little rain, we have no springs, our wells are drying up fast.”
Although he has three water wells, they are located on his farmland. That is far from where he lives, making collecting water a tedious task.
The majority of residents either draw clean water from wells or buy potable water. For non-drinking purposes, some may even purchase trucks of water from Tanjaro River despite it being unsafe.
The effect of water scarcity on stockbreeding has been drastic, given how much water they consume.
“Since we’ve been having less and less rainfall, I sometimes have to take my farm animals 3 to 4 kilometers outside the village to find greener pastures for grazing,” the 54-year-old noted.
“Before I had 120 cows, I was selling 10 every month and buying another five right away because I could easily re-sell beef cattle to butcher shops,” Tofiq said. “Now, I have 60 baby cows, and sell five or six in a month.”
He explained that, with the increased expenses involved in animal feeding, it is not worth investing into the production of dairies. That is especially because of recent greater reliance on imports. He just keeps a cow to produce milk, cheese and yogurt for his family.
The cow breeder also indicated that cultivation of wheat and barley—the only crops grown in the village—has dropped in the last couple of years. Now, less than a quarter of the population grow them.
Tofiq, whom Naw Grdan community members tapped as an unofficial representative, pointed out the main problem villagers encounter is the government’s lack of planning for the agriculture sector. That includes ensuring efficient water management and a fair provision of water resources, as well as supporting farmers by different means, such as with machinery, tools, fertilizers and financial incentives.
One proposal he put forward to the governorate was to create a big water reservoir to sustain the villagers, after a team of geologists found last year large groundwater reserves in Naw Grdan. Alternatively, he suggested, the water supply network that serves greater Sulaymaniyah should be linked to the village.
Four New Dams
A combination of a semi-arid climate, drought conditions, decline in rainfall, and decreasing water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers arriving from upstream neighbors have compromised farmers’ ability to grow food in Iraq and in the Kurdish region.
According to a report published by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in August of last year, wheat production in the Kurdistan region is expected to decrease by half because of the drought. Further research the NRC released last December found more than one-third of wheat farmers in drought-affected regions of Iraq faced crop failure in 2021. This impacted average monthly income, which dropped below survival rates in six governorates, leaving one in five families without enough food.
The Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture announced at the beginning of July that desertification threatens more than 50 percent of Iraq’s available farmland. Water shortages and dry climate had already forced the Iraqi government last October to order farmers to cultivate only half of the arable land during the winter.
The Iraqi water resources ministry warned in April that the country’s water reserves had decreased by half since 2021. The same ministry anticipated in a report released towards the end of last year that, unless urgent action is taken to fight against declining water volumes, Iraq’s two main rivers will be entirely dry by 2040
Moreover, the World Bank forecast in November that Iraq could suffer a 20-percent drop in drinking water by 2050.
Rahim echoed some of the calls by Humat Dijlah and Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan for the protection of waterways that include “efficient water use” through advocacy to government officials and public awareness, prevention and removal of dams, and “serious steps from the government” to negotiate with Iran and Turkey and demand Iraq’s share of water. He maintained that the Iraqi central government and the KRG need to cooperate on water security issues.
The water campaigner slammed the KRG’s plan to build another four large dams as well as Turkey’s discussed building of the Cizre. “We already have two big dams in Kurdistan, they are not even half full,” he underlined. “We don’t need to see more dams built.”
Instead, he proposed, small reservoirs could be created in farmlands to manage water resources suitably around farming communities.
A staff person in charge of media relations at the KRG’s Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources didn’t respond to written questions, despite initially welcoming them.
The Kurdish region is in the midst of a water crisis, some of which has been blamed on poor water management and lack of funds. Diar Gharib Latif, head of the Sulaymaniyah governorate’s Directorate of Environment, acknowledged that, stressing the need for a “serious management system” to protect water resources and to mobilize “necessary capital” for it.
He also emphasized wastewater treatment should be introduced to stop waterways from being contaminated, with high pollution loads advancing through the KRI down to Iraq’s southern governorate of Basra, one of the most polluted cities in Iraq. With water reserves dwindling, water quality deterioration additionally reduces available supplies.
“We have faced drought for two years now. At our directorate, we are pushing for a decree law in the Kurdistan parliament that aims to protect water resources qualitatively and quantitatively,” Latif told Toward Freedom. He added that the agriculture and irrigation committee within parliament would be tasked with further discussing finding solutions to water shortages and budgeting for a plan.
“We wish to receive the needed funds so that we can respond to the drought and other water-related issues in a scientific way and with good strategy planning,” he alluded to the ongoing budget disputes between the federal government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous KRG.
Expressing concern for the suffering of the agricultural sector in the KRI, the local official anticipated that, if the drought drags on for another year, not only it will be a devastating blow to agriculture and food security overall, but the environmental impact will be severe, too.
He insisted that Iraq should have effective water negotiations with its neighbors and finalize an agreement. To date, there is no international treaty for the Euphrates-Tigris basin, leaving Iraq exposed to unilateral alterations of water flows by Turkey and Iran.
KRG’s authorities allocated 21 billion Iraqi dinars (roughly $14 million) to maintain the water distribution network in the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil ahead of the summer season. Regional officials said they were digging more than 130 new wells to stem water scarcity, though that could also negatively impact the performance of pre-existing wells.
In an attempt to diminish the effects of the drought, the KRG ministry signed in March a memorandum of understanding with Power China to build four dams in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok.
At the Second International Water Conference in Baghdad held last March, Iraq’s ministries of water resources and of the environment signed new cooperation agreements to support a joint approach to tackling the water problem. International and Iraqi NGOs demanded that these and other relevant agreements and policies be effectively funded and implemented, including the 2009 Law on Protection and Improvement of the Environment and the 2001 Law on Conservation of Water Resources, both of which prohibit the dumping of waste and discharge of pollutants in public waters.
In the meantime, the situation remains dire for Iraq’s farmers.
“We expect the harvest to be really bad,” Hussein said. “Most crops will die since we have far from enough water to survive the summer heat.”
Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. Then she was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017. Since 2018, Bajec has lived in Tunis.
Claudia Amikwa (left) and Shepheline Achuo live in Adagom, the refugee settlement in southeastern Nigeria where about 5,000 Cameroonians reside / credit: Philip Obaji, Jr.
MAMFE, Cameroon—One Saturday morning in March 2021, 17-year-old Beatrice* and 19-year-old Patience* stepped out of a single-room apartment they shared to buy food near the Adagom refugee settlement in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River State.
That’s when a young man they knew as “Mr. Patrick” approached them.
He asked the teenagers if they were interested in moving to the United States to work as caregivers for a monthly salary.
The two wasted no time in accepting the offer, which came with the condition that they would have to work in a bar in Cameroon, their home country, for at least a year to earn enough to make the journey.
“We immediately began to pack our bags and, after two days, we left for Cameroon,” Beatrice, now 19, said. “We were excited to hear that our stay in Cameroon was temporary and, after a year, we would be traveling to America.”
A little over three years ago, both women, who used to live close to each other, fled their homes in the southwestern Cameroonian town of Akwaya after soldiers stormed their compounds and began to burn houses as the war between English-speaking separatists and government forces in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions intensified. After spending days struggling through thick forests and grasslands, they arrived in Nigeria in November 2019, quickly seeking refuge in the Adagom refugee settlement, where about 5,000 Cameroonians now live. The site is on the outskirts of Ogoja town in Nigeria’s southeastern Cross River State.
For the two days this reporter spoke with the petite women, they were dressed in the same outfit: Blue jean trousers and faded t-shirts. They also appeared emaciated.
According to sources this reporter interviewed, trafficking of adults and children has become rampant as a war rages in Cameroon between the Francophone government and Anglophone forces.
Map of Cameroon-Nigeria border depicting cities of Calabar, Mamfe and Oguja / map: Google; illustration: Toward Freedom
‘We Just Had to Leave’
Both women fled Cameroon on their own, leaving behind relatives, some of whom later fled to Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Cameroon’s southwest and to other refugee settlements in southeastern Nigeria.
An Emergency Food Security Assessment that the United Nations conducted a year ago found more than 80 percent of Cameroonian households in refugee settlements and those in host communities are “severely or moderately food insecure.” Three in four refugees may be engaging in child labor and survival sex, according to the UN.
Beatrice and Patience, who spent three years at Adagom on a $2-per-day allowance they earned, jumped at the chance of paid jobs in Cameroon and an eventual trip to the United States.
“At Adagom, we only earned money during planting and harvesting seasons and, once these seasons are over, we go back to begging for survival,” Beatrice said. “When we heard there was something better waiting for us outside Nigeria, we just had to leave.”
Beatrice and Patience had no time to tell anyone they were going.
They arrived in the southwestern Cameroonian town of Mamfe alongside Mr. Patrick, who drove them in his red Volkswagen Passat car. That is when the women said they met a couple of other girls from the same refugee settlement in Nigeria at a bar where they quickly began to work as waiters. Later, they labored as cooks when a restaurant was added to the bar, which was run by three young men, including Mr. Patrick himself, according to the women.
“Behind the bar is a three-bedroom apartment, where everyone who worked there lived,” Patience said. “At some point it was only us (Beatrice and Patience), who remained as workers at the bar. The other two girls we met there were taken away from the apartment one morning.”
Less than a week after they arrived, each of the three men began to make advances at them, demanding sex and threatening to lie to Cameroonian authorities that the teenagers worked for the Ambazonia Defense Forces (ADF) one of the two biggest armed English-speaking separatist groups.
“They said if we didn’t do what they asked us to do, they’d make our lives miserable,” Patience said. “We had to choose between doing what they wanted or having our lives turned upside down.”
Fearing that they could lose everything that was offered to them and even end up in jail, they gave in. Within weeks, the teenagers were pregnant. But after they gave birth to two boys in February, the traffickers took away their babies. They told the women that they needed to prepare for their trip to the United States and that U.S. authorities wouldn’t admit them if they went with children.
But the trip never happened. Instead, the bar closed in April and its owners fled with the babies.
“They sent us to the market one afternoon to buy baby toiletries and when we returned, we found that both the bar and our apartment had been locked,” Patience said. “The men had left with our children.”
Not having anywhere to stay, a Mamfe trader whom Beatrice and Patience often bought baby toiletries from took both of them into her home, where they remain for now.
Water spouts at the Adagom refugee settlement / credit: Philip Obaji, Jr.
‘No Mother Can Rest Until She Finds Her Child’
The women have solicited help from local activists and a Nigerian NGO to find their babies.
“We reported the incident to the police in Mamfe but haven’t heard anything positive from them since then,” Beatrice said. “We also informed [local] pastors and human rights activists, and they’ve been going ‘round the [southwest] area, asking people if they know anything about the men who took the children.”
A senior police officer, who was unauthorized to speak on the matter, told Toward Freedom human trafficking is growing in the city and traffickers are hard to track.
“They receive protection from armed groups,” the officer said. These groups control certain areas in the southwest. “[The police] isn’t equipped enough to engage these elements.”
In Nigeria’s Cross River State, from where Beatrice and Patience were trafficked, authorities explained policing in Adagom is difficult because of its distance from the state’s capital, Calabar, about 304 kilometers (188 miles) south of Adagom.
“Things can only change if funding improves,” said Godwin Eyake, who heads the Cross River State command of Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).
A local NGO is helping Beatrice and Patience find their sons by visiting orphanages and writing advertisements.
“It’s hard when you are not sure where the babies were taken to,” said Salome Gambo, a researcher at human-rights group Caprecon Development and Peace Initiative. “We are doing what we are doing just in case it happened that the children were trafficked to Nigeria.”
Gambo admitted recovering the children will be difficult.
However, for the mothers of the babies, there’ll be no stop in their search.
“We will not rest until we find our children,” Patience said. “No mother can rest until she finds her child.”
*Names have been changed
Philip Obaji, Jr., is a journalist based in Nigeria. He won the Future Awards Africa Prize in Education in 2014, and the Future Awards Africa Prize for Young Person of the Year in 2015. Follow him on Twitter at @PhilipObaji.
