Danube Dramatizes Wide Discord Over Rivers

Flowing from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, the Danube hasn’t changed course recently, but Europe’s turbulent times are carrying it through new countries in crisis.

The political shake-up along its banks means that the waters of the 1,771-mile Danube--Europe’s second-longest river--are now shared by 10 countries rather than eight. Four of the 10 are newcomers in competing for its waters.

The Danube dramatizes the many disputes that can arise along the world’s 214 international rivers--those that flow through or form the boundary between at least two countries. Whether it’s the Euphrates, Jordan, Nile or Mekong, the more international the waterway, the greater the competition for its resources. No river runs through more countries than the Danube.

When Czechoslovakia split in two on Jan. 1, the Czechs and their Prague government were cut off from the Danube. Slovakia, whose capital, Bratislava, sits on the river, has gained all riparian rights to it. Slovakia already has angered neighboring Hungary by going ahead with plans to divert Danube waters for the Gabcikovo dam and hydroelectric facility.

“It’s nasty,” said geographer George J. Demko of Dartmouth College, an expert on Eastern Europe. Hungary contends that the diversion canal would change the border between the countries and cause human and ecological tragedy.

When Croatia was part of Yugoslavia, Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, had sole control of the Danube along its borders. As an independent country, Croatia now has access to the river in its own right. But the Serbian government in Belgrade also retains rights. And Serbian forces in war-torn Croatia occupy some Croatian territory along the Danube.

The U.N. economic embargo against Serbia, which supersedes the Danube’s designation as an international waterway, has made shipment of cargo along the river to Belgrade illegal. The United States has called on Romania and Bulgaria to enforce the embargo and stop oil barges from reaching Serbia.

U.N. monitors are deployed on the Danube. But “there are loopholes; barges are still getting through,” said Helmut Turk, Austrian ambassador to the United States. “Without someone to apply military force, sanctions are difficult to enforce. They hurt the countries that apply them.”

The former 15-republic Soviet Union had a sliver of its border on the Danube, near the river’s mouth on the Black Sea. But now Russia doesn’t. The new riparian countries of Ukraine and Moldova do.

Yet Russian government officials in Moscow say that they are the inheritors of any Soviet participation in international treaties and organizations, such as the Danube Commission. The commission, set up in 1948, faces major restructuring today.

The Danube--it isn’t blue--also is suffering from pollution from the upstream countries of Germany and Austria.

Countries on shared rivers can encounter four critical problems: navigation rights, boundary issues, pollution beyond their borders and withdrawing water for such necessities as hydroelectric power or agricultural irrigation.

“As there is more competition for water, there will be more international disputes--the most complex ones about siphoning off water for dams and other projects,” said Demko. “Hydropolitics” is already an issue in water-scarce developing countries.

When nations share the same river, the upstream countries are under no legal obligation to supply water downstream. Turkey, which controls the headwaters of the Euphrates, could turn off the spigot on Syria and Iraq. But the downstream countries may campaign for equitable treatment on grounds of their historic rights of use.

“With all the fragmentation in the world, the only remaining exploitable waters are in shared rivers or underground,” said political geographer Arun P. Elhance of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The prospect of water wars over shared rivers will increase.”

In arid Central Asia, Elhance points out, the two main rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, each now flows through four of the five newly independent countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. “With ethnic and boundary disputes among them, there is a recipe for disaster,” he said.

When all five nations were republics of the Soviet Union, the two rivers that fed the shrinking Aral Sea were centrally controlled in Moscow. But too much of their water was diverted for agriculture, creating an environmental catastrophe.

About 85% of the water of the Nile, the Earth’s longest river, comes from Ethiopia. The Nile, with its sources in Burundi, runs through nine countries. No other nation in the world is so dependent on a single lifeline as Egypt is on the Nile. Without it, all of Egypt would be desert.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia will lose its direct access to the Red Sea if its province of Eritrea votes for independence in a scheduled April referendum.

One of the most potentially explosive river confrontations is in the Middle East, over the Jordan and its major tributary, the Yarmuk. “There’s an annual chronic deficit of water because of overuse by all sides,” said Thomas Naff of the University of Pennsylvania, director of Associates for Middle East Research.

Israel controls all major water sources in the Jordan Basin. The other riparian countries are Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. If the regional population grows at the present rate, Naff said, by 2015 there will be a water crisis, leaving 3 million to 4 million of the area’s projected 16 million people without water.

Other river hot spots could develop over the Indus if Kashmir, which sits on the headwaters, frees itself from India and Pakistan. In Southeast Asia, the Mekong is shared by six troubled countries: China, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. Most of the Mekong’s energy potential is in Laos.

One of the world’s great rivers, the Brahmaputra, begins as a glacial trickle in Tibet and sweeps through southern China, India and Bangladesh. But China and India contest their border near the river, and India and Bangladesh differ over control of Brahmaputra waters.