THINKING BIG : Politics : Ataturk Dam a Source of Power and of Conflict : Huge Turkish project shows how competition for water shapes Mideast.

The Turkish hydraulic engineer swept his hand toward the Middle East’s storied Fertile Crescent and then to the brown waters flowing sluggishly toward it, the first fruit of Turkey’s grand project to harness the headwaters of the mighty Tigris-Euphrates river basin.

“Just think,” Lutfi Solakoglu proudly told the latest group of dignitaries to visit the site since the sluice gates opened April 11, sending a stream of water down an irrigation canal to the fields beyond. “This canal can soon be carrying the equivalent of the whole flow of the Euphrates in a bad summer.”

That’s great news for the Turks, whose $32-billion Southeast Anatolia Project--or GAP, by its Turkish acronym--may one day irrigate wide, hot plains and bring prosperity to a backward, rebellious region.

But for the Arabs downstream in Syria and Iraq, Turkey’s biggest engineering feat is another blow in the region’s turbulent politics of water and engineering. According to some think tanks and officials, including Jordan’s King Hussein, competition for water is more likely than oil or territorial conquest to cause the next war in the Middle East.

Water. For food, for drink and more recently for hydroelectric power, the world’s rivers have always been a source of both succor and conflict. Ancient engineers built dams and wells to control the resource. Romans moved it with great aqueducts, spreading civilization beyond natural water sources.

Americans of the Southwest know well the legal and political controversies springing from use of the Colorado River, Feather River, Owens Valley and Delta waters that fill Southern California reservoirs.

Even the Chunnel connecting France and Britain beneath the English Channel had its naysayers. The cost became a political issue, as did British fears that French rats would invade their island through the tube.

The engineers of history have erected other primarily political works--the Great Wall of China, France’s Maginot Line, the Tijuana Fence--but nothing has been more political than water, and few places match the Middle East as a region of conflict over its benefits.

Most Middle East observers are more sanguine than the Jordanian king on the prospects of war over water. They cite Turkey’s generally conciliatory stance in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, a new era of Israeli-Jordanian cooperation over the Jordan-Yarmuk river system and the disorganization of states strung out along the region’s other major river, the Nile.

“There is a growing gap between food production and population size in all of the countries of the Middle East,” wrote Israeli professor Nurit Kliot in a definitive new book on the region’s water politics.

“The present agreements over water allocation will probably lead . . . to a certain degree of conflict, though not to war.”

But armed conflict would be nothing new to the Jordan-Yarmuk river system.

In 1951, Syria attacked Israel’s first canal from the Jordan River into western Israel, believing that the canal would rob the Arabs of water. And when a 1964 Arab summit agreed to divert the rivers away from Israel altogether, Israeli jets bombed Syrian earth-moving equipment in one of more than 50 clashes.

Israel eventually secured most of the headwaters by capturing the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, one reason the Damascus regime still refuses to cooperate on water issues. Israel’s talks with Palestinians about extensive Israeli pumping of West Bank ground water are proceeding slowly.

But since Arab-Israeli peace talks started in 1991, Israel has helped Jordan seek financing for two dams and for other improvements to increase water flow.

The two states are even discussing an ecologically controversial canal to connect the Dead Sea to the Red Sea along the Rift Valley that divides them.

“The plans run the length of the valley,” said Oded Eran, Israel’s representative on the Israeli-Jordanian Jordan Rift Valley Committee.

In terms of water supplies and populations affected, however, the Jordan-Yarmuk system provides only an annual 1.05 cubic kilometer trickle compared to the combined 60 cubic kilometers of the Tigris and the Euphrates or the giant 86 cubic kilometers of the Nile at Aswan in southern Egypt.

Egypt, totally dependent on the Nile, has long warned Ethiopia that any dam-building on the Blue Nile would be a cause for war. On the White Nile, crisis-racked African states are in little position to challenge Egypt’s ancient hegemony over the 4,132-mile-long river.

More volatile is competition for water in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, where Iran makes a small, remote contribution to the Tigris and the rivers are mostly shared by Iraq, Syria and a newly assertive Turkey.

Troops massed on the Iraqi border after Syria and Turkey started filling their first dams on the Euphrates in 1974, reducing the Iraqi share to a silty stream. Both upstream states eventually released more water to the Iraqis to cool the crisis.

Biding its time, Ankara waited for the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to start work on the Ataturk Dam, the 555-foot high, mile-wide centerpiece of the Southeast Anatolian Project. For the first time, Turkey intends to divert water for its own agriculture, although it is unclear how much Turkey will use.

The chief of the project, Olcay Unver, said in an interview that he expected to use 11 cubic kilometers for irrigation, slightly more than one-third of the original river flow. Unofficial estimates of the eventual Turkish usage range up to one-half of the Euphrates’ waters.

Turkey is probably entitled to much of that water, claims Kliot, the Israeli professor, citing two non-binding international legal codes about rivers: the 1966 Helsinki Rules drawn up by the International Law Assn., and a draft law being formulated since 1971 by the International Law Commission, a U.N.-affiliated body.

Turkey might have to compromise slightly because of historic Syrian and Iraqi dependence on the river, Kliot said, but Turkey has strong rights based on its supply of almost all of the water flowing into the Euphrates and half the water into the Tigris, making up 70% of the system. And some people in Turkey--which is poor, isolated and often unpopular in the Middle East--like the feel of the new “water weapon.”

Project chief Unver, speaking with professorial charm, said Turkey had fully briefed its neighbors on the three dams so far built, the six more under construction and the ground-breaking for two others this year. In all, there will be 22 dams and 19 power stations.

“Our promise of a regular flow forced us to delay the start of power generation by a whole year,” Unver said. “We have every interest to keep as much water in the rivers as possible, since it means we can generate more electricity.”

Baghdad is still in no position to object. In the past, it needed Turkey’s neutrality and oil pipelines as it became bogged down in eight years of war with Iran. The 1991 Persian Gulf War further crippled its military and diplomatic ability to counter Turkey. Even so, Iraqi territory accounts for 46% of the Tigris-Euphrates drainage basin, and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime insists on its rights as the linear heir to the ancient Mesopotamia, “the land between two rivers,” whose water supported the world’s first urban civilization and first man-made irrigation.

Syria was able to respond to what it saw as an immediate and significant threat as giant trucks started to dump boulders into the base of the huge Ataturk Dam. Northern Syria is largely dependent on the Euphrates for water and hydroelectric power. As the Turkish dams filled, hydroelectric output downstream in Syria’s Soviet-built Thawra Dam once fell to 12% of maximum, causing widespread blackouts.

Using a classic Cold War tactic of a Soviet ally against a NATO rival, Damascus encouraged militants from Turkey’s ethnic Kurdish minority to launch a separatist guerrilla campaign from camps and bases in Syria and Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon.

The spark ignited a rebellion that is now by far Turkey’s biggest problem, tying down up to 250,000 troops and ruining the Turkish economy’s chances of stable development.

Turkey and Syria held talks in 1987 to try to iron out their differences. Ankara offered to guarantee 500 cubic meters of Euphrates water per second, about half the river’s flow. Syria in turn promised tighter control of Kurdish separatists and moved Kurdish camps away from the border.

But Turkey never signed any commitment, and Syria, although it has recently bowed to U.S. pressure to rein in its support for terrorists, still protects the Kurdish rebels.

Turkish leaders recently presented the Southeast Anatolian Project as a solution to its Kurdish problem, but local officials admit that it can only help indirectly. Ironically, the first beneficiaries of the irrigation waters have been Turkey’s ethnic Arab farmers along the Syrian border.

“There are no Kurds here. We hate them as much as the Turks do,” said Ibrahim Cavus, an Arab in a mud-brick and breeze-block village surrounded by fields green with crops of winter wheat and barley.

These farmers will now be able to use the new water to sow higher-value crops two or three times a year, turning the 6,200-square-mile area to be irrigated into a veritable breadbasket. Turkey hopes that the project will ultimately increase its total irrigated farmland by one-third, add 70% to the country’s electrical generation capacity and expand the national income by 10%.

“It is an important element in terms of Middle East power. The implicit use of a water threat now exists,” said Philip Robins, a Middle East specialist at Oxford University. “In an ideal world, of course, cooperation between all states in a river basin . . . would probably be the answer to making best use of the water.”

But Syria and Iraq are unlikely to respond to Turkey’s calls for overall coordination, its offers to sell hydroelectricity and its vision of a $20-billion Turkish drinking water pipeline down to the Arab peninsula, the so-called Peace Pipeline.