Slovakia, Hungary Struggle Over Path of the Danube

Slovaks love the Danube River so much, the joke goes, that they decided to have another. The problem is that Central Europe’s greatest waterway may not survive the sibling rivalry.

The Danube River--the stuff of Austrian waltzes, Hungarian ballads and folk tales from the Black Forest to the Black Sea--has met its modern match in this erstwhile farming town about 30 miles downstream from Bratislava, the Slovak capital.

Diverted from a grassy delta riverbed into a $1-billion concrete and steel waterworks that towers higher than a village church, the Danube is at the center of a struggle between Slovakia and neighboring Hungary that has implications for environmental disputes far beyond the flatlands of Central Europe.

The International Court of Justice, which agreed to hear the highly charged case four years ago, is expected to issue its long-awaited ruling Thursday. Conservationists and international law experts say the court’s unprecedented intervention will set an example for environmental fights from Africa to South America.

“At the moment, Gabcikovo is probably the hottest environmental conflict--certainly involving water--being discussed in the world,” said Alexander Zinke of the World Wide Fund for Nature, the world’s largest independent conservation group. “It has global importance.”

A 1993 analysis cited by the group estimates that the waterworks--which includes a 20-mile concrete channel, a 16-square-mile reservoir and a hydroelectric dam with shipping locks 100 feet deep--endangers 130 bird species, eight reptile species, six amphibian species and 28 fish species. In addition, 17 protected areas and four nature reserves are threatened, according to the report, as is Central Europe’s largest drinking water supply, which originates in the gravel beneath the riverbed.

For nearby villager Gyula Varga, an ethnic Hungarian, the half a mile of bright wildflowers and lush cornfields that separates his frontdoor from the old Danube might as well be a continent. Heartbroken by the artificial channel that reroutes his beloved river above and beyond his backyard, Varga refuses to visit the abandoned waterway.

“I used to go down there every Saturday. It was a gold mine for fishing,” said the retired sewage treatment worker. “No one goes anymore. We can’t bear it. They’ve destroyed it, and no one understands why.”

Hungary agreed to the Soviet-backed shipping and hydroelectric scheme in the 1970s but reneged during the waning days of communism because of exorbitant costs, mounting ecological concerns and a new political opposition that viewed the engineering behemoth as a relic of Stalinist tyranny. So defiant were the Hungarians that they spent $100 million tearing down a partly built companion project 80 miles downstream in Nagymaros, Hungary.

Still financially and emotionally committed, the Slovaks forged ahead anyway, embracing a go-it-alone mega-project as the first great achievement of their newly independent state, which separated from the Czechs in 1993.

Gabcikovo became a symbol for Slovaks of a hopeful future, just as it became a reminder for Hungarians of a hated past. The clashing national interests set the scene for one of the most contentious post-Communist border disagreements in the former East Bloc.

“It is unbelievable that two countries like Hungary and Slovakia, who want to belong to European democracy, have not been able to solve this problem in a civilized way,” said biochemist Janos Nemcsok, recently named point man for the Hungarian government on the project. “We need to find a way where both sides can retreat from their original positions and not be humiliated.”

The Danube clash is essentially local, steeped in the politics, history and centuries-old rivalries of two neighboring peoples. But its resolution will probably have far-reaching repercussions because of the extraordinary international attention it has generated.

At the urging of European officials, Slovakia and Hungary submitted the dispute for arbitration in 1993 to the International Court of Justice.

Regardless of the decision Thursday, some court observers say, the panel’s involvement in a conflict with such poignant environmental dimensions will make it difficult for future water projects to be built without careful environmental scrutiny and greater deference to international public opinion. Simmering water-use disputes along the Okavango River in Namibia and the Amazon River in Brazil, for example, are among those likely to be affected.

“From a purely legal view, this will be one of the most important cases of the century by the world court,” said attorney Michelle Leighton Schwartz of the Natural Heritage Institute, a San Francisco-based conservation organization. “If the court doesn’t hide behind treaty issues, it will have to address the [environmental dispute] head on. That has never come up before. It is seminal. It will define how governments everywhere are supposed to conduct themselves when environmental resources are at stake.”

Zinke, of the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Vienna office, said the world court last spring signaled its appreciation for the extraordinary stakes in the Slovak-Hungarian dispute when judges spent four days touring the depleted riverbed and the waterworks.

It was the first on-site inspection in the panel’s 50-year history of mediating international conflicts.

“We can all see that in a fight between two countries, the Danube is losing,” Zinke said. “It is an issue of high urgency. There is still a chance to save a large part of the area, but those chances are getting smaller every day.”

At its core, the disagreement before the world court is not environmental. The judges must determine whether Hungary violated its 1977 treaty with then-Czechoslovakia when it backed out of the waterworks project in 1989, and whether Slovakia violated international law in 1992 by diverting the river--which had formed the Slovak-Hungarian border--without Hungarian consent.

But nine conservation organizations, including the Natural Heritage Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature, have made it difficult for the judges to divorce legal questions from environmental ones by supplementing the Hungarian case with a host of urgent concerns.

The International Rivers Network, also among the nine, has classified Gabcikovo as one of the 10 most environmentally destructive hydraulic engineering projects in the world. Several environmental groups have tried to rally public opinion in Central Europe and elsewhere behind the Hungarian position by promoting the court case as the first environmental dispute ever heard by the International Court of Justice.

The Slovak side has strongly resisted attempts to turn the matter into an environmental cause celebre, claiming Slovakia has been the victim of an international smear campaign led by organizations “pretending to serve the noble interests of the environment,” in the words of one Slovak official. But even the Slovaks have submitted conservation arguments to the court to buttress their position.

“In the Gabcikovo case, there have been many arguments brought forward by both sides in the fields of environmental law and environmental protection,” said Arthur Witteveen, spokesman for the court in The Hague. “We are not qualifying the case ourselves as environmental or other--that is for the academics to decide. But [environmental issues] have been more direct than in the former cases.”

The coalition of conservation groups submitted a 96-page brief on Hungary’s behalf insisting that the river must be jointly managed by both countries with extensive public participation, including a comprehensive analysis of environmental consequences. If such an “environmental impact report” had been prepared, the groups argue, the project would never have gone forward--everyday Hungarians and Slovaks would have blocked it because of the scale of the threat to the environment.

“Some of the impacts were immediate, such as tons of dead fish, but some others you don’t see right away,” said Schwartz of the Natural Heritage Institute. “We tried to explain to the court that this dam is not an isolated case.”

But because of the difficulty in measuring ecological damage, much of it beneath the ground, the environmental argument is not clear-cut.

Slovak authorities insist that nearly five years of operating the Gabcikovo dam and channel have proved immensely beneficial to the river, which had been in ecological decline for years because of pollution, erosion and damage from public works projects upstream. And they say they have monitoring data to back up their claims.

“A variety of alleged disastrous implications for nature, fauna and flora, farming, woods, fishing, sources of drinking water, etc., have been used as an excuse without taking into consideration the Danube’s current adverse status,” wrote Julius Binder, head of the Slovak state-owned water directorate, in a report evaluating the waterworks’ operations. “At the present time, the completed project is providing economic and environmentally precious benefits.”

The ecological situation has become especially confused because the old riverbed has been getting regular infusions of water for the past two years. Under a temporary agreement pending the outcome of the world court case, Slovakia has been returning about 20% of the captured river water to the natural channel. The Hungarians, meanwhile, have been pumping water from the main riverbed into outlying streams and wetlands, reviving areas once considered lost.

Although the World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that far greater flows--about two-thirds of the original Danube waters--would be needed to reverse damage to the natural waterway, the current flows have helped alleviate many of the most pressing problems. The riverbanks are green, some fish and birds are flourishing, and some neglected tributaries--dry for decades--have sprung back to life.

“After permanent reintroduction of water . . . both fish and birds returned, even increasing the pre-dam number of population and diversity,” said Miroslav Liska, spokesman for the Slovak water directorate, in a public debate on the project. “But why argue? Why not have a look with your own eyes. Everybody can be sure, what he or she will see will certainly not be a fata morgana.”

Although environmentalists opposed to the project insist that looks can be deceiving, most concede that the inland river delta has recovered enough to make it unlikely that the world court will suggest shutting down Gabcikovo when it issues its ruling, which the two sides will have six months to negotiate into a final agreement.

With strong water lobbies in both Slovakia and Hungary, some environmental groups even fear a deal between the two countries that will pay only token consideration to conservation issues and sentence the river to permanent ruin.

“There is clear cooperation between Slovak and Hungarian dam builders, both of whom want this project to continue,” said Janos Vargha, a founding member of the Danube Circle, a Hungarian conservation group that has been fighting construction of the dam since 1984. “I give a small probability of the best solution ever being realized--that is, reopening the Danube as it once was.”

For Varga, the local villager, nothing less will do. Even with infusions of water into the old Danube, it has been five years since he took his fishing net down to the muddy riverbank. He would like nothing more, he says, than to teach his five grandchildren how to snatch his favorite pike from a brimming delta.

“But first,” he lamented, “we need the water back.”