It wasn’t until this declaration in 1999 that UN explicitly acknowledged water as a universal right.
Was this simply too obvious to be put into words before? It’s the opposite, actually. We may intuitively accept water to be a right, but it is also a resource. When it comes to such, we take for granted that the nation-state gets to decide how to use their resources within their jurisdiction, as they see fit, even if said use is inequitable across the globe. Just as Russia is not obligated to provide oil to Germany and the U.S. is not obligated to provide grain to Somalia, the UN has no power to enforce this non-binding resolution.
De facto, water is not a universal right. Instead, political institutions use their control over water as a tool of authority over populations both within and without. That is their right.
In that sense, water can be a weapon. And all too many have used it as such.
Flooding as a battlefield tactic is usually equal parts uncontrollable and ineffective. The Dutch have for centuries relied on the intentional destruction of dikes for defense, but neither the Spaniards in the Eighty Years’ War or the Germans in WWII were deterred (though efforts against the former left regions inundated for a century). In 1938, the Chinese Nationalists released the Yellow River against the invading Japanese, only to result in over 800,000 casualties and the fall of Wuhan anyways. However, there is a modern example of a nation deliberately flooding as an effective territorial tool, despite their now defunct status as a state.
At its peak in early 2015, the Islamic State (IS)controlled large swathes of Syria and Northern Iraq – including many crucial dams along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These dams became weapons in their hands; for example, in April 2014, IS closed the Falluja Dam floodgates, submerging the town of Abu Gharib and 200 square kilometers of farmland to repel upstream Iraqi forces. However, this wasn’t the worst that IS could have inflicted. The capture of the Mosul Dam in August 2014, though only held for a few days, gave IS the power to potentially inundate the cities of Mosul and Baghdad. An estimated 500,000 people would have died.
Yet, IS’s tactics also reveal water’s double-edged nature as a tool of governance. Consider the Tabqa Dam in Syria. Under IS administration, the water in the Lake Assad reservoir was diverted to occupied regions, while simultaneously squeezing the water supplies of downstream Al Rakka and Aleppo. The flip side of this coin was that IS also increased hydroelectric output. Under former Free Syrian Army (an umbrella name for various Syrian rebels) control, electric power was only produced for an hour a day. IS at one point provided power for all 24.
This policy created surreal contradictions in the dynamics of the Syrian Civil War. The Assad government, IS’s sworn enemy, was forced to pay ransom to maintain power and pay the dam operators’ salaries. Regions under drought were supplied water by IS, while IS artificially created droughts elsewhere. However, these contradictions are part of the IS’s unique strategy among Islamist militant groups: to establish their legitimacy as a caliphate, as a political state, by effectively demarcating between constituents and non-constituents for which they have a (non)responsibility to provide basic services.
That responsibility is as fickle as the borders that divide them – and not just for IS’s quasi-state. For example, throughout the Syrian Civil War, Aleppo has suffered from similar tactics at the hands of the Assad government and various rebel groups, who all have withheld water to lay siege to the city, depending on which was occupying it at the time.
We don’t have to stay in the Middle East, either. Take, for example, Crimea. When Russia seized the territory in 2014, the Ukranian government ordered the construction of a makeshift dam to cut off the flow of water from the Dnieper River through the North Crimean Canal, which supplies 85% of the peninsula’s water. Even Ukraine’s top irrigation official protested the decision, warning of a “humanitarian catastrophe,” but the Geneva Convention actually takes a side here: providing for basic services is the occupiers’ responsibility. This was the crux of the Ukranian government’s dare: if you want to claim Crimea to be Russian, then take care of your own citizens. That is, if you can.
And to Russia’s credit (as weird as it is to admit this), they spent tens of billions of dollars on various infrastructure projects, including a 12-mile bridge linked to the Russian mainland so that water could be trucked across the country and multi-million dollar aquifer projects. However, these solutions’ effectiveness are in question as the aquifers are increasingly tainted by salt without replenishment from the river. While shoddy pipelines burst and dead-on-arrival moonshot projects such as desalination plants and cloud-seeding planes were abandoned, agriculture was nearly wiped out and residents had to make do with what one described as “brandy-colored” water.
Many in the world – even the residents themselves – would still call them Ukrainian. But in the end, it was Kyiv that built that dam, and in the first days of the broader invasion, the Russian army that brought it down. In the eyes of a detached world, the difference between citizens and non-citizens is the same as the difference between a tragedy and a means to an end.
This dissociation between the governing and the governed allows water to be wielded as a geopolitical weapon, rationalized by the former at the expense of the latter. For Crimea, it was the severing border that allowed Kyiv to abandon its social mandate. For the Bolivians shot and arrested by government troops in the Cochabamba Water War, that dissociation was shaped by capitalist globalism.
For much of Latin America, the 1980s was the “lost decade”, thrown into chaos by defaults on foreign debt and the resultant recessions. At the time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the U.S. Federal Reserve stepped in to renegotiate and ultimately arrange the forgiveness of much of these loans. The catch was “structural adjustment”: indebted countries had to open up to foreign investment and the privatization of state firms. In the case of Bolivia’s state water system (SEMPA), only foreign investors would have the capital to improve utility infrastructure, and treating water as a monetizable good will incentivize sustainable consumption. So the argument went.
Eventually, in 1999, the Bolivian government acquiesced after the World Bank threatened to deny further debt relief, opening SEMPA up to privatization. The only contract bidder was Aguas del Tunari, a consortium of international firms led by Bechtel, an American construction company. An agreement was only reached with certain preconditions: Aguas del Tunari would hold a monopoly over water supply and service in Cochabamba, be guaranteed a 15% return on investment, and would work to finish constructing the Misicuni Dam, local mayor Manfred Reyes Villa’s vanity project that the World Bank had actually written off as uneconomic.
At this point, you can predict how this all turned out. Rates were raised by more than 100%, protests arose, martial law was declared, and innocents were shot. I will dwell on this later. What I want to call out now is, when the Bolivian government finally caved in, how quickly the various political actors distanced themselves. The Bolivian government terminated the contract on the grounds of Aguas del Tunari having abandoned it when executives fled the violence. Mayor Reyes Villa had already abandoned support for the project several weeks earlier. Aguas del Tunari demanded $25 million compensation, blaming Bolivia for breaking the terms – it wasn’t until 2006 that trade courts ruled against paying a single penny. As for the World Bank, let’s just note that when protests against similar policy arose in El Alto, a World Bank official blamed native Andean consumption habits – implying that they weren’t consuming enough to fulfill investors’ bottom lines.
That’s what all of these examples come down to, don’t they? In the tumult left behind by tenuous international law, constantly shifting geopolitics and principal-agent relationships, the question of who is responsible for meeting people’s basic needs is muddled. This is not to make a moral equivalence between the political actors mentioned in this piece. (Probably should leave a disclaimer now: no, I don’t think Zelensky should be judged as harshly as the Islamic State.)
Nonetheless, within this ambiguity, in an attempt to seize control of situations spiraling beyond it, political institutions and entities tend to focus on what they can control. Troop deployments. Utility outputs. Financials. Numbers. After all, as the apocryphally attributed but forever influential quote goes, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Turns out you don’t have to be Stalin to fall into that line of thinking. You just have to have power over human lives to forget about them.
What convinced the Bolivian government to stand down wasn’t the effective hostage-taking in the form of debt dollars, or the exorbitant rates charged to their citizens, or the 50,000 people that rose in protest. It was the televised rifle of a Bolivian army captain, shooting seventeen-year-old Victor Hugo Daza in the face.
As citizens, when the very things that sustain our lives are instead pointed against us as weapons by the political entities that manage them, we have to make that the world sees it as a tragedy. Not a statistic.