Tibet Set to Become Next Flashpoint: Danielle Mitterrand
New York, 11 June: As neighboring countries find themselves drawn into unwanted disputes over ever shrinking transboundary river systems, Tibet is poised to become a major international flashpoint, said Mrs. Danielle Mitterrand, Former First Lady of France, in a press statement issued on 8 June.
Speaking to reporters in Agen, southern France, Mrs. Mitterrand said that war over oil is well on the way to becoming a thing of the past, but that war over water is likely to break out in different parts of the world.
Mrs. Mitterrand is not the first person to raise a specter of war over water. It is the subject of hundreds of scholarly papers and conferences, as indeed it has been the worry of environmentalists over much of the past two decades. A former senior president of the World Bank predicted famously that the next World War will be over water.
Mrs. Mitterrand was referring to the silent tension brewing between China and Tibet’s southern neighbors, who view Beijing’s hydrological development in Tibet with mounting apprehension.
As Asia’s principal watershed, Tibet is the source of the world’s 10 greatest river systems. The total area irrigated by these rivers, from the Machu basin in the east to the Senge Khabab in the west, covers 47 per cent of the earth’s human population.
Deforestation on the Tibetan plateau over the past four decades have already resulted in extremely high sediment rates. The Machu (Huang Ho, or Yellow River), the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra), the Drichu (Yangtze), and the Senge Khabab (Indus) are among the five most heavily-silted rivers in the world.
Now China has a massive project on its design table, one that may be a time bomb.
The South-North Water Diversion will drain at least 48 billion cubic meters of water from Yangze (Tib: Drichu) River to northern China along three alternate routes.
Of the three, the southern part of the western route is certain to pit the world’s two most populous nations against each other.
The route envisages changing the course of Yalrung Tsangpo away from India and Bangladesh, where it flows as Brahmaputra and is worshipped as the lifeblood of millions of peasants.
Some experts maintain that there is no need to worry and that the project is actually an engineering impossibility. But the scientists at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics in Beijing said they could “certainly” achieve this with peaceful nuclear explosions.
Moreover, the growing scarcity of water in northern China is becoming such a sensitive issue that the Chinese leaders fear that unless something is done it may one day become a cause of major uprisings. In other words, the survival of the Communist Party leadership is at stake.
Also, one should also not forget that gargantuan engineering projects have been the fetish of all rulers of China, who–starting from builders of the Great Walls–have sought to immortalize themselves with mega projects of unbelievable scales.
It is thus only a matter of time before the UN is forced to turn its attention to Tibet.
Report sent by OoT, New York